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- To identify some of the most relevant trends for the coming 10 years
- Some implications and opportunities for newspaper companies
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- My focus is on driving force trends – ones that drive other changes
- Where will the opportunities be?
Where will the money be?
- What are the implications for newspaper companies?
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- Everything electronic constantly more, better, faster, smaller, cheaper,
easier to use
- E.g. Worldwide storage capacity will increase from 283,000 terabytes in
2000 to more than 5 million terabytes by 2005
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- Internet continuing its spread
becoming the main media for information and commerce in all
quarters of the earth
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- Ultra-broadband Internet will soon arrive in developed countries via
fiber optics
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- Communications becoming cheaper and cheaper as time goes on
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- NOW
- My cell phone contains a tiny hard disk, a camera with flash, has a
color screen, a built-in GPS, personal databases, does
voice-recognition, records, sends and receives voice, photos, video and
text, shows slide shows, plays music, has an address book, a calendar
of appointments, takes notes, transfers files into and out of my
computer and some times needs to be re-booted. Long distance calls in the US and
night and weekend calls are free.
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- Wi Fi short range radio networks has spread like wildfire in homes,
airports, coffee shops, offices, everywhere.
- Cheap and off-the-shelf.
- Wi-Max is next, offering broadband over a 30-mile range
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- In appliances, light switches, medicine cabinet doors, chairs, furniture, shoes, clothing, pets,body organs
- They will sense, communicate and help with biometric health monitoring
- They will also do things, such as release drugs, make emergency calls,
let you know your levels of anti-oxidants and hormones
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- Individuals becoming real-time, multimedia information hubs with lots of
computer power and unlimited communications capabilities.
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- Full-powered PC in pocket
- Virtual image glasses already used by auto and sailboat racing teams
- Voice or pocket “Mouslett” activated
- Body-area networking
- Broadband wireless connection with rest of world
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- Body-area network wirelessly links glasses, microphone, mouse, pocket
computer, body stress sensors, peripheral and night vision devices,
cameras, image projectors, smart-clothing displays, possibly personal
alarm and defense systems
- Eventually connected to body and
brain sensor and control implants
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- The wearer becomes a cyber-being
- Lost without the device, the experience will be as if deaf and dumb
- Even today, I feel naked without my Palm Pilot, my cell phone and my
digital camera with me
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- Rapid adoption now of
- HDTV sets and programming
- Large flat hi-res screens
- New hi-definition DVD formats almost here
- Consumer screens showing 3-d stereo depth are due this year - will be
commonplace within 5 years
- Eyeglasses which show hi-res stereo with eyeball tracking to be
commonplace in 5-10 years
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- Pannable 3-D computer images to become very common – like the scenery
in games that you can move through
- Eyeball tracking coming out of the lab.
Look to the right, left, up or down and the screen image will
pan to where you are looking
- Personal applications like computer dating, maintaining distance
romances, pornography getting increasingly realistic
- More and more mixtures in movies of live and computer-created actors
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- And food – an example:
- Chicken tells your Refrigerator-Oven (RO) food unit that it is getting
old sitting there
- The RO checks your recipe data base, taking into account the other food
you have stored. It knows your
favorites.
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- While you are still in the office, the RO sends you a message
suggesting main courses for dinner that uses the chicken
- Using your cell phone, you tell the RO you want the chicken-rice dish
for you and two guests and will arrive home at 7PM
- You are delayed in traffic. Your
car calls the RO and tells it you will arrive home at 7:30
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- This is the century of bioinformatics, building on the informatics and
biotechnology of the last half of the 20th century
- Bio research done collaboratively at multiple locations using computer
models
- Computers made of DNA and enzymes
- Life, including animals, made-to-order, first on computers then
actually
- The conflict over stem cell research is just the beginning, pitting the
scientific establishment against some religious groups
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- People will live hundreds of years
- The genetic causes of aging are becoming known, as well as means to
regenerate organs, and, eventually whole bodies.
