The future is not real time, it’s written down
September 25, 2008
This blog site was a way for me to research, discover, record and share my findings on what was a very new subject, way back when. Unified Communications.
But what I discovered earlier this year was:
- There is no real business case for real time Unified Communications, even the best of it, - although there certainly is for Communication Enabled Business Processes.
- The (blog) medium turned out more interesting than the message.
Of course, I wasn’t to understand this until recently, but I had started off in the wrong direction.
The problem with real time communication, is that time is getting more scarce. Tools that promote more and easier ‘real time’ communication have this innate problem that more often than not, the call is not as productive as what you can achieve by writing stuff down instead. Interruption is not scalable.
I should have realised the lessons of the printing press much earlier.
The ability to research, (re - search), discover, record and share - is vastly better when things are ‘written down’ (even video has tags and descriptions these days).Non real time is just fantastically efficient. A one to many technology.
I didn’t waste the effort, as website blogging and software based communications has opened up a hugely rewarding and productive environment for me, my friends and colleagues. I’ll still be writing here about these things, but it will be focussed on the web.
The affluent are wired
September 17, 2008
Someone said recently - I can’t remember who it was - that in this age of credit crunch the 50+ age group are still spending money, they can afford it.
So, I saw a piece on behavioural insider (signup required, if you don’t like copious emails, don’t bother!) about market profiling. The upshot is that older more affluent people are more likely to be using the internet more of the time. Excerpt below.
The rich are different. Not only do they have more money, but they are simply more wired than the rest of us. While marketers chase youthful demos as the natural target for digital goods and interactive advertising, they may be missing the real sweet spot: the wired affluent. A standout insight from the 32nd iteration of the Mendelsohn Affluent Survey is how the 23.3 million households making $100,000 and up (19% of U.S. adults) are deeply committed to digital media. For example, while less than 20% of all cell phone subscribers use their mobile devices to access the Internet, 40% of these affluents do. Even more striking is how that share escalates quickly to 57% of those making $250,000 and above.
Better be marketing to them in their preferred environment then?