THOUGHT (aka Centric's Blog)

When I took the tagline of the "Agency of Change" last year, I had no idea how challenging a position this was going to be.

(Or, in English, "Wow, people really don’t like to change, do they?")

It may be ingrained in us. Consider the Newsweek article from 1995 that saw wide re-circulation this weekend, entitled, "The Internet? Bah!" It held such screamers as:

"The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works."

And:

"So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t–the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople."

I’ll bet the author of that Newsweek piece wished that the magazine was still only physical, and that his article was comfortably moldering in garages and landfills, rather than splashed on the screens of 1.3 billion potential viewers.

But that’s been done to death. Let’s turn the timetable back a bit farther, and look at a story from 1957, where a character opines:

"Take this television they’ve been talking about, oh, for years now–and they haven’t got it yet. Who knows if they ever will?"

I’ll be willing to bet that if you could hop into a time machine, set the dials for somewhere in the 18th century, and drop into a parlor conversation of the day, there’d be plenty ready to decry the newspaper as being a waste of paper which would never catch on!

But, like it or not, change happens. Resist change, and younger, nimbler competitors will use it to their advantage. Sit back and say, "My website follows current best practices and benchmarks well against my competitors," and someone will find a way to do it better. Scoff at social media and say, "Well, it’s only for kids," and someone from your competition will be following Forrester or ComScore and know it isn’t "just for kids," and, in fact, 49% of US adults are expected to participate in social media this year.

Scary? We don’t think it has to be. Welcome to change. The change that brings opportunity.

Okay, so we’ve had some internal (and client) comment on Today is the Day the PC Died. Here’s an example: "Okay. So let’s suppose you’re right, and the PC really is on the downslope. What does this mean to me, beyond ‘Thou shalt go and develop a iPhone app, pronto-ish?’"

Fair enough. What does it mean–to everyone, and to marketers in general?

Well, first, the more I think about it, the more this really is a watershed event. This marks the first step in making technology part of ourselves. And that changes everything.

Follow me for a sec.

Think of how you use your computer today. You sit down, shake the mouse, open the web browser and go to YouTube. Or you use Office to make a presentation. Or you go on Facebook to see what your friends are doing. Then, when you’re done, you stand up and walk away from the computer.

Or, if you have a laptop, you drag it out of your messenger bag, plug it into the wall, open the lid and wait for it to find the wireless connection, then do your YouTube/Facebook/Office/Final Cut/Flash/whatever. And when you’re done, you close the lid, put it to sleep, and stuff it away in your messenger bag.

In both cases, you separate yourself from the computer.

In an iPhone-esque world, your computer is in your pocket, it’s always a half-second away from being turned on, and it has many different ways to alert you to its presence. The computer has become part of you. And when you add highly capable apps for productivity and games, as well as higher-speed data, you now have a constantly-connected, intelligent, extremely high-functioning link to, well, damn near anything in the world.

It’s now trivial to look up information on Google, play games with friends, communicate with voice and photos and video, add metainformation to the growing geographic and regional databases, respond to email, create new spreadsheets–half a million things are now seamlessly integrated with your life, rather than being a car trip or a laptop-startup away.

I’ll repeat: the computer has become part of you.

Let’s extrapolate this out. iPhone-esque technology becomes smaller, faster, more ubiquitous. At the same time, future display technology allows us to project data into our eyes, creating overlays on the real world. And, at this point, the distinctions between our own capabilities and those of the network begin to blur. We’re constantly connected. There’s no reason not to use your Google Ambient account. And, in fact, unless you turn it off, it’ll probably work constantly and helpfully in the background, instantly recognizing objects and classes of objects (like cars, faces, friends, and more) to let you know what’s going on with them.

"Wow, that’s a lot of information," the dinosaurs here say. "And I can see the potential for spam and abuse."

Yeah, and welcome to the early 21st century. Yes, assimilating augmented reality overlays may represent an order of magnitude increase in the amount of information we have to process. But that’s what today’s millennials (and post-millenials) have been training themselves for. Watching TV while doing homework, listening to music, and talking to 3 friends via IM is a great start on managing information overload. They’ll treat these augmented realities as part of themselves in very short order.

