I just returned from a week in Lisbon, Portugal at the IPN Global Spring Meeting. IPN Global is a group of member companies in the print and graphic communication industry. IPN believes in global business through global friendship. For this meeting, I was asked to present to the group. I developed a presentation called “Technologies that are Transforming Print Today.”
The main message I tried to convey is that the media business is undergoing a dramatic shift, or is at an inflection point. The Internet, or more broadly, communications technologies, is changing the entirety of the media landscape. Print communications are as dramatically affected as all other media, from TV and radio, to the underlying audio and video, from telephony and mail to online collaboration and freely available user generated content. Hopefully the information and insight I presented aids IPN members in planning to help their organizations excel in this changing environment.
A big part of the IPN meeting is the visit to different cities around the world. In this case, we paid a visit to Lisbon (Lisboa) Portugal. What a great place to visit! If you are like me, you really do not know very much about Portugal. It is not a large country, but it is a beautiful one, in many ways. I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed the people… and the food!
To get ready for this trip, I spent considerable time over the last few months thinking about how to categorize technology trends and to encapsulate them into a groups of technologies that I feel dramatically affect the traditional print communication vendors. In many ways, they affect all companies. In some ways they offer specific challenges and opportunities to printers and their customers. I will be elaborating on these areas over the next several blog posts. Here is a synopsis of these topics.
Internet broadband is the lifeblood of all of the technologies we are talking about. The ability for people to connect whenever, wherever is a huge change for the human species. Soon almost one third of humanity will be connected through the Internet. Many of these poeple will be connecting through wireless devices. How does this change the media landscape?
We are closing in on twenty years since the creation of the World Wide Web and forty years since the core innovations that are the Internet. In the last ten years however, these technologies have spurred the digitization of virtually everything. So with such huge volumes of information, how does one manage them? CMS and DAM systems are available for this and they are impacting the way media is managed and deployed.
When I first saw XML described about twelve years ago, I said “Wow, this changes everything.” That statement has come true. XML tools are synonymous with modern programming environments. Now the ability to store content as XML and automatically format content for targeted media and channels is easy. How does this change your business model?
Just fifteen years ago, the standard of encyclopedias was being seriously challenged by an upstart from Microsoft called Encarta. Access to soft information online as opposed to hardbound books changed the business model of those like Encyclopedia Britannica. A few years ago Wikipedia changed the business again. This time the change was to allow crowds of people to collaborate of the content. Recently Microsoft permanently shelved Encarta. Will this happen to your business? How do you compete with free?
As people can now freely collaborate and humans being social beings, is it a surprise that the rise of social networking is an enormous phenomenon? How do you think this changes media? How does it change marketing? How does it affect your business?
Earlier this year, some academics tried to establish the carbon footprint of a Google search. Google said that they were not even close. Large online services such as Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Salesforce.com and MSN have been on the forefront of very large data centers, distributed processing, and virtual systems. Taken together, they create tremendous computing capacity and vendors have begun offering generic computing resources for sale to others. The Cloud Computing vendors can deliver access to vast, scaleable, low-cost resources. In response to the questions about their carbon footprint, Google opened their doors to show how their data centers work. The high efficiency clouds deliver computing power at about one tenth of the electricity and equipment costs of traditional data centers. Is there any doubt that this will impact your business?
Over the weeks to come, I will dive into each of the areas more deeply. I will try to explain how Trekk sees these technologies impact media, communications, marketing and our business. Please let me know what you think. Collaboration is the key to sucess!
Posted by JA Stewart at 04/28/2009 11:58:13 AM |
