Fortune magazine will host its first iMeme conference next week (July 12-13) in San Francisco, gathering the usual crowd of luminaries from the tech industries as well as top influencers and reporters. The summit is supposed to replace the former Fortune Innovation Forum in NYC, which appears to have outlived itself.
The advent of iMeme marks an interesting shift in the way the power players of innovation think about innovation. The term “meme” itself signals a new focus on bottom-up (or bottom-bottom, for that matter), democratized innovation, driven by amateur users and diffused by the self-propagating power of “memes” that spread through social media and with the help of smart crowds.
Fortune has obviously understood the zeitgeist and has come up with a compelling program that will not only have the industry leaders (Cisco, Google, HP, Sun, etc.) but also the CEOs of Zillow, Slide, Second Life, and Craigslist, along with outliers such as Talking Heads guitarist Jerry Harrison (who co-founded Garageband.com) share their perspectives on the next big “memes.”
Speaking of which, check out spigit, one of the conference sponsors. Built on the paradigms of crowdsourcing, spigit says it "bridges the gap between social networking, multi-player online play, and business creation."
Look forward to seeing you there!
Posted by: Ryan Allis | July 08, 2007 at 05:06 PM