Big Marketing:
Tech guru Ken Nickerson, who convinced Microsoft to buy Hotmail when he was the GM for MSN in Canada, shares his take on technological and other business trends that are creating the most opportunities to launch new companies:
Work as Play: With the vast improvements in computer processing and communications, more and more work could become ‘play.’ We’re seeing this already with the U.S. military using next-generation unmanned aerial drones controlled with Game Boy-like interfaces. And this trend will almost certainly spread beyond warfare. It’ll filter its way down to other environments with massive volumes of data, such as business in terms of stock analysis, or medical searching for tumors or skin damage from melanoma. ‘Workers’ will fly over the data, zooming in and out to investigate the possibilities. This work could slip out of the hands of the expert and be passed on to legions of piece workers diligently searching for the ‘win.’ It may even be possible to embed this work within actual games. This would be not unlike the way SETI [a project that harnesses the collective processing power of five million computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence] has done with massive parallel-computing environments running on our screen savers over the past few years.
Personalization or ‘myPoding’: There is so much ‘media’ that we will become very specific in choosing our media to order, like Meg Ryan did in ‘When Harry Met Sally’ [when she placed a hilariously detailed meal order in a restaurant]. We will expect services to be personalized because it saves time, although at the risk of giving up more personal data. ‘Mixes,’ movies, reads, RSS feeds, news, portals and such will spoil us. And this will accelerate as all business portals and so on start offering a high degree of tailoring.
Green Products: Everyone is trending from being concerned about the environment to actually acting on that concern. Business and product designers are accelerating this, because they are beginning to see that going green can bring in the green, as people are willing to spend a little more to help save the world.
It only grows where people have attained a level of wealth where they can afford to do it. If you’re barely making rent and having troubles of your own, it’s harder to think more broadly than that—not to say people don’t do that, just that it would be harder. But the folks I know that drive Priuses can certainly afford more, so they’ve made a conscious choice. In the Western world, there are people who are willing to pay more to reduce their footprint. And outside the Western world, there are some interesting indicators, such as that there’s lots of work being done on electric vehicles for India, and in China they’re looking to gasify coal.
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