I love apps, I hate apps. Their ingenuity and variety has brought fun and delight into my life, but I also long for a world without them. That is to say, a world without a handful of companies circling their wagons around my content and how I interact with my community. Fortunately something happened this week that should fuel a glimmer of hope for an alternate mobile future.

The real issue is not whether Apple or Android will win the war for your mobile phone, but rather the nature of the game they are forcing us to play. The digital revolution is at a crossroads. The Web was designed to be an open platform for the networked navigation of content, but increasingly it is under challenge by those who would allow it to become a walled garden for social media monopolists or a background pipe for proprietary mobile applications. In that context, Amazon’s lastest challenge to Apple’s control over your smartphone is a welcome development.

I still remember the day I made the heart wrenching decision to move all my physical books into storage and embrace the Kindle. Dust, space, and endless hours on airplanes finally killed the romance of ingesting words on dead trees. Now I read my books on my phone, my iPad and, when in direct sunlight, on a Kindle e-reader. After this week, I also have the choice of reading them directly from the Cloud. At face value, Amazon’s new HTML5 Kindle app might not seem that game changing but think for a minute what it actually represents. One brand platform, no App Store, no software downloads - just your content, on any web enabled screen wherever you are.

HTML5 has been kicking around for a while, but now that platform providers are playing hardball on their approval processes and demanding a greedy bite of third party revenues on content sales - publishers have a growing incentive to bypass them altogether. Amazon will not be long alone in this nascent uprising. Magazine and newspaper owners are growing uneasy at losing their direct billing relationships with their audiences. The Financial Times has already launched its newspaper on the HTML5 platform. More will follow.

There is a deeper thread to this conflict worth noting. At the moment, mobile application development is a nightmare in diversity. Different screen formats, multiple device profiles and divergent operating systems add up to costly duplication of work and complex testing processes. For CIOs in particular, this creates all kinds of headaches when deploying services in the enterprise. But in the future, what if you could virtualise any application and deploy it in a web browser? Music, productivity tools, secure communications, video games, newspapers - all hosted and deployed from the Cloud, irrespective of what device you are using.

Cloud virtualisation is not good news for everyone. It erodes the platform power held by Apple who have used the iTunes ecosystem to defend the high margins of their hardware products. And while in the short term, a shift to the Cloud might help challenger brands like Samsung, Sony, LG and HTC - in the longer term, even they will suffer as hardware and bandwidth commoditises and value shifts to a hyper-competitive era of platform agnostic applications.

Don’t sell your Apple stock just yet, but I do think we will look back and remember 2011 as the year this innovative company and its CEO were at the historical peak of its powers.

As a coffee aficionado, I never thought the day would arrive that I would love an automatic coffee machine. But it’s true. I love my Nespresso machine. I bought my first in Hong Kong when I struggled to find a decent coffee anywhere on the island. And I’m embarassed to say, I sometimes even choose hotels based on whether there is a similar machine in my room. But if Nespresso, owned by Nestle, represents the past triumph of applying the Gillette ‘razor and blade’ business model to beverage consumables - it also points to the present failure of appliance brands to capitalising on their captured consumer base.

When you buy a Nespresso machine they ask you to provide your details to join their coffee club - ostensibly so that they can keep track of your consumption and prompt you to service your machine at the right time. Not a bad premise, and certainly a smarter engagement tool than the standard warranty database coupon. But what if there was a Nespresso app store that sold apps that let you customise your brew strengths or program automatic functions? How would that change the economics of the business? White goods manufacturers would certainly stand to benefit from similar thinking. You may buy a new washing machine only once every 5-10 years, but what if you could get consumers to upgrade their software applications that controlled energy usage, spin cycle programs and other features once every quarter? Turning durables into consumables was a neat magic trick for many appliance brands in the last ten years. But for the next stage in the game, they need to be thinking about the broader information ecosystem that surrounds their physical products.

One of my favorite hotels in New York is the Ace. It’s hip, idiosyncratic, and they even put record players and vintage vinyls in your room to enjoy. Best of all is the lobby - with its free wifi, great Stumptown strength expresso and communal desks - in other words, the perfect place to work. And that, of course, is also the problem. As you can see in this photo I shot on my last visit, hotel guests aren’t the only ones who have decided that it’s more fun to work away from home.

Of all the interesting sociological by-products of the digital revolution - the rise of ‘co-working’ is one of the more curious. The Web has liberated millions of potential office slaves. Either as entrepreneurs low on cash, digital freelancers with a global customer base, or simply creative types who like to pretend they don’t have a real job - coffee shops, hotel lobbies and newly styled ‘co-working’ centers are full of digital nomads who like to work alone, with other people around. As a writer, I totally get the paradox of social solace. If I’m alone at home, I get distracted by the echo chamber of my own mind. In a busy cafe, the white noise and activity can actually help me focus and be more inspired to create.

One of players to watch in this space is Loose Cubes. Think of the company as an Airbnb for the nomadic global co-worker. Jump online and you can find literally thousands of potential cool spaces to work in for the day - whether it be an artist studio in Berlin, or a gamer friendly tech cave in San Francisco. A funky place to work is only part of the appeal. There are also practical benefits of sharing work and projects with similar peers that you might meet at co-working facility. Where Loose Cubes is particularly clever, is that they integrate with Facebook to make office recommendations based on who you know. The dashboard shows if any of your friends know the office host, or whether your contacts have used that space before.

