“I’ll never look at it the same way!” (a report from SOFA)

SOFA – The SWIFT Operational Forum Americas – was held last week, square in the middle of Times Square, New York City.

The organizers (thanks, Eva !) were kind enough to include an Innotribe stream within the event, so Mela (@mela_atanassova), Peter(@petervan), Matteo (@matteorizzi) and I (@copernicc) made the trip to NYC.

I’ll get to what we did and who was there in a second, but let me first share one particular feedback we got:

“I’m fascinated by what I’ve learnt about SWIFT. From my perspective a SWIFT code was just a number the bank always asked me for that I always had to dig for. I’ll never look at it the same way again!”

Wow.

All the effort, trip, money, time we invested is 1,000 times returned with this single feedback. Bear with me, we had a lot more positive comments, but I picked this particular one as I think it represents the essence of what Innotribe is all about: that people never look at SWIFT the same way again.

So, what did we do?

FIrst off, Petervan made his “How to make babies?” presentation. You can look at the prezzi here . And, no, I won’t spill the beans, you’ll have to come to one of our future Innotribe events to understand the full power of what Petervan has to say. I can just say this: Petervan, you rock  !

Then, we had a special interest Innotribe session – a workshop moderated by Mela and spiced with four superb speakers:

– Douglas Rushkoff (@rushkoff), author of  “Program or be Programmed: Ten Commands of Digital Age”   and most recently “Life, Inc“, gave us a very interesting historical perspective on currencies and how currencies represent value.

– Brian Zisk (@zisk), founder of the “Future of Money & Technology Summit ” , who gave us an insight on the findings of the summit that took place on Feb 28, 2011.

– Venessa Miemis (@venessamiemis), a regular friend of Innotribe (she was one of the speakers in the Innotribe opening at Sibos 2010), who told us about her latest crowd-sourced project – the Future of Facebook. Interesting in the perspective of what is happening with the new “currency” on Facebook – the Facebook credits. See the progress on her blog here .

– Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd), another friend of Innotribe, too big to describe in few words 😉 so best is to see his site . He gave us a very interesting perspective on social cognition and corporate behaviours.

The combination of their talks opened the minds of the audience (about 65 delegates of SOFA) to think about a future bank could be and what services would it provide.

I was amazed at some of the ideas that came up in very energetic workshops.  Mela added the “magic potion” that she always does to make this sizzling, intelligent, entertaining, fun! We’ll summarise the results in another post shortly.

You could feel the energy, enthusiasm, thirst for innovation in our community. It was excellent and so motivating.

And … “never looking at it the same way”.  See you at one of our next Innotribe events.

Kosta