Topic: The Future
In the future consumers may have lower costs for services they demand but at the cost of their privacy and attention, while private enterprise will benefit from a wide variety of customers and more expansive relationships with those customers. Martin Geddes imagines the public will soon be ready to receive billing and customer service notices via pay-per-moment options added to Twitter or other social media instead of through today's minute-based telephony.
Three business chiefs reiterate that relationships are the most important assets -- so handling customer data is critical business. As internet marketing continues to grow, chief marketers have more data than ever on their customers. Here, top marketers talk about their data assets and how it directs company actions. Nikesh Arora of Google, John Hayes of American Express, and Yusuf Mehdi of Microsoft talk with John Battelle.
The Veteran's Administration, Medicare, and Medicaid make up the largest repository of public health data in the world, and now it's being made available in appropriate forms for the use of patients and innovators alike. Todd Parks, CTO of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, wants to change the fee structure of healthcare from "Fee for Service" to something more efficient, and he's freeing up information on public health so everyone can see and help design better health systems.
Imagine the earliest days of society where oral communication served as the foundation of describing, preserving, and sharing human experience. Johanna Kollmann, User Experience Manager at Vodafone, studies how technology serves essentially the same function today as then, helping move the interaction of people from communication, to conversation, then to collaboration.
"Telephony is dying and voip is not much better off". Where are telecommunication companies to look to next? Colin Pons, Senior Architect at KPN, thinks it's in enterprise applications, social networking services and mobile devices. The future of mobile is bright. The future of the internet is mobile.
Telecom companies need to move from being merely infrastructure companies to having add-on services on top of their infrastructure to survive. Martin Geddes, Head of Strategy at BT, looks at the container industry's history for insights into where the future for telecommunications will be. The money in the container industry was not in the infrastructure but in the service of moving objects from A to B, efficiently and profitably.
Everyone knows that books have been a cornerstone in our society for millenia. But according to Kevin Kelly, we're moving away from them at a rapid pace. Through a mix of powerful trends, Kelly takes a look into the future. What he finds are more tough questions. He predicts a questionable future for producers everywhere. He also offers a few ideas that may drive the market to services in what Kelly calls our new vizuality.
In a world of media fragmentation, how can a big telemedia company keep its edge? By bundling deals with content providers, aimed at targeted markets. Gerd Leonhard says "curation" is the name of the game. Previously, big broadcasters and communicationss companies were the only game in town. It's now time for a new telemedia to care about content, branding, and audience.
Everyone on the web is participating in a great "data exhaust." Therefore, good internet companies do not ambush their users, Reid Hoffman says. Known as the most connected person in Silicon Valley, and a newly-made billionaire since the May IPO of LinkedIn, Hoffman predicts what Web 3.0 will be like.
Our "flat" world is also hyper-local. Location is becoming simultaneously more and less relevant. Julia Grace discusses why we buy some things from across the globe and others at our corner shop. Could our experience at the stores could be improved by using all the data that we generate every day paying with credit cards, checking in at Foursquare or using customer-linked cards? Could super-computers be used to sort through all the data we are generating and personalize our shopping experiences? This is an ethnographic look at shoppers today.