If you feel like you are missing out on all this fun because you are stuck at work - don’t despair. The good news is that ‘the office’ per se, is not the problem. Given the choice, freelancers seem to prefer somewhere to work rather than staying at home. So ask yourself this. How does your space stack up? if your office was listed on a website that people could choose to hang out in - would anyone do it? And if not, why not? Keep asking that question enough, and maybe someone will do something about it.

Being interviewed to work at McKinsey was one of the more interesting experiences of my earlier life. Ten rounds of interviews, rigorous analytical tests, bizarre psychometric probes and a final cup of coffee with a senior partner of the firm that felt like a scene from a John Grisham novel - and voila, I was in. The story about how I never actually turned up for work is one I'll save for another day. But I do remember one thing from the process - McKinsey were obsessed with finessing their strategy of hiring and retaining 'smart people'.

After one of the interviews, a manager at the firm described their ideal archetype as a 'spiky integrator'. In essence, their perfect candidate was someone who had an extraordinary talent spike (e.g genius chess skills, Olympian athletic discipline or knowing six languages), but were also capable of integrating that skill across a range of other capabilities and in association with other team mates. Or to put it another way - they wanted freaks with social skills. The only problem with that personality type, as many companies discovered when they put former high flying management consultants into leadership teams - is that spiky integrators need to be surrounded by other super smart people in order to thrive. Out of the fish tank, they don’t survive too long.

For companies today, hiring smart people is still a critical priority. And it’s harder than ever. The digital revolution has had two major impacts on the war for talent. Firstly, you are now competing with the fact that the best candidates can earn significant incomes as free agents. With the Web offering a global customer base and infinite opportunities for fame, being a digital ronin or an entrepreneur has never been more seductive. But the second impact is just as profound. The concept of work has never been more challenging. Traditional industries are being disrupted, competition more nuanced, and the demands on managers more pronounced. Your old school spiky integrator might be able to draw up some rather pretty strategy slides describing your industry - but will they have the level headed poise to ruthlessly execute and get things done in an increasingly ambiguous and uncertain operating environment?

In the future, I think there will be three capability attributes that senior managers will need to look for in their top performers:

1. Super Synthesizers

In the old days, smart employees gathered competitive information in traditional ways - phone interviews, focus groups and industry surveys. Basically - you were clever if you knew how to pick up the phone and make some calls. Now we have the opposite problem - too much information. Super synthesizers are people with the capability of scanning and processing huge amounts of information. They are like human meta filters. With enough technical savvy and familiarity with blogs, social platforms and search algorithms - they can assess the topography of available data, see patterns and collate them as trends, prioritize and then act.

2. Hyper Connectors.

One of these days we will laugh about the fact people used to get fired for using Facebook or LinkedIn at work. Hyper Connectors are people that know how to swiftly build and exploit relevant networks to get things done. They won't necessarily have the largest collection of contacts, but they will know how to use digital platforms to find and nurture just the right set of people to reach their goals. These could be internal networks in a huge enterprise, or external webs of journalists, industry influencers and taste makers. You will recognise them in meetings because they are the first to say in the answer to a problem, 'I think I may know someone who..'

3. Change Optimists

The final quality of the future super smart might sound a bit soft but in some ways it is the most vital personal attribute - positivity. The pace of change is accelerating and there are people for whom that is good news, and others who, if they are honest with themselves, view that fact with dread. You can reassure the change pessimists about the future all you like but believe me - in the end, when faced with disruptive change, pessimists fight for the status quo not for future growth. Your best performers may not know the future, but they should be happy to meet it head on.

What do you think? Are there other attributes of what would make someone ‘super smart’ in the future?

A key trend to track this year is social mining - the intelligent collation and cross-referencing of machine accessible data on your social graph and personal content. It is a controversial area and you can be sure the trouble will only escalate once the general public really understands how powerful these new data matching tools have become. Leaving aside the privacy issues for now - I’d advise you to spend some time thinking about how these technologies can be integrated into your business - and in particular your sales cycle.
Here are three tools to start with:

1. Connected
Connected is a Cloud based address book that connects and syncs with all of your potential sources contacts and leads. Once the system identifies duplicates and merges records you are left with a new contact database gleaned from your email address book, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and even your mobile phone directory. Where Connected is smart - is that it begins monitoring these connections and sends you a daily email with useful communication triggers like job changes or impending birthdays.

2. Tout
If you currently use Mailchimp or a similar advanced newsletter distribution platform - you would be familiar with concepts like open rates, click throughs ratios and bounce reports. Tout takes these reporting concepts and combines it with web based templates. Connecting your web based CRM tool to it (e.g HighRise, Batchbook, CapsuleCRM) imports all of your sales leads as contacts. You can then begin firing off business development or follow up emails from your template list and then track which versions are the most successful. The team edition is particularly useful, as you can monitor how many of the emails your team are sending out are generating positive responses.

3. Rapportive
Rapportive is a magical addition to the Gmail experience. It uses social data from Rapleaf to automatically identify the people you are communicating with. If you are already connected with them on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn it will load up their picture and recent status updates in a right hand column - or alternatively will prompt you to connect with them. In a sense - it creates the kind of information rich, business focused social network from your email inbox that Google+ should be doing for you.