Topic: Business

In a keynote presentation from the 2007 O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference, Brian Murray, Group President for HarperCollins Publishers, provides a textbook business strategy analysis of dealing with rapid change. During his presentation, Murray provides details of the 6 step process HarperCollins used to react to the dramatic changes in the publishing industry.

Can consumers and social networkers trust the security and privacy of information they share on line? How can companies manage their brands to earn customer confidence? Lise Buyer moderates this astute panel of experts from business, the law and academia as they look at what it means to be trustworthy in the digital age.

Since his early attraction to the new Internet industry in the early 1990's Jake McKee has slowly moved to the center of the growing debate over the use of social media within businesses. Factors impacting this debate include the organizational changes required to embrace social media, the need to acquire social media technology, and dealing with management resistance. In this interview, McKee shares his experiences with helping organizations brainstorm, detail, and implement strategies for engaging with and learning from their customers.

LAMP applications have a firm foothold in e-commerce and social networking, and the value of information stored in those systems is surging. At the 2007 MySQL Conference, Chander Kant of Zmanda, talks about how his company is taking advantage of this growing economy.

Advertising has always been something we suffered through, particularly in such passive activities as television watching. On the other hand, online advertising has become more context sensitive. Glen and Gerd discuss how this new model will continue to grow in the future as a better way to reach consumers. They review some possible ways to do this, including how Google is already working to better get the advertiser's message across to the user.

The Internet has always been known as a way for individuals to retrieve information. Shane Pearson, VP of Marketing and Product Management for BEA, believes that the Internet is now a place for individuals to interact with information. He also believes that many of these ways can be used by enterprises and businesses to better run their organizations. He joins Phil and Scott to talk about how "people centric" interaction. He joins Phil and Scott to discuss his ideas. He also talks about the upcoming Defrag Conference and how it will be a great place to discuss these ideas.

In this conversation with Scott Mace, Centric CRM's Michael Harvey contrasts Centric CRM from rival SugarCRM, which he says doesn't scale as well because it's written in PHP. Harvey then defends Centric CRM's take on open source: developers who want to build a commercial business on top of Centric CRM must sign a reseller agreement. Harvey also describes "open software-as-a-service" which lets Centric CRM customers easily move their apps from hosted facilities to their own data centers.

The future is creatable and can be planned for. It has an effect on the present because it tells us what to get ready for and it can change how you think about tomorrow. Glen Hiemstra, founder and owner of Futurist.com and author of the book Turning the Future into Revenue, discusses the important concept of future planning. He talks about how to plan for the future and reviews both positive and negative examples of business future planning.

In his new book "The End of Control", Gerd Leonhard expands on the key topics introduced in his first book "The Future of Music" while escalating the debate out of the music realm and into media at large. He addresses the single most important issue underlying many debates about the future of media: who controls what, why, when, and where, and how can digital content still generate revenues when most of the traditional ways of controlling its flow ( i.e., distribution) are no longer available.

Guy Kawasaki has a long history working in technology, both in established companies and as an entrepreneur. He worked for Apple at the time of the development of the Macintosh and later returned as an Apple Fellow. In this keynote speech, he gives what he believes are the important stages towards successful innovation. He presents the steps in both a humorous and intelligent way, showing what companies must do to be successful.