- Regenerative Medicine already has its commercial start.
- E.g. technologies to re-grow completely-destroyed skin
- Within 20 years, genetic treatments will enable those who can afford it
to live several hundreds of years in young bodies
- This too could promote cultural warfare
- There will be opportunities for all kinds of information services for
mature people who seek constantly to expand their knowledge and wisdom
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- New materials with amazing properties, like radiation-resistant
clothing, plastics that can conduct electricity
- Tiny body implants, e.g. for the intelligent delivery of drugs, for
monitoring body conditions
- Cheap photovoltaic cells
- Tiny engines that run of fuel to make power for laptops
- Artificial insects, like mosquito killers
- Tiny household sensors that detect bacteria, molds
- Micro-machines that can perform specialized surgery
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- Many serious thinkers believe nano-robots the size of blood cells will
be able to
- cure diseases
- reverse ageing
- Perform specialized surgery
- Augment human intelligence
- Provide unlimited human memory
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- The trends are not simple
because they feed off each other
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- Using a computer and going online for almost everything is now the
normal things to do among the educated, in businesses and for those in
the middle and upper classes
- Not using a computer or not going online puts individuals at a
disadvantage
- Google and the other search services now make information and knowledge
of all kinds available at the touch of a keypad. Everybody can become a researcher and
millions are doing so.
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- TIME AND SPACE ARE VANISHING AS BARRIERS TO COMMUNICATION
- General implications include
- worldwide distribution of work processes
- companies become super-national entities
- Outsourcing: intellectual work going from the US and Europe to India, manufacturing to China
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- TIME AND SPACE ARE VANISHING AS BARRIERS TO COMMUNICATION
- Due to lower and lower cost communications and computers - intelligent
personal devices
- Cameras and flat screens everywhere, soon for video as well as photos –
always cheaper and better multimedia communications
- Wireless means communication available any place, any time for
entertainment, work, social interaction
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- EXAMPLE – HEALTH CARE
- This is the century of bioinformatics, building on the informatics and
biotechnology of the last half of the 20th century
- Profound shifts in health, medical care and longevity can be expected
- An important shift will be to individualized medicine: shift from
one-treatment-for-all to treatments that are tailored to the genetic
patterns of an individual
- There will be accompanying social conflict and disruption; the stem
cell issue is only the beginning
- As health decisions become more complex, individuals will have to
assume increasing responsibility for their well being.
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- Massive shift from hierarchical one-way media (newspapers, magazines,
TV, etc,) to horizontal
communications via richly connected networks.
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- Many traditional middlemen are being disintermediated.
- E.g., with emergence of ultra high-speed Internet, thousands of movies
will be available for free or low cost download, perhaps finally
breaking the back of the big film distribution companies
- Services like e-bay and Pay Pal allow individuals to act like retailers
- Cell phones in African villages cut out usurious local money lenders
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- Starting to shift in a big way to China, India and other Asian
countries:
- 1950s – textiles, clothing
- 1960s – household goods
- 1970s – consumer electronics
- 1990s – chips, computer peripherals, technical support
- 2000s – R&D, software, pharmaceuticals, legal medical and financial
services
- Also migrating to Russia, Eastern Europe
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- EVER MORE COMPLEXITY IN THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT
- Powerful diverse ethnic communities within communities
- Gross misalignments of enclaves of people and governments on
perspectives of reality
- Unilateralism, disintegration of international world agreements,
institutions,
- New international trade and travel barriers.
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- European and US cities
increasingly becoming collections of ethnic and social communities with
different directions and value systems
- Inter-penetration of first-world and third-world communities everywhere
- Security concerns likely to further partition big cities into barrios,
gated communities
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- Virtual remote office installations
- Less travel for business or entertainment, more teleconferencing,
virtual experiences
- Computer dating, distance romances, virtual families
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- Pro-war and anti-war groups; E.g. Move on! International network of 2
million activists
- Online is serving increasingly to integrate immigrant communities in
different US cities and with people in their native countries
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- Millions of people “live” in the worlds of online video games, others
in worlds of dating services, pornography, religious cults or advocacy
groups
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- Productivity example: The wireless construction site.
