e’re entering an exciting time in the evolution of technology, during which imagination, innovation and creativity are being rewarded and valued more than they have been for decades. This new “Imagination Economy” is the culmination of the movement toward open source technologies and solutions, lowered barriers to entry and a drive toward development and ingenuity.
David Walsh, CEO of GENBAND, which specializes in real time communications platforms and innovative solutions, discussed the growth and impact of the imagination economy in a recent article. Walsh believes this new economy is being fueled by human energy, in the form of brand currency, social networking and the innovation electricity derived from constant global connectivity and communications.
“Large enterprises will continue to benefit from massive investments in real time communications infrastructure,” wrote Walsh. “They are finding that moving from a legacy infrastructure of TDM networking, servers, physical phones, and data centers to the cloud – is saving them so much money they can invest in R&D, hiring for expansion and even acquiring next generation businesses in order to compete…They are moving carefully and slowly too often, causing them to miss the new competition, the new challenger business models, and the overnight success stories that are passing them by so fast on the information superhighway that they may just seem like a peripheral blur.”
Those challengers and upstarts are harnessing the power of the imagination economy to get their solutions, platforms and services up and running full steam in a matter of mere months. Walsh offers up GENBAND’s Kandy RTC platform-as-a-service as an example of a disruptive solution that was built and leveraged in a matter of months. He also points to Collaborizm, a global collaboration platform designed to manage talent scouts and corporations to engineers and developers. The solution has succeeded in attracting nearly 40,000 engineers and developers and is growing rapidly.
GENBAND partner myDevices is another upstart, and the company succeeded in gathering a community of close to 80,000 IoT engineers and developers in less than nine months. The company’s Cayenne platform provides access to free code and a secure gateway for connecting nearly any sensor or device to a sensor in the cloud, making IoT testing and provisioning simple and quick.
The three companies are participating in a virtual global “pajama hackathon,” designed to facilitate coding and development using the Kandy platform. Developers then connect with each other on Collaborizm, while using myDevices to connect access points and sensors. The hackathon has attracted more than 100,000 developers, facilitating innovation, creativity and collaboration