Thought Leader Interview

Thinkers360 thought leader interviews profile prominent members of the Thinkers360 community who embody the power of ideas in their work. In this edition, we speak with Dr Mark van Rijmenam, Founder of Datafloq.

Dr. Mark van Rijmenam is The Digital Speaker. He is a future tech strategist who thinks about how emerging technologies change organizations, society, and the metaverse. Van Rijmenam is an international keynote speaker, 4x author, and entrepreneur.

He is featured in the annual listings of the Thinkers360 Top 50 Global Thought Leaders and Influencers on Artificial Intelligence 2022, Top 50 Global Thought Leaders and Influencers on CRM 2022, and Top 50 Global Thought Leaders and Influencers on Analytics 2022 as well.

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Thinkers360: Tell us a bit about your background and areas of expertise

MVR: I am a future tech strategist who thinks about how technology changes organizations, society, and the metaverse. As an international keynote speaker, I have spoken in 25 countries across the globe and collectively inspired over 100.000 managers, directors, and C-level executives. I am the founder of Datafloq and 4x author, with my latest book published on the metaverse: Step into the Metaverse: How the Immersive Internet Will Unlock a Trillion-Dollar Social Economy detailing what the metaverse is and how organizations and consumers can benefit from the immersive internet.

I am also the publisher of the ‘f(x) = e^x‘ newsletter, read by thousands of executives, on the future of work and the organization of tomorrow.

Thinkers360: What is your new book all about?

MVR: Step into the Metaverse: How the Immersive Internet Will Unlock a Trillion-Dollar Social Economy discusses how the world as we know it will fundamentally change as the physical and the digital worlds merge into the metaverse, impacting the everyday experiences of people, companies, and societies. The metaverse offers extraordinary opportunities and challenges for business leaders, consumers, regulators, policymakers, and other metaverse stakeholders trying to navigate the future of the Internet.

In the metaverse, you can be who you want to be, where you want to be, and companies and consumers are only restricted by their own creativity in how they can benefit from the immersive internet. In the book, I cover issues ranging from avatars, identity, and digital fashion to non-fungible tokens (NFTs), blockchain, and the economics of the metaverse. The book also offers:

• Discussions on the importance of an open and interoperable metaverse build on the web 3.0 paradigm if we want to reign in the control of Big Tech over our identity, data, and lives.
• Explorations of the enormous—and largely untapped—potential for metaverse entertainment, including gaming, music, media, and sports and how brands can engage with their customers in novel ways, and how digital twins will change how we work and innovate.
• Considerations related to the dangers of an always-on, immersive internet, including data breaches, avatar imposters, mental health issues, corporate and state surveillance, and the need for metaverse law.

Step into the Metaverse is meant as a blueprint for an open metaverse and I believe it is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the future of technology, the internet, and social interaction.

Thinkers360: You deliver keynotes as a hologram or avatar, can you tell us a bit about that?

MVR: As a future tech strategist I believe in practicing what I preach, so I have digitalized myself and created an avatar just when the pandemic started. This allowed me to deliver keynotes with my avatar when I was no longer able to fly and do in-person keynotes. My first avatar was quite rough and I used it to deliver season 1 of my podcast The Digital Speaker series.

Currently, I am working on my MetaHuman for season 2, which will be a hyper-realistic digital copy of me. I am also working on a video chatbot with this new avatar, so people can talk to me about the future of work 24 hours per day.

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Thought Leader Interview

Thinkers360 interviews profile prominent members of the Thinkers360 community who embody the power of ideas in their work. In this edition, we speak with Dr Mark van Rijmenam founder of Datafloq, he is a globally recognized speaker on big data, blockchain and AI, a strategist and author of 3 management books.

Thinkers360: Tell us a bit about your background

MR: I am the founder of Datafloq. Datafloq is the one-stop source for emerging tech, offering C-level Executives information, insights, knowledge and opportunities to drive innovation with data. I have a bachelor’s in hospitality management – I was part of the opening team of the first ski resort in Dubai -, a Master of Science in Marketing Management and I hold a PhD in Management from the University of Technology Sydney. My research is on how organizations should deal with big data analytics, Blockchain and AI. I have written three management books: My first book Think Bigger – Developing a Successful Big Data Strategy for Your Business, was published globally in April 2014 and published in Chinese in 2017. I am the co-author of the book: Blockchain: Transforming Your Business and Our World, which was published in English in August 2018. My third book, The Organisation of Tomorrow, discusses how AI, blockchain and analytics turn every business into a data organisation.

