Since 2005, we have written three best-selling, critically acclaimed tech business books together. We have spoken on 100s of stages on all continents not covered by ice. We have been interviewed well over 1,000 times, and have published millions of words in social media. We were the first to argue successfully that social media would change how companies and customers would talk to each other. We also predicted that social media would converge with data, the IoT, and location technologies, to add context in a way that makes a profound and lasting difference. Most recently, we predicted that Mixed Reality would change everything in work and in life.
Except for a few occasional meanderings and wanderings down rabbit holes--everything we have done has focused on what is coming next to business because of technology.
We come at it from different perspectives. Scoble is a tech champion. He is among the first to adopt and evangelize. Israel, trained as a journalist, was taught that if his mother said she loved him, he should find a second source. Trend-spotting always starts with Scoble, then gets vetted by Israel. This can be a bumpy process, but it has proven consistently successful for them for more than a dozen years.
As the above photo suggests, their relationship has not always been filled with harmony and they often do not speak with a single voice. Instead they represent two perspectives to clients that are based on years of experience, research and talking with business and technology experts. They recognize that clients know their businesses better than any consultants can, and their job is to add value in their respective areas of expertise.
Robert Scoble, Partner
Robert Scoble is among the world’s best-known tech journalists and futurists. Based on his many meetings with tech pioneers and thinkers, he is always looking for early changes in patterns that foretell lasting trends. Three such trends have resulted in his three books with Israel.
Scoble has been a tech blogger since 2000, and was one of five people who built Microsoft's Channel 9 video blog/community. He worked at Fast Company setting up and running its early online TV efforts, and has been part of technology media businesses since 1993.
For six years, he was Rackspace’s futurist, interviewing thousands of technologists and entrepreneurs about what’s next. Most recently, he was Entrepreneur in Residence, at Upload, Inc. where he and Israel incubated Transformation Group.
Shel Israel, Partner
Shel Israel anticipates how tech will impact business processes. Often with Scoble, he is a frequent keynoter, addressing how tech will next impact business and life. He has spent half his career as a tech business journalist at publications that include Forbes , BusinessWeek and FastCompany .
His other half was as a tech marketing and communications consultant. He began at the legendary Regis McKenna, Inc., where his first start up was Sun Microsystems. Over the next 20 years he played strategic roles in more than 100 tech startup launches including the introduction of such enduring categories as desktop presentation (PowerPoint) and mapping (MapInfo), PC sound (Creative Labs) and relational databases (dBase 3Plus).
SIPR, the agency he founded and ran for 17 years was purchased in 1994 by Ketchum PR where he served as senior vice president for consumer technology worldwide. He bought it back the following year, and then sold it to a team of employees in 2001, when he returned to his first love of business writing.