Presented at the Oxford Internet Institute.

Thank you for having me here today. Thank you Dame Stephanie, Professor Dutton, all of the wonderful staff of the Oxford Internet Institute. Thanks to the HAND Foundation, New America Foundation and Stanford University which make my work possible. Thanks to all of you for coming. I particularly want to thank my father for joining us here today – it’s a special honor for me to have him here.

Now, I want to ask you to do something that is a bit unusual at the start of a speech. Please turn on your mobile phones. This is both a test and an experiment – a test of a theory I’m working on and an experiment because this will be the first time I’ve tried this outside of the States. I want you to turn on your mobiles because I’m willing to bet you they won’t ring. Why? Because no one uses mobiles for making phone calls anymore. We use them for texting and twittering, messaging and emails. But phone calls? Heck, there oughta be an app for that.

Why do I bring this up? To make a point about how quickly technology changes. Here’s a technology that’s gone completely mainstream in the last decade – all of you have a mobile, as do about 4 billion of the 6 billion people on the planet. And while these devices were designed for phone calls, we use them for something else.

Once the technology is in our hands, we start to adapt it. We adapt our behaviors to what it lets us do. We do this on an individual basis – think for example of another way in which our relationship to phone has changed. About a decade ago, when the phone rang, you wouldn’t know who it was until you had answered it. There was no caller ID. But as soon as you knew who it was, you also had a pretty good chance of knowing where that person was – because they were likely calling from a landline. So if it was your mum she was at home, your sister was calling from work, your brother from his office. Once you knew who was calling, you had a good chance of knowing where they were.

Nowadays, we know who it is the minute the phone rings – caller ID tells us who. But the first question we ask is “where are you?” Simply knowing who is on the call doesn’t tell you anything about where they are – they could be at work, at home, in the car or in another country. We can no longer pin down our family or friends by their phone number. I have a hunch that this is why geo‐location services and applications are becoming so popular – especially among young people who have never been tethered by a landline, but that’s a different speech.

So technology adapts to us and we adapt to technology. It is easy to see this on the personal level. The organizational level is a little bit harder. And this is where we can begin to talk about how technology is disrupting philanthropy...

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