LIFT07 is over, and its hard to imagine.  Laurent did a superb job of not orchestrating what people should talk about.  The approach was open, and very engaging.  The chatter was non stop.  The presentations, and panels, were just plain thought provoking.  Scoble makes a couple of great points.  Who needs vendor booths at conferences.  They all have web sites.

At LIFT some obscure and different people, we or at least I would never have otherwise seen. 

Sampo Karjalainen speaking about Habbo.  I’ll bet few North Americans have heard of them.  Habbo has 7.5 million active users.  Think Second Life in a browser, but so much more.  People create rooms, and buy items.  People create private rooms to warehouse items, which because of limited availability rise in value, and can be sold on eBay.  Sampo makes the point that the ways people use the rooms, to create commerce, competitions, or conversations, is not anything he could have imagined.  Simply providing the tools, and the environment is all Habbo has to do, and the users do the rest.

Jaewong Lee of daum.com, speaking of what comes next for search after Google.  How the majority of Google searchers pick one word.  He spoke of the power of collective intelligence and how that can shape and filter search results to be more meaningful, and importantly, easier to use for the masses.

Jan Chipchase from Nokia, an Englishman, living in Tokyo, designing phones for illiterates.  How we are approaching a situation, or may already be there, where the majority of phone users are illiterate.  Yet phones have been designed for people who read and write.  Following his thoughts and examples was fascinating, and how that research pans out will have implications for all phones.  He was followed by Nathan Eagle from MIT< but resident in Kenya, and studying mobile phone usage.  He spoke of people in Kenya buying phones for $10, and sim card for 15c, being sold on all the street corners.  That card has 10 calls built in.  He spoke of small SMS applications being built to trade, and sell things.   This is in Kenya – they are more advanced on SMS than Canada!

These are just three examples.  The common theme for me, and from the conference, I think, has come down to understanding how people and society interact as a result of technology.  To say its not the same as before does not capture it.  There are directions happening in first world and 3rd world that suggest a much tighter integration between real life and virtual life.

Which brings me back to banking.  The them for my talk was that online banking is not e-commerce.  Its simply the automation of transactions, that could be done by a person in a branch.  Its obvious that commerce will be handled entirely differently in the future as a result of the directions, and shifts occurring.  Its also obvious that the answer is not “go build me one of those”.  The changes required will be iterative, test and learn, small incremental change.

The next opportunity I have to talk about this is to actual Bankers at NetFinance2007.  LIFT provided a good warm up for that event.

Relevance to Bankwatch:

Its no longer an option.  If Banks wish to survive, they must engage with the online world, try some of the tools.  Enough examples exist now, to prove the current Bank model is under active threat. (Wesabe, Prosper, Zopa, FYGO, CircleLending)

Be prepared to make mistakes, so provide some backup to those who are asked to do the testing.  Engage those within the Bank who understand some of these threads, and try some things.  Blogs, wikis, internal and external are great place to begin.  But look beyond that … those tools will gain engagement, discussion, and ideas for your Bank.  But look beyond to more radical ways – as I stated at LIFT.

Networked employees and networked customers. If your business requires employees see that as an advantage and at least provide the same capabilities to them as their customers have.

With that kind of environment, who knows were it can lead.