The hardware may be dazzling, but it won’t make any difference if our intellectual product, and that of other reputable companies, isn’t right. If you are to be truly successful, you’ll be marketing, promoting and publicizing programs with inherent quality.
This is what will happen: Multiple overlapping of remotely located personalities … Pretty soon, we’ll have dozens of alters wandering the electronic hallways, meeting other alters, while we wait … The alters ultimately will report back to us about the things they’ve seen, other alters they’ve spoken to, the fun they’ve had. Later, maybe they won’t report back to us anymore.
The money to be made is in the blades, not the razors … What I am talking about is information about information, and the processes by which we filter the onslaught of bits. The computer industry’s blades may not only be modeled after Bambi or Tetris. Instead, I see a huge market in the agent business, modeled more after the added value of an English butler or the Librarian of Congress. Yes, making and owning the bits is certainly better than simply carrying, storing, or churning them. But there may be another bit business: understanding the bits. So far, in the theater of Wall Street, the personal information filter business has only played a bit part. I assure you that it will be tomorrow’s lead role on the stage of success.
Logic suggests that if the marketers are at the helm, [interactive television] is bound to end up looking more like QVC than the Internet. Fundamentally, interactive television will serve whoever controls the switches. Today, via the ratings system, advertisers do. The history of broadcast has its own inexorable logic, a logic based on selling an audience about which progressively more can be known. The $64,000 Question is whether interactive television will reinforce that logic, taking it to the extreme of one-consumer/one-commercial, or shatter it, creating a decentralized network of citizen-broadcasters, each with his own vision of the future. The answer is television history in the making.
The Passive People Meter is straight out of a Big Brother nightmare … [it is also] a powerful computer which links the phone line, the cable line, and the TV with a broadcaster. The current, toggle-switched People Meter … can be reprogrammed at a distance by Nielsen. A more powerful model could conceivably target individual television sets for custom-tailored commercials. This is broadcast’s version of the direct-mail approach … Any vision of interactive television that preserves the ratings economy – would also preserve the current couch-potato paradigm of television watching. A video-mail system, then, is a profoundly dark take on interactive’s bright future, a betrayal of all that the technovisionaries hold dear.
Holographic Video … will be how you watch football games in the year 2010.
We have digital distribution. The next step will be virtual record companies.
There is a whole new business in confiding our profiles to a third party, which will behave like a Swiss bank … What we should be looking for is an entity which is able and willing to keep our identities confidential while at the same time passing along newsworthy advertising and information. Such services will only work with a high degree of machine learning. While it is important to postulate such learning, how does this relate to human learning?
All of us are quite comfortable with the idea that an all-knowing agent might live in our television set, pocket, or automobile. We are rightly less sanguine about the possibility of such agents living in the greater network. All we need is a bunch of tattletale or culpable computer agents. Enough butlers and maids have testified against former employers for us to realize that our most trusted agents, by definition, know the most about us.
The value of information about information can be greater than the value of the information itself. From that and other similar observations, I am willing to project an enormous new industry based on a service that helps navigate through massive amounts of data.