From Where I Sit: Thoughts From the Beach

When afforded the opportunity to sit on a beach for a few days, I feel a certain sense of obligation to “think big thoughts”. We need big thoughts. Big ideas. Especially in digital media. Although these aren’t really “big ideas”, they are the ones that came to me with my toes in the sand. I wanted to share them for comment.

I put them into two categories – Incremental and Disruptive. The latter types are bigger than the former. This is just a start. More to come as I get them out of my head and onto the blog.

Incremental

Portable personal video chat
Clearly video ichat is a game-changer. When our iphones, blackberries and smartphones are video IMing with each other, the world gets smaller (or, flatter in Thomas Friedman speak). Our shared experiences become more potent and vivid. Video blogging, already on the rise, explodes with first-person dispatches from the four corners. We will consume this content on our mobile devices in near real-time, alerted to its presence by our video Facebook feed. A friend alerted me to an Apple patent filing which creates a camera as part of the pixels in an LCD screen; an electro-sensing display, truly allowing us to look directly into each others’ eyes, a million miles away. This further threatens the networks, especially when I embed Google video AdSense in my video blog streams. User-generated video, particularly conversational video, is going to become massively pervasive, and that triggers lots of other needs in the video ecosystem.

Personal video indexing
As we amass lots more UGC video, this time from people in our social graph and not just impersonally on YouTube, we’re gonna need to retrieve some of it quickly. While much of it will eventually reside in the cloud, a bunch won’t. Tagging alone won’t allow for easy enough retreival when I need to bring up the video chat session when my VP of marketing walked me through the October churn deep-dive. We’ll need desktop video indexing to transcribe the audio, create relevant video picons, and present it in a fresh video coverflow. iTunes’ spreadsheet presentation doesn’t work for video browsing and retrieval.

Disruptive

Personal compresensive health metering
Its happening. We are taking a more active role in the observation, maintenance and monitoring of our heath, nutrition and fitness. We need a combination of that new device which passively monitors our sleeping and exercise patterns (FitBit), a daily life event journal (what we ate, injuries), and our medical records. This potent combination, stored in the cloud and accessed and updated by whatever communication device we may be near, is a linchpin of bringing down costs in our over-burdened heath care system. Lots of IT is necessary to pull this off. Lots of APIs and data standards. Its a big idea. Its not my own, per se. Lots of smarter people are thinking about it and working on various pieces of it. But you can see lots of smaller pieces where entrepreneurs are needed; will we log-in on the web-connected treadmill before we start our workout?