- This system enables the real-time management of trucks, bucket
loaders, scrapers, loads and even material administration. Each time an action like a
shovel-full of dirt is moved, the server is updated.
- Eventually, no people required
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- Direct marketing and product placement are becoming more important tools
for selling while traditional advertising models continue to decline.
- More and more viewers are skipping TV advertising by viewing pay-cable,
using TIVO-type devices and watching DVDs
- Advertising is slowly being disintermediated by direct sellers, whether
these be Amazon.com or Wall Mart or Costco
- Internet and wireless are slowly displacing TV for entertainment as
well as information - narrowcasting
- New technology means advertising is targeted to the individual AND
coordinated with time and circumstances
- Mass-market advertising becomes a thinner and thinner reed on which to
hang business survival.
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- Allows flexible dynamic Just-in-time organization of group activities
- Massive peace gatherings
- Terrorist actions
- Short strikes
- Overnight political action protests
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- Polarization can be seen in many dimensions such as immense luxury
houses and expensive cars and yachts
for the wealthy, growing numbers of children below the poverty
line, and disappearance of social-support funds and networks.
- The US is already ranked near the bottom of the list for many social
indicators such as infant mortality, health care, scientific education,
personal opportunity and life expectancy.
- The US is ranked below many supposedly third-world Asian countries on
many of these dimensions and it continues to loose ground.
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- Easy communications makes professional as well as manufacturing labor
employment competitive across the whole world
- There is a massive shifting of wealth to India, China and other Asian
countries
- accompanied by increasing poverty in the developed countries among their
uneducated laborers.
- Squeezing out of the middle class.
US and European countries becoming a lot more like Latin American
countries with very wealthy 15% class and very large numbers of people
struggling to survive without a government support network
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- Networked battlefield systems and soldiers - sophisticated technology use by
advanced armies
- Pure cyber-weapons, e.g. GPS jammers
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- Art blends with reality
- Becoming impossible to tell real people from computer-created ones in
films, on TV, in games
- Fractal-based art appearing everywhere in all media
- New role of the artist: as a reality-construction engineer
- New view of art – as re-fractalization of reality
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- More and more news is available online, but followed only by segmented
parts of the population
- Objective news of less and less importance and highly filtered in
countries like the Russia and
China. The populations
are not well-informed and subject to political manipulations
- As editorial staffs in newspapers continue to be cut back,
breakthroughs in news are more and more being found in specialized
websites and blogs
- The objectivity of what is said in such websites and blogs is
frequently questionable. Fact,
opinion and dogma are often freely intermixed.
- How can newspaper company editorial people help?
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- Comedy TV shows, drama series on TV and talk shows on TV and radio are
extremely popular, e.g.
- Comedy shows like Comedy Central and the Bill Mahr Show
- Religious broadcasters like Calvary Chapel, American Family
Association, Bott Radio, Moody Bible Institute
- The same is for blogs and advocacy websites on Internet
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- Research from Pew Internet & American Life (2004):
- 77 percent of online Americans use
the Net for information on the war in Iraq.
- In all, 55 percent of the nation’s 116 million adult Internet users
have sent or received emails related to the Iraq war
- Around 44 percent of online Americans have used the Net to search for
news related to the war, while 15 percent have used it to get
information about the country and people of Iraq.
- One in seven Internet users say they are going online more because of
the news.
- War opponents are slightly more likely than supporters to report
intensified Internet use.
