Changing technology, and what it doesn’t change

You may have already seen this clip of Pattie Maes unveiling the “sixth sense” wearable technology at TED. If not, I recommend checking it out.

This clip, along with a great post by Steve Rubel about Open Web, has me thinking about what the future holds for technology, and how different organizations might be able to capitalize on it. Seems to me that Pattie’s talk and Steve’s post more or less point to the same trends:

1. Accessibility: easy (and hopefully inexpensive) access from anywhere, on any device
2. Relevance: constant and effortless access to relevant information (much of it ‘user-generated’)

The first trend is facilitated in part by the complete separation of content from device. Right now—like most people my age, I imagine—I have music on old cassettes, CDs, an old desktop, my new laptop, an iPod, and so on. While a lot of it overlaps, I know that I’m ‘leaking’ music each time I switch to a new medium or device. I’m looking forward to buying a song and knowing that I can easily play it at home, at work, in my car, or at the gym without worrying about transferring it from device to device. I’ll simply own the content, and it will be device agnostic. The same will be true of other content, entertainment and otherwise. We’re getting there, but it’s not perfect yet.

The second trend is all about transparency—or at least selective transparency—in software and elsewhere, which allows for open innovation, combined capabilities (e.g., Google Maps mashups), and hopefully ’smarter’ algorithms. As Steve explains, bookstores will know to provide book reviews from my friends and from people with similar tastes (and no, I won’t have to explain to the store/site who my friends are through some proprietary social network they’ve created). Of course, a lot of this is already happening, but there is a lot of room for improvement.

The only sticking point for me in Steve’s post is with this sentence: “Marketers need to really embrace the fact that it’s peers and their data, rather than brand, that will become the primary way we make decisions.” This seems like a chicken and the egg assertion—won’t our peers’ experiences with a brand, and therefore their impressions of that brand, impact their ‘data’? If he’s just saying that organizations need to be aware of the shifts from proprietary and ‘one-way’ to open and conversational, I agree completely.

But beyond that, I hope these posts will remind organizations how fleeting these innovations are, and that, to a great extent, it’s still more about whether you have anything beneficial to offer or interesting to say than whether people encounter it in a newspaper, via Twitter, or projected onto a roll of toilet paper (see the video above). It’s a bit ironic, but organizations hoping to prepare themselves for cutting edge technologies would be well served by focusing on the offline parts first—the quality of the offering and the potency of the message.