Hej GEF-Community,

been busy days – at the moment we are launching a project, that combines collective intelligence/social media-interaction for regional development in e.g. districts of cities or a given area with development-potentials. Could be something like a mash-up of plancast and twitter, with the purpose of creating transparency for participation in development projects (like needed e.g. at Stuttgart 21: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuttgart_21). So been buzzing around quite a lot and coincidently run into two videos:

Mike is founder of http://www.maplesinvestments.com/ and http://www.floodgate.com: His talk is about how to develop your ideas into businesses; how to engineer your start-up.

Simon is consulting cooperate strategy and presenting in this Ted-talk pretty accurate, how to be successful as a company: know why you do something and you customers will love you. He is a lot selling his idea/concept, but in a way I am going with him (though I am not sure his Apple example is state of the art) – globalization and transparency create new opportunities for value based approaches in business development.

P.S.: Did you hear about: http://unityexpress.eu/ – that seems pretty, pretty cool, might be of your interest?