Gentry Underwood focuses on social media and collaborative software at IDEO. He works both internally and with the firm's clients to design and build software people will actually use. Check out his recent post: Social Software, The Other Design for Social Impact. Gentry's post includes the following exerpt:
It isn't difficult to see where most social software falls short: many tools have pleasant, user-friendly interfaces and take advantage of well-designed physical devices (i.e., they're easy to use from a human-computer-interaction perspective). But it's in the sociological and anthropological arenas where they run into trouble: most social software tools are clumsy and ineffective at smoothly facilitating interpersonal interaction.
The bottom line, which Underwood intelligently shares, is that we are in the infancy of social software and new methods of designing these tools will lead to more powerful applications of their capabilities. Join Gentry and continue the discussion at http://socialsoftware.org. In the meantime watch this hillarious satirized look at Facebook by the British improv troupe Idiots of Antsthat pushes the social behaviors of Facebook to the extreme.
Gartner's recent 2009 Symposium provided another opportunity for IT leaders to share views regarding the future. Google's chief Eric Schmidt explored his thinking on key internet trends; among them real time search, the dominance of Chinese language content, the ten fold increase in computing power and the continued shift to video content - all forecasted to dominate the next five years of the Internet's evolution.
Gartner is a respected research firm and much of what Schmidt said in his 45 minute interview was directed at business leaders. An excerpted 6 minutes highlights points of interest to anyone impacted by the web.
For an interesting review of Schmidt's contemplation of these points read Kirkpatrick's article and watch the brief video. It will be an exciting next five years indeed.
The Web 2.0 summit just wrapped up in SFCA this past week. There are some noteworthy observations and content on their web site and in particular Mary Meeker's annual overview of Internet trends . Take an moment to review her indepth presentaiton below. A huge surge in mobile access is about to, yet again, revolutionize businesses and the adoption of new technologies using cloud infrastructure and location centric applications will become another key influencer of shareholder value and produce and service niche differentiation. Among the conferences many revleaing presenters Mary put forth a revealing observations that platforms which combine social networking with mobility will drive "unprecedented change in communications + commerce." As Richard MacManus points out, that statement seems a little hyperbolic, but we have undeniably seen an uptick in usage this year of companies like Foursquare, Loopt and Brightkite. Later in the presentation, Meeker predicted that Facebook will be a major player in this market in the near future. Hold onto your hats.
Daniel Boorstin, author and historian, was right when he observed that, "the greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance: its the illusion of knowledge." Its true; to realize the potential this exciting time of change offers requires letting go of certain past assumptions. Disengaging from old thinking enables a consideration and potential adoption of innovations impossible before but central to driving new opportunities. When evaluating every industry today, the primary barriers to moving ahead toward a positive future have much more to do with interests vested in the past than the potential the future offers. Nowhere is this more accurate when considering the struggling music industry of today.
Enter Spotify. Founded in 2006 by Daniel Ek, former CTO of Stardoll, and Martin Lorentzon, co-founder of TradeDoubler, in Stockholm. The company is fast catching up with Twitter as the most talked-about internet site and has been called a “21st-century jukebox”. A library of millions of songs, both pop and classical, can be accessed by users through their computer. Tracks are not downloaded, but merely played once. The effect is similar to listening to the radio - but you choose all the songs. Spotify is unique in that it is both free and legal. Experts think it represents a new model for people to buy music and watch television and films in the future - as reflected in the brief advertisement below.
More interesting than the innovative business model itself is the founder's recognition of where the barriers to success lie. Ek explained the notion of overnight success as "very misleading and actually rather harmful to any hope for long term and sustainable growth in this industry" during a recent interview. Despite this, he called out the music industry for doing just that and expecting to see business models proven "within months of inception." "That's just not how it works", he says, reminding us how iTunes was not initially the powerhouse it is today. Apple missed its iTunes revenue targets by 30% and most label executives doubted its staying power at the time. While Ek realizes that comparing iTunes to Spotify is wrong given the very different business models for each company, it does prove the overall point: success in this industry or any industry takes a long time. More importantly, the long time is more a result of the industries lack of vision and acknowledgement of a solution - a clear demonstration of "the illusion of knowledge" blocking discovery.
If it was up to Spotify, the music industry would be embracing the future instead of fighting against it. Ek opines that for the industry to find success, it must recognize the new business model as "a mix between ad-supported music, downloads, subscriptions, merchandising and ticketing where the user comes first and where the key to monetization comes from portability and packaging access rights." If willing to adapt, the industry could then have the potential to grow stronger than it ever was.
Its not just the music industry that is in desperate need for new thinking in leadership to reach its potential. See his recent interview video below to learn more about Ek and his views here.
In his book, "The Chaos Scenario", Bob Garfield, writer for Advertising Age magazine and co-host of NPR’s On the Media program, forecasts the disintegration of mass media and advertising structures that have dominated commerce for hundreds of years. Garfield astutely warns that all formerly top-down institutions cannot dictate to consumers with advertising through mass media as before, but must retool, restructure and reengineer their business models enbracing new digital tools and forging better relationships with customers—no longer seeing people as eyeballs or votes, but as REAL stakeholders in their enterprise.
Amid the ruins of mass media, the choice for business is stark: really listen and respond or perish. This is evident in most industries today as they try to figure out rapical change brought on by mega trend convergences. As Garfield states in this illumantive video below, "Its a Revolution". Watch it !