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- INTERNET NOW A CRIME ZONE -reflecting trends in the broader society
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- Internet news and political action networks that displace TV, integrated
with P2P activities
- Virtual world scenery architects, game and plot designers
- Virtual world creation software
- On-line game and community companies
- Fractal and 3-D architecture and art
- Telepresence applications
- Virtual property brokerage
- Internet multi-media
- Wireless multi-media
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- Bio-modeling
- Complexity science and chaos theory
- Genetics and re-generative medical informatics
- Quantum informatics, computing
- Intelligent robotics
- Nano technology applications
- Fuel cell informatics applications
- Wireless site applications engineering, general and specialized hot
spots
- There will be vast opportunities for specialized information services
- News services that help the public understand what is going on
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- Body-area networks
- Cyber clothing to hold technology and for displays
- Computer security and cyber-warfare measures and counter-measures
engineering
- Services that deliver time, place and circumstance-specific information
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- TURBULENCE, disruption, lack of predictability result from interaction
among the trends
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- Predictability becomes a weaker and weaker tool as the world and
situations in it become ever-more complex
- The future is not historically determined.
- “You cannot put your foot in the same river once.”
- What happens depends more and more on what is created.
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- Times have changed significantly and change is accelerating.
- Changes are in technology, social conditions, business organization,
people and their habits, capabilities and expectations.
- The changes are so complex in their interaction that nobody can say
where they will go
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- Newspapers worldwide function in a more or less standard model where
the paper itself is manufactured daily and distributed physically.
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- NONETHELESS, it is an exciting period and can be exciting for newspaper
companies since:
- Tremendous changes are occurring
- Many of the changes are about communications
- Change means opportunity
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- The printed product alone cannot meet the challenge
- YET
- Most newspaper companies now have 10 or more years of experience in
the electronic media
- There is a rich background of current newspaper experimentation with
blogs and wireless applications
- Newspaper brand names and community ties remain strong
- There is a greater public need than ever for editorial functions to
help people understand the changes taking place and dealing with them
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- In innovation, it is best to “ride the horse in the direction it is
going.” That means align your
innovations with the powerful trends out there
- Newspaper opportunities include:
- Providing editorial support, quality analysis and guides to blogs and
other P2P services – in multi-media combinations including print
- The need for objective information, guides, user orientation and
context has never been greater
- There has been considerable newspaper experimentation in these areas
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- More “riding the horse in the direction it is going.” Example:
- Providing wireless community services, probably linked to print and
online
- Consistent with newspaper’s traditional roles of supporting
connections in and providing information to communities
- There are all kinds of possibilities for community, business and
personal services linked to traditional newspaper areas of content
such as news, entertainment, real estate and automobiles
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- More “riding the horse in the direction it is going.” Example:
- Becoming a community multi-media hub
- Providing comprehensive services to create community via online,
wireless, live meetings and print.
- (the print product cannot necessarily
be expected forever to be the central pillar of this hub)
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- The challenge is to recognize the
opportunities and find
revenue-producing models to meet them
- Some opportunities are associated with new technology
- others are associated with profound social changes coming about due to
already-existing technology
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- Give up an idea of a “standard model” business to replace the existing
newspaper business – instead adopt to your circumstances
- What you can do as a newspaper company depends on your resources, the
needs of your community and your appetite for adventure and risk
- It may help to give up the idea that your printed newspaper will always
be your “core product”
- Your company is about a lot more
than putting ink on paper and producing a physical product
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- Build on innovations being tried by other newspaper companies
- But do not be limited to this; most relevant action is going on outside
the radar of newspaper companies
- Follow the trends closely – see their implications for your particular
circumstances
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- Don’t feel you have to spend a lot of money on innovating; Yahoo and
Google were created from nothing
- Put your brightest people on the job of finding these opportunities –
draw on the best talent you can
- Work with partners
- Focus on it, and you should be able to find success in a turbulent
future
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- In this decade of accelerating change there are lots of unfulfilled
needs and opportunities for information services
- While some newspaper executives were saying “nobody is making money
online,” multi billion dollar information services empires were being
built like Yahoo and Google
- There are probably more such empires to be built
- Why not by newspaper companies?
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Notes
