For over 20 years, I’ve been working with numerous speakers bureaus around the world. These are the folks who have booked me into numerous associations, Fortune 500 or others events. I have relationships with most of the majors – the same folks who book Presidents, Prime Ministers, sports figures and celebrities into countless events worldwide.
And I’m always happy to say that I a very close and tight working relationship with all of them. They are often the experts in helping organizations to discover the right speaker with the right content for the right purpose – experts in their field.
One of these bureaus is GDA Speakers, a group in Dallas who have been around the industry for over 20 years. Gail Davis established the organization almost by accident. (It’s a really compelling story which you can read here). They’ve booked me into numerous events — and given my inclination for golf, the fact that they booked me into the PGA of America and into an event at St. Andrews, Scotland, they are pretty dear to my heart!
GDA recently launched a series of podcasts with many of the people they represent, and I was thrilled to be part of their launch week. They are covering a regular stream of topics and issues, and there is some pretty compelling stuff. It’s available online at their site, gdapodcast.com (and Twitter, @gdapodcast). Visit and have a look at some of the interviews so far, and they are only into week 2!
You can listen to my podcast here, and read the full transcript on that page.
What’s really cool about this project is that its a combined initiative of Gail and her son Kyle. He’s worked in the tech space, including a stint at Square in San Francisco, but is now working with his mom to bring great content to the world in new and innovative ways.
I don’t know about you, but I always think its cool when a mom and son are working together, particularly on digital projects!
Here are two extracts. Listen to the podcast, subscribe to the series via iTunes, and open up your mind to opportunities!
Well, the easiest example is probably what could potentially, and what is already happening with energy. The idea is that you’ve got some backyard energy. You’re generating solar, wind, whatever type of energy. I’ve got my energy, solar, wind, and just as we’ve shared music in the early days of Napster, we’re going to share energy. We’ll create our own little… We’ll call it a microgrid, little community energy grid in which we’re sharing the energy we generate. Well, we tap into that and we link into that backyard weather sensors, local weather sensors, and we’re feeding in weather information from other sources, which helps us to understand when we can best generate solar, or wind, or other energy. Not only do we have these individual intelligent devices in our homes, but they’re starting to network to each other. They’re starting to talk to each other, so they become their own little intelligent system that can better predict when should we be generating energy and take ourselves off the main grid so that we’re becoming most efficient in terms of what we do.
The second example, vehicle to vehicle communications. Everybody’s talking about self-driving cars. Obviously there’s a lot happening there, but there’s a lot of other stuff that is underway as well. The concept is, my car is going down the highway and it’s not only self-driving, but it’s got the capability to talk to intelligent sensors that are embedded in the roadway, so the intelligent highway infrastructure begins to emerge. Not only that, my car can talk to your car, can talk to other cars with telemetry, radar, and other technologies so that we’re all acting sort of together as one. We’re not just becoming single vehicles going down the highway, but we’re vehicles that are traveling together. We’re aware of where every other vehicle is. We’re aware of conditions on the road, not only within the next 100 feet, but within the next two miles. That’s a very good example of an intelligent connected system, and that’s the obvious next step of what’s going to happen with the internet of things. There’s just tremendous technological advances like this that are underway.
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