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Damn it’s cold outside. Subzero degrees in Copenhagen as we approach the weekend. Brrr. Good thing we are working with such burning hot topics, well in fact we a fired up by working with people that try to change the world bit by bit. So bring it on winter.

This week beside general busyness on our projects and Thomas going to Berlin to participate on a workshop for the Official artwork for the London Olympics in 2012. Magnus and I had a very interesting workshop with Martin Ferro-Thomsen, founder of Issuu.com,  about his current start up project conferize.com - that promise to change the way the conference business work. We are helping Martin and Conferize.com along with the social design on the...

This week another of our interesting clients went from stealth mode to public sign up. The project now have an official name and the site is up at shareleap.com. Shareleap.com like Conferize.com is on a grand misson changing the world by making business more transparent and collaborative. One could say, they are trying to redesign influence. 

Shareleap.com promise to change the possibilities for small investors and shareholders to influence large companies, allowing them to share and synchronize ideas and opinions, in order co-create or endorse agenda proposals. individually small shareholders are ultimately powerless, and the general assembly in most companies are designed to keep small investors out of power. If connected through a social platform like shareleap.com, small...

Working with start ups is such a thrill for us, we find that our competences and experience in working with social design and social business models, really is making an immediate difference, because we are in the creation and execution phase all the time. There is no layers between the product and the business + working with people who are running 10 times faster than anybody else, to keep up with their own ideas and ideals is just inspiring...

Reflecting on this weeks work, we see a new pattern in terms of innovation coming from the start up scene, from people who truely believe they can change something that is broken. We see the best ideas come from people that are outside "organisations" because they can work more agile and prototyping than larger corporations and traditional agencies are able to do. One area in particular that I see as an emerging space for this type of...

In fact think about the recently announced IPO of Facebook, which promise to become a top 10 IPO introductions of all time - estimated to generate 100 billion dollars, certianly by far the biggest for any social network site ever. Interesting (and a little scary) Facebook has done nothing but to create the platform and to own the relations - a lot of them. If Facebooks userbase is worth the astronomic amounts is beyond me to judge. However...

Returning to the point. Platforms. Niche platforms. Major disruption will come from start ups and inventors creating “niche” platforms around specific areas of interest. Facebook, Twitter and Google+ is going to be to generalized and to broad for capturing all the potential action, it will probably be the “backbone” of a lot activity. But my guess is we wil see a continual rise of a mulitude of emeging niche platforms - like shareleap.com and...

Just to say, in Socialsquare, we are spending a lot of time in our projects as well as in our methods thinking about the design of digital and social platforms, and how they are changing valuechains and businessmodels, by making markets  more transparent, distributed and scalable. In fact we are working on an event where we’ll share more of these insights, so stay tuned for more. And do drop by or set up a meeting with us if you are...

Have a cool weekend.

European Glass Context is the biggest biennial for contemporary glass art in Europe. It takes place on the danish island Bornholm every four years and brings together Europe's most prominent glass artists. The next biennial starts off this year in September.

Back in november Susanne Jøker Johnsen – head of the biennial secretariat – contacted us after reading this previous blogpost on crowd funding. She wanted our help for a new funding...

Our projects have moved along nicely this week, as have our new biz meetings, writings and calls, but in general this week has been a week of research.

Kim, Martin and myself have been working on "the Book" project. Doing interviews, desktop research and hosting a very interesting insight workshop with our esteemed client's management and chairman. It was our first workshop in the office and it worked out fine, although I believe we need to...

As part of our latest project – “The Book” – we are investigating the publishing industry. Our job is to design a business model that facilitates, commercialises and improves the availability of content originating from a wide range of writers, while meeting the nature and possibilities of the Internet.

We are therefore deconstructing the process of writing and publishing. We are talking to authors and asking crucial questions about writing and publishing, about the function of publishing companies, about the interaction between authors and readers and about the creative process in general.

It is clear that the book industry is changing (or “being disrupted”, to use a term we like). An article in The Guardian paints a picture complementary to our own observations: That the traditional institutions of publishing and the central function of the publishing companies are no longer as crucial for publishing and reaching a big audience as they used to be.

In the eighties and nineties a lot of the core functions in publishing were outsourced. That led to a growing number of out-of-house functions like freelance editors, freelance proofreaders, freelance art directors and freelance publicists. Today we see these same functions bypassed more and more often, and that authors increasingly choose to publish and market their books more indepentently.

Obviously, the Internet is the main driver in this development. New services like smashwords.com and lulu.com provide part time or professional authors with a platform where they can conduct and manage their own publishing. Considering this, what is the role of the traditional publishing company in the future?

The publishing company and the editor still offer an almost priceless service to (established!) authors. Besides creative support, marketing and the practical task of transforming a script into a physical product, the publishing firm helps in endorsing the work. On the other hand the commercial interests could act as a creative constraint for interesting new niche productions.

Instead of reaching the readers through old-school marketing or the traditional book fairs, the authors can connect to their potential audience through forums, rating systems, blogs, chats etc. These can also be means of promoting and endorsing a piece of work.

The article that I referenced earlier is written by Cory Doctorow, who besides being a science fiction and post-cyberpunk (?!) author, is also known for advocating the liberalisation of copyright laws. He is a good example of how to use the new possibilities and that it is possible to make money while doing it.