And for marketers, that presents an interesting conundrum. How do you market in an environment where computers have become part of everyone, and media itself has become personalized? People tend to guard their personal environment with much greater care than, say, a web page. AdSense ads won’t be tolerated when they’re in your field of vision, or even if they’re flittering around the corner of your eye. 3D overlays of fantasy-lands to explore in real space may be a better marketing venue.

But, no matter how you look at it, the rules are changing. Fast. What are you doing to keep ahead?

It occurred to me that I hadn’t written anything of near-significance since my column in the mid-’90’s ("The Radical Retailer") in the long-gone gamer trade magazine edited by my friend and former publisher of American Cinematographer Magazine, Jim McCullough. It was before blogs but it was just as pithy as I could write.

Had I written the column today it would have covered the Hi Def format war pitting The Toshiba Corporation’s HD format against Sony’s Blu-ray. It was a war that actually ended before it began. Walking the floor at the 2006 CE Show in Las Vegas with Questex Media’s Don Rosenberg and with research mavin Judith McCourt of the Redhill Group, we were told with no uncertainty that it was over. Blu ray would win because of capacity. "Capacity always trumps features and launch dates," I was told by another interested party from ironically, NBC Universal.

It was frustrating for the retailer. As excited as they were about a new opportunity to sell high definition screens, installation and accessories, they were holding back. While the management at Best Buy and Tweeter were all for it, the kids on the floor - the real touch points to the customer - not so much. Ask them about the new HD or Blu-ray players and you were told in no uncertain terms, "it’s too early. Wait." And, if they went through the process of A-B-ing Hi Def software and player versus standard DVD technology, it was hard to tell. To the average consumer, no discernible difference.

To all those who held back buying the HD players due to honest, knowledgeable custom service- you were saved from buying an expensive paper weight. Would you return to that store? You betcha.

Today, the format war is over. Those that should have known better lost more than just face. They lost consumer confidence and oh yeah, hundreds of jobs and a billion dollars U.S.

If this tragedy had occurred in the 1940’s there would have been mass seppuku at Toshiba. The sad part, it all could have been avoided.

Isn’t that what social networks are for? Instant focus groups. Instant feedback. Instant everything. More on that next time.

On March 6th 2008, approximately 30 residents of a virtual world descended upon an event staged 100 meters above Yosemite valley. Far in the backdrop, one could see two towering globes. Both the terrestrial globe and celestial globe are works by Giovanni Maria Cassini (1790 & 1792), now prominently displayed on David Rumsey’s island in Second Life. While this sounds impressive, you soon begin to realize that the entire region around you is home to numerous historical maps. Maps that were given a second life in a virtual world.

It is fitting that paper maps are given a second life of their own, in a virtual world that prides itself in offering its residents a second life. The unique nature of this platform is its ability to be robust, scalable, and most of all fully immersive. Because virtual worlds are so tactile it lends itself well to education - and that is why 30 residents from various parts of the world gathered at David Rumsey’s launch event.

As residents settled in, they were given a chance to view a special presentation appropriately titled “Giving Maps a Second Life with Digital Technologies.” Following the insightful presentation, residents called in to a live Q&A session via conference call. Here residents were given the chance to ask David Rumsey questions regarding his work in Second Life and beyond. Although we’ve known it all along, this is when it truly sunk in for me - the residents of second life really crave meaningful interaction and jump at the opportunity for education. They really do!

The questions asked during the call inspired us to look at the work we have done to date. It challenged us to think of new creative ways to further evolve David Rumsey’s island into a more collaborative and educational space. As a matter in fact, one resident asked “when will we be able to see a collaborative project in second life?” in response to David’s comment on wanting to bring in hundreds of his maps into Second Life. Certainly, the virtual plane is the perfect platform for disseminating hundreds if not thousands of maps. The work however can be a daunting task. This is one of the way that residents can collaborate on a project.

As the event came to an end, residents mingled and explored the various landmarks that helped frame this wonderful event. I have selected the accompanying image because of two important reasons. First, because it captures the awe of Cassini’s globes as residents looked on. The later because these residents really made the event a success. Working as event staff, they were available to guide visitors and educate them on the history, origin, and the technical implications of giving these maps a second life.

On behalf of David Rumsey, and the team at Centric I would like to thank you all for coming to the event, and we look forward to seeing more great things come out of David Rumsey’s island in Second Life.

If you missed the launch event, you may view the video presentation here and as always, there are lots more to be seen at Centric’s Flickr page.