I love the Consumer Electronics Show, but not because I ever get any real work done there. I love it because I personally love consumer electronics. I love seeing high technology applied to such frivolity as portable music and theater-sized television. Sometimes I speak on a panel or something to give me an excuse to go, but really I would go for a day anyway just for fun.
A month ago we started getting emails: “Are you guys gonna be at CES? We’d like to get together there.” So anyway, now we’re going for some legitimate reasons.
A friend of mine called last week: “Hey are you gonna be at CES?” I replied, “I have never had a productive meeting at CES. There is a lot of activity, but not a lot of productivity.” I think this may be true of all tradeshows. While I have definitely had important meetings at CES, CTIA, etc., they are always over breakfast, lunch or dinner, and in the case of CTIA, at the MTV party over rap music, gin ‘n juice and hot women who may be working, but clearly not in our industry. Productivity only happens when you have focused time and attention to really do some actual work. For that, you have to fly to Overland Park or Basking Ridge or Little Rock or whatever fine part of our great nation your business takes you to.
Since that conversation with my friend, I have been thinking a lot about activity vs. productivity as it relates to our business of mobile social networking. Mobile applications in general either:
A) Save time (this is productivity, like email) or
B) Waste time (this is activity, as in games and moporn)
Much of the mobile communication experience is about filling holes in your schedule with activity or productivity. When you are next on some form of public transportation, look around at the people either thumbing away on their blackberries or scrolling through their music lists.
The best mobile applications both save time AND waste time. As a result, they evolve the personal communication experience itself. Social networking is the biggest opportunity in the mobile space because it is as much about productivity as it is about activity. From an adult using Linked-In to a college kid using MySpace and at every point in between, social networking can be made more available and more immediate in the mobile space. It is already an important trend and we have not even seen the tip of the iceberg yet.
I assume the detractors who are banning social networks from school campuses see the activity part of the equation clearly, but perhaps not the productivity part. Would it be at all useful to engage political science students by using the MySpace/MTV presidential debates as a teaching tool? I think so.
I further assume these are the same people who propose banning mobile phones from school campuses. While it is true that mobile phones and social networking sites can be used together to waste a great deal of time, (which is not a bad thing, depending) it is equally true that they can be used together to greatly enhance productivity.
Email is a massively productive tool, but it also facilitates an even greater volume of spam. Does that make it any less of a tool? No. In fact, it makes it more of a tool, because it feels more like a communication platform than a rigidly verticalized application. We are simply seeing an evolution of personal communication. In three years, mobile phones will have built-in social communication capabilities as ubiquitously as they have cameras today.
This is going to be a big year for Intercasting Corp. We will be building on our momentum, which last year focused on distribution, to evolve the native personal communication experience. We have some exciting projects currently under development that will present the next layer of value of the ANTHEM platform. As those happen, I will discuss them here. Also, we have several more high-profile SNS partners integrating now, a new UI, and a long list of carrier deployments, all of which we will be announcing over the next several months.