Your Secretary is Here - A Brief Intro to Amunet Insights

Your Secretary is Here - an article I posted to Medium on 5/11/2016

2005 I dreamed of working in intelligence or foreign service. A lot of life, exposure, and experiences in other areas happened in between shaping my opinions and guiding my outlook.

April 2014 my notebooks were bursting.

September 2014 it dawned on me that my thinking was not just all over the place, but that my outlook was a vision to a future?—?one that embraced creative and high technologies in innovative ways to communicate them as one for societal advancement as the pace of intelligence gathering technologies was increasing outside it’s traditional home within national security and climate.

January/February 2015 it was at the tip of my tongue.

So now, wind the clock back to exactly one year ago today to my first of several short returns to NYC in between casting off to sea and far off into the waters of the defense department and intelligence community’s technology cat’s cradle and siloed depths.

I was obsessed at first with getting hired, but then it manifested into something much greater. In chasing the community to unravel the technological architecture, I became so familiar with all of the tools out there that it became craft. This continued for the next several months. I went really broke and seriously homeless. Due to the nature of the community, my involvement, and how I was navigating it, I became cagey and avoidant. It was deep “stealth” as startups like to say.

Those short trips back into NYC kept me grounded and within my community. A community that was supportive and creative and free and innovating and accelerating change all over the place just as I had set out to do.

It was about being heard. It was not about being misunderstood or mistaken as something that I was not.

I found home in gaining knowledge, trust, and expertise in the field and verticals which I had always wished to serve. And from there, communicating and liaising some major trends in technology that was leaving it’s intended national security use and into a commercial/for society application, as I was seeing it in real time, to a narrow audience came naturally and was viewed and anticipated highly by it’s recipients.

The work was simply just starting, and it translated to beginning with around 40,000 conversations, 7,500+ products learned, tested, and sourced, 37+ cities squashed, and countless frozen burritos crushed. Connecting and connecting, linking people to product, company to company, firm to trend, federal office to research and etc.

This was no light hearten journey for the undetermined or the weak. This determination, discipline, and conquest are the sweat and elbow grease of many shed skins going into the formation for a transparent and bureaucratic infrastructure that supports (and manages) a shift in power that I am calling “A Rise of An Information State.”

That narrow audience started widening, but I was still so financially limited that action in growing that audience paused. Also, when coming at the defense and high tech worlds with a lens of adverting and luxury branding, that phrase “timing is everything” really is…everything. These silos were not open to new thinking, and the world was innovating much much faster on the outside. Something needed to be done for security and societal procurement’s sake.

I started offering my approach to sourcing talent-tech-trends, setting up sessions geared toward white boarding-ideation-strategy-marketing campaign build outs, and teaching the art and practice of cooperation in something I’m calling flat collaboration. Something that these firms didn’t account for in budgets was consulting of this kind. There previously had been no marketing capital around their products and services because they served one customer: the government.

So, I opened up my mind, my heart, and my obsession to start bridging the gaps between new tech and high tech/defense tech and framed the vital work being done as pro bono services toward the information state. Instead of turning down an opportunity to get our sleeves rolled up or prove value of opening up my deep and diverse networks to a particular person or company, I saw this action as being on a campaign of sorts and with that mindset a constituency formed along the way. But I needed an MVP?—?a tool?—?not just the consultancy?—?to house and facilitate all of the cupiding that I was doing on the top of my mind, instantaneously, and turning over the engine to innovative & strategic partnerships. These firms and whole portion of the information technology community needed to understand the value of marketing and advertising.

Internal marketing teams at these new gen, venture backed, ultra high tech, start ups were in their roles designing SEO/SEM and product & content marketing strategies to serve their complex products. And on the flip side, the locked in loaded defense contractors and affiliated networks didn’t know how advertising and marketing could and would play so drastically in the invigorating of their corporate structures and competition.

All of this start-up model of marketing is great for exposure and for those that are already familiar with the basic principle of the product being sold. But I started seeing that the marketing capitol of these technology-to-market products valued way higher than being locked in e-blasts or reserved to featured/sponsored one-offs that slim marketing budget accounted for.

The necessity for real impact in this equation was the down to the core fundamental, “I’m just a bill, sitting on Capitol Hill” type education/PSA campaigns of distributed content that actually demonstrated how the main technology functioned so the populous could, even if they didn’t pay real mind to it, know how the tech worked.

Part of my business is designing and distributing these types of campaigns, not just with clients, but to serve the information technology community. Once added value of the function is learned, it can be woven to your business practices through our management consulting arm. And we have a team of group members that assist and liaise these technologies and techniques for you.

Opportunities to sit down with all and everyone across legacy firms, contractors, professors, researchers, leaders, start ups, politicos, hackers, thinkers, analysts, scientists, ceos, private security officers, etc. arose and I was able to then start guiding an industry to reshaping it’s vision and strategy. To start integrating new participation policies internally. And I started humming the tune to an industry in order to cultivate a perspective that society at large could start understanding. One that could deliver how deeply analytics and data collection will play in all aspects of society and see how invasive national security technologies and practice are funneling down and are starting to shape our businesses and guide progress into the private sector.

I stopped living nominally and started living purposely. 
 
So I founded an Innovation Strategy & Management Consulting firm called Amunet Insights? to start formally working with new companies and legacy ones to build out impact strategy, sift through branding & narrative hurdles, pivots, address business development and market readiness for their technologies and then match that with a consulting arm that expands and integrates their tools and practices into different markets and businesses. I’m wild about geospatial intelligence and firmly believe that this will be the leading technology in paving the way to accountability for many things.

Outside of building AI, looking for business partners (***seeking advertising & media guru AND business/consulting shark, Equity and co-founder stake offered***), and growing the narrative of what we are trying to accomplish, I’m also applying for grants in order to 1. form an NGO to support the efforts, campaigns, research, constituency, and etc. of the American Information State and 2. To write the book that is a long time coming. It is on The Rise of An Information State and speaks to the technology-to-market shifts and what this time of open high technology data, deep analytics, and what a flattened collaboration model will mean for society, our rights, diplomacy in data, and legislation. Our data is not only just a matter of national security and government intelligence?—?hard power, it is a matter of public safety, concern, future Earth, wars, and our happiness?—?serving soft power.

If we do not know about the very fundamentals of the technologies that guide our lives and making innovation and progress possible, what will privacy and national security really truly look like?

Your Secretary is here. 
 #SOTIS #untiltherobotstakeover

Your Secretary is here. 
 #SOTIS #untiltherobotstakeover