Megatrends in Media & Technology from Georgia Tech

by David Eckoff · 2 comments

Am attending the FutureMedia conference this week – Renu Kulkarni of Georgia Tech kicked things off with smart observations about trends in media & technology. The six trends she discussed, and my thoughts:

1. Data Tsunami

Massive data analytics will be critical to turn meaning into all the data.

My view: the increasing volume and velocity of information in our daily streams creates the need for “filtering”. Filtering for relevancy, importance, and right timing. In the future, I believe it will be less about “real time” and more about “right time”. The need for this type of filtering is the business hypothesis for Spitter.com, a startup I’ve co-founded with Peter Gruman.

2. True Personalization

Individually tailoring services to what you want to create. Simple and convenient are key. Our preferences and location are what it’s all about.

The company that does this better than anyone is Zazzle.com (a past client, and a Kleiner Perkins funded company), which focuses on what I call “mass customization”. Remember, Henry Ford was famous for saying, “you can get any color car as long as it’s black” – that was all about ‘mass production’ to achieve economies of scale. Today, the holy grail is ‘mass customization’ – get whatever you want, customized to however you want it.

3. Content integrity

As multiple content platforms become more open, information security becomes more important. Security will move from being reactive to proactive.

How is this done today? For example, how do we know that the information we read on Twitter is accurate? I predict that, similar to eBay, some form of “trust metric” will become even more important than number of followers, number of tweets, etc.

4. Multimedia assumed.

It will be a given that video and audio will be parts of content. It will be all about how these are integrated.

Of course, this is already happening now. This strikes me as stating the obvious – unless you’re a traditional print newspaper that has focused only on text; or a traditional television network that has focused only on video.

5. Mixed Reality

Combining real-life and virtual world. Example: Rock’em Sock’em, a GaTech spin out. (Pretty cool concept!)

So far, I’m not seeing virtual worlds reach the mainstream. However, I believe that Facebook and Twitter are “training wheels” that are getting people used to connecting online in new ways – that will pave the way for virtual worlds in the future.

6. Collaboration

Being able to harness the power of many to create.

Mass collaboration really does change everything. Information. Innovation. Product development. Media. All these can be even more powerful through online collaboration.

What do YOU think about these trends? Post your ideas in the comments section below.

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Next up: the most interesting things I heard from Michael Jones, Chief Technology Advocate, Google.

{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Chris York October 5, 2010 at 7:19 pm

Interesting summary, particularly the issues of Data Tsunami and Content Integrity. As more and more data comes at us, we need to be sure our sources are reliable. Too often people look at anything on the web as being ‘truth’

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2 Kit York October 7, 2010 at 3:55 pm

Thanks for the post, I used it to generate a business idea for my presentations class…

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