Idea I Kno now, but did not Kno yesterday

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Source: http://lyndagrattonfutureofwork.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a6a171f6970c0133f64ea424970b-pi

See also yesterday’s post about Kno.com

Introduction:

In addition to allowing students/professors a context in which to catalyze the communion of kindred minds, Kno.com allows teams to do the same thing.  The team market is probably bigger than the text market by an order of magnitude (schools have students for educational life which for college is 4 years, work environments have people for their entire working lives which is about 40 years, thus a factor of 10).  

So what?

I remember reading in POST CAPITALIST SOCIETY (I *think*) about Drucker’s consulting clients going through his books page by page looking for tools that they could apply.  I’ve shared this idea with entrepreneurs who vehemently scoffed … on the way to crashing and burning.  Yes, it seems unlikely that a team could sit around a conference table and go through INNOVATION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP say.  But Kno.com means that people don’t have to meet synchronously to share ideas.  Books can be downloaded to iPads, then read and marked up during travel, and then once back on the internet *foom* re-synchronized.  

Young whipper snappers could enter an entire back of envelope business plan into a book.  I once had a student who wrote a business plan and then gave a paper copy of the plan to his company president.  At a key point in the plan Mike inserted a $100 bill with a post it note on it that said “If you’d like to have about 30,000 more of these, keep reading!”  

What other uses for Kno.com in GTD and business?

  • Kno.com could sell businesses a subscription service to electronically share strategic documents requiring communion of kindred minds to make work.  The service could be a VPN within a business.  I wonder if SAP or Oracle would be interested in buying this document/thought linking capability?  
  • Kno.com could provide a back end linking service to connect from Kno.com markups in books and company documents, to Evernote, OneNote, OmniFocus, Remember the Milk, etc. I’m always writing notes to myself for raw materials to lecture on as I re-read my texts.  If I could simply access my Kno.com text markups while in PowerPoint, it would be a time saver for me.   
  • Books are reference materials, annotations of books being swept into Evernote (the world’s most perfect reference system) would be a huge win for me personally.  *Note* this blog post comes to you from an office with 5,000 books surrounding the author.  :-) 

Stay tuned!!!

I’m still early in my digestion of what Kno.com means.  I’m sure there will be more to come as I figure out how to run my GTD system pipes backwards with Kno.com.  

bill meade