Is the future of entertainment small?

I came across VPod several weeks ago (via Om Malik's blog).

They are delivering content to the truly small screen.... and apparently won 2nd prize in Helsinki at a recent developers conference.

Google has recently added a tool that enables you to look at trends in search. You can also run comparisons. And you can see which cities generated the highest volume of searches.

I did a search on 'Global Warming". Below is the graphic reflecting the search. But look at this information: The cities where there were the greatest number of google searches by volume.

1) Brisbane
2) Perth
3) Melbourne
4) Minneapolis
5) Washington
6) Vancouver
7)San Francisco
8) Sydney
9) Seattle
10) Miami

4 out of the top 10 from Australia! And of those Brisbane and Perth are very small cities in terms of population compared with the US cities.  Clearly shows that this is a hot topic in Australia.... Wonder if the politicians are paying any attention?


The letters in the chart show the times of various key news events that took place:

A) A Story about Kyoto
B) Bush, Blair discuss Africa Aid and Global Warming
C) G-8 Leaders remain split on Global Warming
D) Talks about Kyoto Global Warming mandate
E) UN climate conference agrees to talks on global warming
F) Americans willing to fight global warming

The upper graph reflects the search volume and the lower shows the volume of media activity.

Hot on the heels of the Al Gore movie, here is another one that seems to be aiming for the thinking person...  This one is called, "Who Killed the Electric Car". Is this a growing trend of low budget movies with a clear political agenda designed for high impact? I know of several others that are currently in production..... with UK and Australia appearing to lead the market in terms of pre-sales

In the Independant of May 30th there is a lengthy extract from Noam Chomsky's new book.

Here is a sample:

We tend to be a product of what media feeds us. And that media directs us down a number of fairly obvious channels - much of it ignoring what is happening in South America. A number of the points that Chomsky raises seem to be very relevant to us now though. The increasing number of quite strategic relationships that China is building with South American and Middle Eastern countries to secure its future energy supplies, while the UK, US and Australia expend significant financial and political resources on Iraq, East Timor etc, should say it all.

Who is winning the Great Game here?

New data from Parkes Associates on On Line Habits - interesting to see how rapidly shopping is growing - as petrol prices increase this can only grow faster - and that means that the new search will be "find faster, more personally". As this takes place the investment in online technologies will only increase, as will the value of hot online properties.

At the same time, as global warming makes some geographies more risky expect further pressure to truly cocoon.

Here are the latest numbers from the Leichtman Group on broadband users in the US.



As ADSL2 works its way through the regulatory process and into the market and speeds get faster, not only from ADSL2 but also from WiMax, subscriptions will go into warp speed and then the major changes in our consumption of content will start to kick in.

There will be a massive demand for all kinds of associated technologies - particularly those that enable consumers to get the experience metaphorically for free - i.e ways to insert ads in content of all kinds.

I spent a couple of hours yesterday at Alcatel in Sydney being shown some of their visions for the near future for convergence... and in particular IPTV.

Some incredible stuff. Particularly the change that Consumer Created Content makes. They have done some amazing things. But as they told me it is not about what they are thinking now. They feel that they are in the same position as Henry Ford trying to establish what the customers of the world are looking for.... who in turn are only able to describe the world in their own familiar terminology. (As Geoff Heydon, who one of the leading evangelists in the company, said: "If Henry Ford has asked people what they wanted from transportation, they might have said they want their horses to run faster")

We are reaching the point where a new language of reference needs to be invented to describe the things that are going to be possible. We will have the ability to have such totally immersive experiences that virtual reality is now possible...

In this world who knows what content and media will become.... ?

Now here is a truly insightful thought from Seth Godin....


I can't begin to tell you how many times I have had conversations with engineers who are concerned about creating me too products..... When products have markets, there are clearly customers. What customers invariably want is something that performs the function but does it in a more user friendly, functional, effective way. Vive la difference.

Business 2.0 has a piece on what we can expect from 3G phones of the near future. This part of the article covers the specific areas of functionality that are in the works.

This is going to be a very interesting sector of industry to watch. The phone business has become enormous. Over the last few years as phones have increased their functionality they have quietly changed the face of a number of business and sectors. e.g. Minolta, one of the most enduring camera brands, no longer makes cameras. They shuttered that part of the company earlier this year. Why? Because of phones that are cameras. The music industry that only a year or so ago was reeling because of Napster and P2P picked up all the losses from piracy from new media income. And it wasn't from iTunes. That represents a drop in the bucket. The real pick up in revs was from ring tones, ring back tones.

Last year Motorola alone, which is about 13% of the global phone business, sold about 200 Million phones.

At the same time the phone carriers are reeling from the advent of VOIP and in particular Skype. It has made the old fixed line network revenue pretty much worthless. If not now, then very soon this will be the case. But the mobile phone services that they supply are extremely profitable.

So think about this. You put together the clout of the telcos and the momentum that they can  create together with the clout of the phone device companies and their need to keep on getting people to upgrade and what do you get.... Oh and I forgot to mention the sunken capital for the purchase of the bandwidth  spectrum from the various governments....

So it is a recipe for creating a global marketing push that will be a juggernaut.

This will tend to drive a huge amount of R&D spend over the next three years. Battery technology to enable longer life, chip technologies for greater speed, lower power etc, screen resolution for brighter picture.... as well as all the technologies that have driven the Internet over the last 10 years needing to be ported over to a new platform.

This is going to be the driver for the next major goldrush of our times.

Al Gore has a slide show arguing persuasively the case regarding global warming. It has been made into a movie. Title is "An Inconvenient Truth". Lawrence Lessig blogs about it here. It is great to see at least one significant politician is displaying some leadership about this crisis that we are in the early stages of living through.