Business Models for the Social Mobile Cloud: Transform Your Business Using Social Media, Mobile Internet, and Cloud Computing

Chapter 1

A Remote Control for the World

Everything around us is about to be reinvented and reading this book is going to help you play an active role in that reinvention. The first step to becoming a reinventor is acquiring an educated, discriminating eye about technology and how it has impacted society and changed our lives over time. Knowing the players and what has happened historically is key to understanding what to look for now and to gaining access and advantage in the social mobile cloud.

The Three Technologies

Digital transformation—the merging of physical and digital into a new reality—is happening now, and changing how we work, play, and even how we think. Your first task is to understand the three technologies responsible for this transformation, the social mobile cloud.

Social is the people we work with, sell to, buy from, and live with—all gathered in various cooperative and collaborative groups. Social is not just online parties for teenagers. Social is also the business communities in every industry and the mechanisms that we use to work with one another. Social impacts your supply chain, your employees, your customers, and your competitors. It is also impacting your neighborhoods, your government, and the society at large. Social is also the word we use to describe a fundamental shift from hierarchical organizations and command and control business processes to peer networks and collaborative business processes.

The technology that we call social networking is ...