Notes from last night’s Christmas event from Chinwag:

A personal favourite of Chinwag’s regular events in London’s west end. Looking into the crystal ball to predict how we will all use the internet, and our habits around on-line life in 2013.

The evening started off with Sam Michel in a santa hat, announcing a few formalities. With the host Richard Titus summarising whether the long tail will be applicable in 2009 where free services will survive against paid services. This subject wasn’t really covered in detail, and not even any brands like ‘Google’ were mentioned as the analysis or predictions on future technologies were not that detailed.

The three main topics from the speakers were:

1. Mobile
2. Data portability / Interoperability
3. Personalised usage of the web

List of Speakers:

Jonathan Mitchener – Futurologist and Principal Research Scientist, Devices, BT
Simon Collister – Head of Digital – Consumer Practice, Weber Shandwick
Jamie Coomber – Head of Digital Strategy, Profero
Neville Hobson – Communicator; Blogger; Podcaster, NevilleHobson.com
Richard Titus – Head of User Experience, BBC Future Media and Technology
Ewan MacLeod – Editor, mobileindustryreview.com

MOBILE – The first question came onto the subject of mobile – how do you expect to use mobile?

“A gadget in your pocket that can tell you anything you want to know”
” Be able to send flowers in 3 clicks from your handset”
“Check which friends are online”

“The mobile is the first internet experience for many handset owners in India. There is a deeper penetration of the internet using mobile than desktop in this country”.

Fact: 306 Million mobile users in India 2008, with 610 million in 2012.

The desire’s of people accessing mobile are increasing, but can the infrastructure cope with this demand? Need to be sure before the ‘flood gates’ open and the innovation increases.

The subject of mobile Commerce came up as the last point of this topic which could have gone on all night, and at some points looked like it was going to.

“Can we buy something with a phone in 2013, like a can of coke? and can we use it like a prepaid oyster card?”

Will we have monetary payment using mobile, everyone nodded and the general consensus was a big ‘yes please’.

Monetary payment is happening in Africa, where farmers are being innovative by using phone as a way of not only improving their lives, but doing business. Farmers can text a service which will reply back with the current grain price on market day. Farmers can choose when to sell, when the price is right.

Women in Africa are communicating with other businesses such as butchers, they can text ’save me some meat, I am arriving to pick it up today’.

So it looks like in what we thought we developing nations, that mobile is changing the lives of these people that we can’t believe.

EASE OF USE

‘If you make it easy for people to use, they will use it’

Whether a web tool or application is open source or not isn’t seen as a factor as to whether you use it or not. People on the street won’t care what it is. It’s down to usability – whether they can use it or not.

DATA PORTABILITY

We are waiting for data portability, where you can join a new social network and take your friends with you. ‘By 2013, we bloody well hope this can happen’. Will Google’s Opensocial solve this? We don’t know yet.

It’s not a technology thing, we just just need to get companies to speak and work with each other. ‘That’s the hardest part of it’. ‘Standards yet to be agreed’.

PERSONALISED ‘ON DEMAND’ USAGE

In 2013 we will be strongly focused on ‘bringing real life conversations together’, feel that we do this already but processes to do this will obviously get ’smarter’.

With all this new technology we will ‘pay money’ not to be connected, where places guarantee there is no wireless broadband.

To be able to turn off the noise, and be able to filter out the good stuff, content you require.

The work / life integration – How do we deal with life on the web and using applications that cross the work / life mix. These boundaries are becoming more blurred on a daily basis.

The topic of ‘constant partial attention’ was described as being a factor for internet usage, where you are able to consume and tap into different avenues of your online life.

eg: facebook – friends, plaxo – address book, and linked.com – your business contacts.

Leading to be able to make sensible choices on who we can connect with and when.

All in all, some thought provoking comments from a very diverse panel. A good night, some nice people met and a good chance to catch up with what is happening in the big smoke.

Merry Christmas Chinwagger’s!

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