The 3L Mantra to live by!

Had a fascinating experience at the IT Strategy Days Summit that was held on the 12-14 February at the Grand Elysse in Hamburg. Some of the most influential IT and business CEOs, CIOs, and other experts and policy makers from Germany came together to tackle key formidable challenges in their business. You had CEOs/CIOs from Lufthansa, SAP, BMW, Adobe, Siemens and more out there discussing these issues. The buzz terms for the summit was "agility, resilience and innovation" framed as drivers of digital business.  This year there was much targeted interest in Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things, and the digital and global logistics of operations that could help design the most optimal platforms through which innovations can quickly reach the entire organization and ultimately customers. There were 3 main strands of focus: 1)  Digital Frameworks - Which architectures make IT resilient and agile 2)  Innovation on fire - How companies successfully reinvent themselv

Brilliant experience in the last two days at Deutsche Welle (DW)  at the FOME Symposium organized in Bonn on  Rethinking media development - New actors, new technologies and new strategies . I gave my keynote on how the rise of the Next Billion users  , low-income users in the global south coming online for the first time, is transforming the media sphere and how we need to center them in our imagination as we proceed to tackle the challenges on how to build a sustainable information ecosystem. Couple of take aways here for the field of journalism and media development when going global with these strategies: 1.  Let us not discount SMS and WhatsApp as the prime and often the sole media distribution outlet. WhatsApp and Facebook is the internet to the NBU market. We need to keep that in mind while we write content for the NBU market and how they will experience it on these devices 2. The internet is the poor person's leisure economy - thereby, for getting them interested

This November, I start the ZEMKI Fellowship at the University of Bremen.    The ZeMKI, Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research is an interdisciplinary research environment in the areas of media, communication and information. Involved disciplines include communication and media studies, computer science, cultural studies, educational science, studies in religion, and history. Since mid-2017, the ZeMKI has been inviting applications from researchers in the field of media, communication, and information around the world to participate in their program.  During the Fellowship, I will be giving a talk on ' Benign dataveillance: a new kind of democracy? Examining the emerging data-based governance systems in India and China' as part of the ZEMKI lecture series.  While I am there, I will also be heading to Hamburg to give a public talk under the 'Taming the machines' theme organized by Judith Simon and her team from the University of Hamburg . Thi

They say the legendary Paul, the German octopus who predicted all Germany’s matches and the final victor of World Cup correctly, is about to retire. I think not. He has a future awaiting him… 1) Paul is going to sign on for the hot remake of Bond’s Octopussy. The question is, can he seduce the British star Daniel Craig like the way he charmed the Spanish? Maud Adams, move over, Paul's the real deal. 2) Paul wonders how anyone in their right mind can actually think that entertaining kids in a German aquarium is retirement? That’s a load of work people! Instead, he wants to cash in! Although the Spanish economy is er, not doing as well as it did in the World Cup final, he wants his share! Lawyers, make your move! 3) Paul is thinking of joining Wall Street; while everyone was busy seeing his moves on predicting the World Cup final, no one noticed him picking out the next Google…oh well, you snooze, you lose.