I am an entrepreneur with a drive for (disruptive) innovation and to make a difference and inspire others. My objective is to be a catalyst for global innovation and to enable organisations and societies to tackle some of the world’s biggest challenges. Currently, I am working on turning Datafloq into a reputation-based content platform to combat fake news and reward content producers.

Apart from building my own companies, I advise organisations on how to incorporate trends such as big data analytics, blockchain and AI in your organisation and how to develop a data-driven strategy. To do so, I have created a unique model, the D² + A² model, which is part of my third management book: The Organisation of Tomorrow.

Thinkers360: What are your current responsibilities and what’s a typical day look like?

MR: My main responsibilities are twofold. On the one hand, I help organisations understand and incorporate emerging information technologies such as big data, analytics, blockchain and AI. I do this through keynotes, workshops, boardroom sessions and consultancy. I work with senior leaders from large organisations in various industries to assist them building the organisation of tomorrow.

On the other hand, I work on building and expanding Datafloq. Datafloq is a content platform around emerging technologies. We are currently pivoting towards a reputation-based content platform. To achieve that, we are launching a browser plugin as a Minimum Viable Product. This plugin allows users and AI to rate articles across the web-based on quality, fake news probability and plagiarism probability. Users will receive tokens for their effort and authors can build a global immutable reputation, non-existent today. In addition, authors that publish articles on Datafloq will also receive tokens depending on the quality of their article and their reputation. Finally, our new search engine will allow users to find articles, or authors, based on quality, fake news probability or plagiarism probability. A novelty for the web. Working on this pivot takes up a big chunk of my day!

Thinkers360: What’s the favorite part of your current role?

MR: My favourite part of my current role is that I get to inspire and help organisations, build and expand my own company and get to see something of the world! I have helped organisations all over the world, from Australia to Canada, France, China, United Kingdom, Germany, Russia, South Africa, Colombia, United States and the Middle East. I enjoy talking to organisations, understanding their challenges and helping them move forward.

Thinkers360: How do you utilize Thinkers360?

MR: The platform brings together a large variety of speakers and thought leaders and interacting and sharing knowledge with them helps me stay up to date in the exponential times that we live in.

Thinkers360: How do you like to work with brands who wish to engage you as a thought leader?

MR: I work with organisations in a variety of ways that best suits the company involved. This includes giving keynotes, boardroom sessions or workshops. My keynotes are inspirational and provide the audience with a deep understanding of the accelerated change that we are currently experiencing. Boardroom sessions will help executives understand how to build a product/service that is truly customer-centric and is based on data. In these sessions, I will guide executives into the world of Emerging Information Technologies and explain how they should change their organization to be ready for the digital revolution that is upon us. Finally, I have developed a set of unique workshops that will get organisations up to par with disruptive innovation in no-time.

Thinkers360: What’s your main advice for upcoming thought leaders?

MR: My main advice for upcoming thought leaders is to dive deep into the topic that interests you, learn all about it and understand how it will affect organisations. Only once you have a clear understanding of your niche, will you be able to assist others. Above all, have fun in what you do!

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Join us on Thinkers360!

Thinkers360 is an opt-in network of the world’s foremost thought leaders — including academics, analysts, authors, consultants, influencers and speakers — with over 10M followers on social media combined. We are differentiated by our unique patent-pending algorithms that measure thought leadership and authentic influence looking far beyond social media alone.

Individuals: Showcase your thought leadership profile and portfolio, build your media kit, and participate in our global leaderboards and opportunity marketplace. Connect and work with global brands as an author, influencer, speaker and more: Sign-Up (free) | Newsletter

Enterprise (including brands & agencies): For brand, influencer, content marketing and speaker bureau services, working with our network of premier influencers with 10M+ followers on social media: Request an Enterprise Consultation | Explainer Video

Want to discover and work with authentic authors, influencers and speakers (including access to our unique thought leader reports and analytics and our zero-transaction fee speaker bureau)? Contact us at info@www.thinkers360.com