Rji-chaos

"Business, Technology and the Media: Charting a Course Through Chaos"

Running notes from Bill Densmore from the two-day symposium, "Business, Technology and the Media: Charting a Course Through Chaos," at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute, Missouri School of Journalism. There may be some typos in the moment, which we'll go back and correct later so consider this a work in progress! Also, there's a CoverItLive blog stream underway: WATCH LIVE VIDEO STREAM AND LIVE BLOG

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This week's event is an initiative of the interdisciplinary Center for the Digital Globe (CDiG), the Alfred Friendly Foundation and the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI). It involves about 50 international industry leaders in media, technology and business. The idea is to create new business models and it's organized by Randy Smith, Donald W. Reynolds Chair of Business Journalism. Among participants: Mark VandenBrink, vice president of technology solutions for Samsung America; Beth Polish, senior vice president of Hearst Corporate Innovation; Ochieng Rapuro, managing editor of Kenya^Ys Business Daily newspaper; Jim Kennedy, vice president of strategy for The Associated Press; Vin Capone, development executive for Apple; Beth Keck, senior director for WalMart; Jin-Yong Park, assistant editor for Hankook-Ilbo (The Korea Times)and Phil Aucutt, managing partner for WR Holdings and president of Junit, LLC. (For a full list visit http://www.rjionline.org/cdig )

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OPEN: Samsung exec overviews mobile growth: "A Live Look at 2040"

We're going for two full days on Monday, March 15 and Tuesday, March 16 (2010) here in Columbia, Mo. Getting us started this morning is Mark Vanden Brink, vp of technology solutions for the wireless terminals division of Samsung Telecommunciations America.

Social networking is becoming personal broadcasting, says Vanden Brink. He is sowing charts about the meteoric increase in video treams and viewing time on Facebook among its 400 million users. From August through October 2009, video usage on Facebook shot up 840% in the mobile market -- views via mobile. He calls this an "exaflood" of data on mobile. Mobile data traffic reached one exabyte/month at a rate twice as fast as fixed lines. "We're predicting that by 2013 we'll be in excess of 2 exabytes per month. We're talking the equivalent of 500 million DVDs being transmitted over the mobile data networks."

Trends shaping future mobile -- 50 megabits and micropayments from washing machines?

You now connect with colleagues via social network. he says more and more people now contact him preferentially through his social networks, rather than via mass communication. Some phones now have 12-megapixel cameras.

The other trend he identifies is "the loss of the medium." In five years, the notion of a cell phone is subsumed by the notion of the activity. "We are right now in the phase of mobile electronics and electronics in general, we talk about nouns and verbs ... what's actually happening is these things are slowly blurring together." Why do you have to have a phone for audio communciation? Vanden Brink, when you can do it over a multi-function device. Your social stream will augment your reality, he says.

Unbiquitous and high-speed connectivity is cited as another trend. He says it is no longer true that other countries are way ahead of the United States on high-speed wireless technology. He says there are 25 U.S. metros that now have so-called "4G" technology available. In his hotel in Columbia, Mo., now he was getting 3.5 megabits per second (Densmore note: That's fairly typical "high-speed" Internet in the United States now). He says 4G technology has a theoretical bandwidth for a download of about 50 megabits per second. He says the opening up of 4G networks for video transmission will free up bandwidth on the current 2G and 3G networks. It will make it possible to embed wireless chips in all kinds of devices -- vending machines, appliances -- "literally every device from dryers, refrigerators," says Samsung's Vanden Brink. "Is there a way to have a recurring revenue stream for a washer or dryer," he asks. "Those are the kind of thinks that are being bandied about by the industry."

Vanden Brink now talks about "pico projectors" which may be everywhere, able to display on walls or tables. He also mentions plastic paper, work making displays flexible. "The big thing to take away is what you look at today -- the idea of the device having a display, that will start to go away, the device will be able to display on other things and use other technologies," says Vanden Brink. He wraps up with a short video showing the use of plastic displays and augmented reality. "You really didn't see a computer in that anywhere, or a cellphone, you saw people interacting with any device that happened to be nearby . . . that type of technology is what we are talking about."

How does this affect journalism and news?

Vanden Brink says news is becomming more than text, even more than multimedia. It will be a dynamically aggregated and annotated "bundle" based on the individual that is:

• Medium independent
• Not time or channel specific, but relevance (context based)
• A multi-way conversation rather than a monologue

"People are expecting to have this time shift, to have news on their own time .... it is becoming context and relevance specific."

Q&A starts: Where does privacy kick in?

RJI Fellow Michael Skoler asks where privacy fits in with all this. How do people want to interact?