At Socialsquare we enjoy identifying the disrupters of a given industry. But what social and technical dynamics is driving this current development? The infrastructure of the Internet and the digitization of books are certainly major drivers. From the demand side we believe that the development evolves around the movement towards niche and long tail markets. From the supply side the development seems in line with the social paradigm and its...

In the coming weeks we’ll continue our work. Together with our client we’ll design a concept that meets some of the issues and challenges above. I’ll write some further blogposts on some of the more essentiental questions we meet.

K

This week thousands of sites - including Wikipedia, Mozilla, Wired – went “dark” for 24 hours in defense of a free and open Internet. Needless to say, we at Socialsquare are also worried about the US bills SOPA and PIPA.

The DNA of the Internet is based on freedom, anarchy and the free flow of knowledge - to limit these basic dynamics will amputate the creativity and the opportunities on the Net. If SOPA and PIPA were adopted, content owners and the US government could hinder the very infrastructure for sharing (not only the illegal sharing!). And without sharing the Net will not have co-creation - which in our opinion might be the single most important...

The value of the Internet should be created by developing new solutions and not by limiting. Assets are volatile – especially on the Internet - and if the established companies feel that their markets are being disrupted they must join the competition instead of limiting it. The Internet is free, humane and creative - and it would be fatal to force and build up the same institutions and legal frameworks that we find “IRL”. At Socialsquare we...

Take a minute to enjoy John Stewart's take on all this.

The conflicts here at Nørrebro are a little less dramatic. Sourdough and rye bread baking is the focal point in a situation where Rasmus (one of the students that are writing their master thesis with us) has challenged yours truly in baking the best rye bread. The dispute is pretty pathetic. But the rest of the Socialsquare welcomes it at lunchtime.

Everyone at Socialsquare has been working hard the last week. On Friday, we completed our project with European Glass Context on financing and organizing the coming biennale through crowdfunding and open source principles (a blog post will follow). And we are also progressing on our "The Book" and "The Farm" projects.

Stay tuned!

Kim

Looking through our calendars, to-do list, scrum- and whiteboards for signs of what we spend the last week on, it seems we are getting a lot of things done.

We’ve been meeting with a lot of really interesting people and organisations this week. Martin have been away censoring at IT University on mobile and social IT related thesisses. We have been putting a next to final hand on our sparkling, new office. And thanks to (or despite of) TDC we...

Happy new year to everyone.

First week of 2012 is coming to a close and everybody at SQ is back from their respective festive and greasy Christmas coma.

Magnus has started a fitness spree and is refusing to eat anything but carrots at the lunchtable. Later today all the SQ’ers is heading of to our annual new years party and 2012 build up - that will include a mixture of oysters, steaks, wine … and Fernet Branca (if Kim is to decide).

W...

Andreas Lloyd is an old colleague here at Socialsquare. Andreas is highly engaged in the food co-operative Københavns Fødevarefællesskab and we therefore interviewed him for our farm project with Aarstiderne. Andreas' comments were used in our vision workshop last month.

Besides talking about member-driven organisations and organic foods we also had a chance to ask Andreas on his general views on how internet affects business. His thoughts are very much in line with ours here at Socialsquare, and he manages to put them into very precise words. Take a look at the video below and tell us if you agree.

 

A little late weeknote, as our last week was extremely busy - and not least very offline and physical, as we moved our office from the Meatpacking District to Slotsgade 2 on Nørrebro. We are very happy to be back where it all started, and this time we think that we have found the perfect spot for our office - both in terms of location (we love Nørrebro) and in terms of office space. We’ll be able to have our activities such as workshops...

At Socialsquare we are interested in investigating how the spread of digital services in general and the social internet in particular is affecting the way we manage our lives and our business. In collaboration with renowned designer Jens Martin Skibsted we have developed skibsted.net to investigate what happens with identity when it is transposed to the digital realm.

Method
The way we approached this project was to start out with building the web page so that we were able to investigate the result. The process has been characterized by our curious and experimental approach. This lead us to an ongoing adaption of the web page based on the results we gathered.

Skibsted.net is constructed so that Jens Martin Skibsted’s data from a number of online services is collected on a continuous timeline and by a ‘tag’ function. In this way Jens Martin Skibsted’s life is maintained and sorted in the digital realm, and in relation to a general timeline.
An early version of skibsted.net experimented with mixing Jens Martin Skibsted’s own digital information with search results from Google matching “Jens...

When Identity Goes Digital
With skibsted.net we have investigated digital identity together with Jens Martin Skibsted and based on the project we have made a series of observations.

Because different digital services play an increasingly large part of our everyday life, more and more personal information is available in a digital format. This increased digitization means that digital identity is transforming from being something we create and control to a more direct and transparent image of our personality and actions. The way skibsted.net is built perfectly illustrates how increased digitization equals increased...

Skibsted.net exemplifies how the spread of digital services leads to increased transparency. Digital identity is therefore something that is created by our actions as opposed to something consciously developed. In this way skibsted.net is a very direct image of Jens Martin Skibsted’s identity.

The project skibsted.net is a callback to the classic discussion regarding whether identity is based on experiences and thereby mutable or if it is a fixed concept that follows you all your life. The content on skibsted.net is collected on a continuous timeline whereby the presented identity is constantly changing. Digital identity thereby becomes something dynamic and mutable.