We are also watching an explosion of new media and new tools that have the promise to bring real breakthroughs in what talented people can practically do together. We're seeing this in the new media of video, which has really only emerged in an historical blink of an eye. Youtube and web video in general has only hit the scene in the last five years or so. And in that space of time, we've watched immense expansion of its capabilities. Youtube is believed to be sending out 200 million video streams each day, and Youtube is just one of many video sites that is reconnecting the planet through these kinds of video linkages. There's a two-way video connecting experiences that's happening through things like Skype and other peer-to-peer ways to open video links throughout the world.

And beyond video, there are waves of new web tools that are allowing people to work together more productively and efficiently in many new ways. At the high end, knowledge workers today are using a laundry list of tools, from free IP conference calls that allow you to connect with anyone around the world, to instant messaging that allows you to cross-connect, wherever you are, to Google Documents to work on similar documents at the same time to wikis where large numbers of people can collaborate on the same document at the same time or asynchronously. And the list goes on.

In fact, it could be argued that Silicon Valley is now entering an explosive new period of what could be called web collaboration tools. These tools are building off of the accumulated web tools that people have been familiar with over the last five to ten years and are now starting to evolve, and to integrate these capabilities together and add new capabilities that we never had before. There is a ride of innovation happening in the Valley now around web collaboration that is very reminiscent to what the Valley went through with social networking five years ago, back when nobody knew what Facebook was, let alone even heard of a thing called Twitter. The world of web collaboration in the Valley is similar to that kind of experimental phase that social networking went through before it became normalized and adopted into everybody's life.

The point is that we now face a great opportunity, in which we can see a through-line in how we can start to use these advanced tools, both the online video and the new collaboration tools to connect-up all these smart, talented people all across the country and across the world - and start applying them more productively and efficiently to solving problems in new ways. There is now a big opening to both do this in a public space - trying to solve the problems that we all face in this 21st century of mounting challenges, but there is an opportunity for private organizations with some foresight to understand how they can use these tools for their own ends. Organizations can take advantage of this opportunity and start applying these tools before others to move ahead. This space of innovation and the tools to connect up smart, talented people to solve complex challenges is the opportunity that Next Agenda is fully ready to exploit. That's what we saw early and that's where our story begins.