Vanden Brink: He says there are times when we don't want to have all our life scenes publicized. "YOu may not want the story to follow you in the car, it may be something you want to control that is contextual and relevant to you." He acknowledges a fear of loss of privacy.

Jim Kenedy of The AP note: "What you don't think about is how much control can be built into the devices, into the cloud and actually you'll have more privacy, more control than you do now."

Clyde Bentley, another RJI fellow and professor at the Missouri School of Journalism notes TV series called "Caprica" (spelling?) which he says is very dark. "I wonder if the hardware companies will take a role in the new ethics and appropriateness of the technology."

"You know, I don't know the answer to that," says Vanden Brink. "People in the cloud, I know struggle with that, what are the ethics, what are they responsible for .... for (Samsung) our primary focus will be to enable enterprise-type controls, we'll supply the mechanism, I don't think that it is incumbent on any hardware manufacturer to do policy .... personally I think it is bgoing to be a family-type decision . . . the policy is probably going to have to come from someone else."

Keith Politte, a technologist at the Reynolds Journalism Institute, asks what the role of the journalism or industry to prototype new embedded chips for enabling acquisition of information and relationships?

Greg Moore of the Kansas City Star piggybacks off a question that Alfred Friendly, who asked about adoption of news technology in underdeveloped countries. Moore asks about vision-impaired people, such as the elderly. Vanden Brink says the gap between early adopters and technology going mass market is getting shorter and shorter. He says access issues such as sight tend to be device-dependent.

Comparing Samsung's $5B R&D budget to the news industry's?

Larry Daily, journalism professor at the University of Nevada-Reno says Samsung has an impressive R&D budget. In 2007 it was more than $5 billion. He wonders how does that compare to the entire news industry's R&D budget "and what observations would you make about that?"

Vanden Brink says he doesn't have any information about that. There is no followup.

He talks about what's going on on the server side and the cloud. It's a question of how you structure metadata. There are some cameras they are looking at wondering what kind of geotagging should be included -- what devices are around you. There is a notion of documenting formats that is important. Device formats he thinks will take care of themselves.

How is Samsung tackling the problem of technological waste, when products become obsolete and are upgraded, asks Maria Garcia, a journalism doctoral student? How does Samsung tackle getting rid of the old projects? Vanden Brink says the Samsung website has a ton of information about this; they are launching a recyling effort; he also things technology may be able to upgrade and renew the live of some older devices.

PANEL: Predicting the Consumer of Tomorrow

Advertising agency executive and RJI fellow Stephanie Padgett is now leading a discussion among three futurists: Beth Polish (head of innovation for the Hearst Corp.), Beth Keck who heads sustainability programs for WalMart, Stephanie Durand (media-development consultant at the United Nations) and Lucas Welch, founder and chief innovatin officer for Soliya.

News will be divorced from paper, Hearst exec says

"I feel a bit like a wuss, I am about to be asking you guys questions," says Polish, the Hearst futurist. She jokes that she was an anthropology expert in college and now she feels as if that major, which seemed to have nothing to do with media or business, is now mainstream. She think news will be fully divorced from paper in the future. "I know that is heretical considering where I work," she says.

She did focus groups this summer with college students. They weren't worried about whether what the heard on Twitter about the latest war was factual, that the community would police itself. "It changes the difference between who's the consumer and who is the producer, I think we are all going to be both in the future, we are all going to be able to produce all our content and be able to consume it, too." You can now capture the information you want and edit it.

"We talked about privacy, but we haven't talked about expectations. This ability to get information anywhere changes the expectations of the people we interact with. If you are at work, you can be reached at anytime . . . what is our expectation as to how quickly we get information . . . and how quickly we respond to it . . . I am really unnerved by the expectation of leading what is my personal life, what is my professional .... if I have a Twitter following, is that my company's is it mine?"

Beth Keck talks about her role at WalMart. "We embraced sustainability five years ago." Big goals: Operate with zero waste and 100% renewable energy. WalMart customers are predominantly women and it is a diverse base across U.S., Mexico, China, India. Many of them are emerging into the middle class. In 40 years the planet will go from 6 billion to 9 billion people. That drives their sustainability business thinking, as do climate change and water. In Mexico City, some of WalMart's clients she works with don't have water 24 hours a day.

"We also see a rise in consumer responsibility," says Keck. She says one study finds 90 percent of Americans understand the importance of sustainability, but 25 percent don't think they can make a difference. Another big trend they see is that their customers have more connectivity -- she is looking for products from many channels. "We basically are focused on innovation in our business and innovation in our supply chain," she says. They are looking for a simple way to communicate the environmental and sustainability of the products they are buying. They are trying to do this through their supply chain communication and efficiency in that chain.