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“This is why Web 2.0 , with its strong network effects and interactivity, could accelerate the growth of a global knowledge economy and stimulate the online communities necessary to practice-based fields like education and increasingly interdisciplinary scientific domains (…) that large scale value capture of knowledge, spillovers, information externalities, and consumer surplus would occur if the costs of collaboration -especially transaction costs- could be reduced.”

Amy Shuen’s “Web 2.0, A Strategy Guide“

Today’s eComm agenda is dealing with a variety of interesting topics and some heated discussions on: edge vs. cloud computing, net neutrality, underutilized wireless spectrum, and how to best enable an innovative communications environment just to name a few. In this post I am focusing on a handful of forward looking insights.

We are unequivocally headed for a world of multimedia (voice, data, content) and multimodal communication interfaces (speech, text, touch, gesture, motion). Couple that with the fact that the growing role of metadata (whether machine or user generated tags) and all kinds of tiny sensors already embedded in mobile and even wearable devices (e.g. gyroscope, accelerator, pressure, geomagnets) all of which will enable sensing and context aware networks. That is key to AR, augmented reality, applications that deliver the ultimate mashup blending real and digital worlds. As an example, see BMW’s video below.

What’s more intriguing is the fact that everything is becoming easily programmable and, therefore, subject to customization and personalization by end users themselves, who can focus on the task at hand instead of having to deal with the intricacies of coding. By the same token, M2M, machine to machine communications,  machine learning and predictive analytics enable services to continuously improve service delivery.

Some wonder if these technologies will help improve our quality of life and productivity or whether they will undermine our own skill development and, therefore, independence. While the speed and scope of today’s changes might be unprecedented, we are talking about technologies that connect people, spur and democratize knowledge and facilitate collaboration in a borderless world. However, addressing the digital divide remains an issue of concern.

See below some of the videos discussed by Microsoft and MIT at eComm.

Microsoft’s Future Vision

BMW’s Augmented Reality Concept

MIT’s Sixthsense: wearable gestural inteface

MIT’s Media Lab: Siftables

J. de Francisco – San Francisco, March 5