In advance of a half-day brainstorming session on all things digital, I have spent some time thinking about what the future holds the average consumer of data.
I want to know now: Real-time Data
The expectation for most people going forward will be that data is free (as in beer). Between the open source movement, citizen journalism, and the NY Times paywall coming down, consumers have learned to expect their information for free. Rightly or wrongly, the perception is here to stay.
Look to the rise of BNO (Breaking News Online) and their new iPhone app to foreshadow at least one future revenue model. For $1 a month, one may receive push updates of breaking news from the BNO network. Reuters, but on meth. Trading firms have long been willing to pay for up-to-the-minute news feeds (the best known example is Bloomberg), and we’ll see the same pattern filter into consumer and business information services. Though, surely at prices well below the average Bloomberg terminal. Technology advances like Pubsubhub and Gnip are only going to accelerate this pattern.
Help me cut through all the noise: Human powered filtering, aggregation & analysis
More data = more noise. People have been struggling with this since fifteen minutes after the first email was sent. As we have all noticed over the past year, the exponential growth of noise has only gotten worse. Unfortunately, the technology tools to manage the noise are still in their infancy and out of the reach of most casual information consumers. To be clear – the technology tools and habits still have too steep a learning curve for most casual consumers.
Most people are willing to pay for other people to do difficult (or unpleasant) tasks for them. The two minute nightly news segment is just waiting to be reborn for the latest generation of information consumers. The best pieces of content will be the short, impactful ones that summarize and analyze a broad breadth of real-time data. The biggest difference between traditional information produces and modern day content will be the 1) expected speed to production and 2) the delivery formats.
Neither of these ideas is all that contrarian. Each is simply a pattern repeated from prior advances information processing. The telegraph, the radio, and the television all gave rise to similar products based on these patterns. The trick to figure out for this latest round of technological advancement is the packaging.
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