Wednesday, February 02, 2011

ASTD #TK11 – Opening Keynote Kara Swisher

These are my live blogged notes…

Kara Swisher – All Things Digital

What is happening now in Silicon Valley is a quantum leap – changing industries.

5 issues you need to be aware of (if you’re involved in delivery of information):

Social

  • Computers have traditionally been hard to use…
  • Google is like giant yellow pages.  Information is ever-changing
  • When you apply social tools to information, it makes it more useful
  • Quora as an example of information with social
  • Everybody becomes a producer of content (people make Facebook useful by posting pictures, text, links, etc. FB creates value because everybody is there) – producers of content are the consumer of content – so you care more about the content
  • Information is no longer controlled by gatekeepers.
  • people want to be able to move content around, shift it, recommend it.  We want to decide what we are interested in (rather than have news, hollywood etc tell us what to watch/read…)

Mobile

  • Smart phones are the way of the future
  • Google unveiling new Honeycomb system (tablet platform…)
  • iPads – sold 15 million over 9 months!
  • Move to tablet is fast and furious
  • Strength of mobility – it’s instant, you have a relationship with your mobile device…”it’s one of the best relationships I’ve ever had” – you feel it’s part of you, it’s important to you – it’s your digital identity and how you interface with the world

Geolocation

  • These devices know where you are
  • FourSquare – where you check in…
  • Using mobile devices to find each other in the physical world
  • moves the physical world and the online world in a very significant way
  • GroupOn
  • Open Table (restaurant app – hey there’s another rest closeby with open tables and here’s a 20% off coupon you can use right now)
  • Big PRIVACY implications

Open and Cloud

  • Everything is “in the cloud” – no longer attached – it’s all brought down to you
  • Smart devices don’t store things locally, you pull it down
  • Training apps will be in the cloud
  • Your browser is the operating system
  • It’s an open environment (the days of Microsoft dominance are over) – and yet FB is closed (it’s all in their cloud) – FB Connect becomes your defacto digital identity…
  • The fighting over standards in tech industry – you turn them on and they should work.  Their shouldn’t be an ongoing fight about what works and where…it should all just work.

Ubiquity/multi-touch/screens everywhere

  • You put a device down anywhere and the surface becomes a screen
  • Kids now touch computer screens to touch them – this will become the way it all works
  • power is a big issue – the number of cords for our devices – keeping things charged up

Consumer is leading everything right now. 

No more retrograde person than the CTO in a company…they don’t want these changes.  But these changes are coming.

“The Facebookization of the enterprise.”

Yammer, Socialcast, Jive, etc. – taking these tools people use in their personal lives and bringing them to workplace.

Training becomes a 24/7 things.

Future things to watch for:

  • Health care: embedded devices in people (a smart pill that you swallow)

 

  • Anticipation of needs: devices will anticipate your needs before you have them because of your past behavior
  • Mobile devices know what you’re doing now and what you do next – “a probe in your pocket”
  • It becomes a database of humanity

 

  • The rest of the world – mobile devices will change how the rest of the world can get access to information
  • The ability to change things in  a much more profound way.  Much harder for fascist governments to limit these things…

Questions from the crowd:

How do you guarantee the quality of the content when it’s all user-generated? (in an identity-based environment, you get more out of user-generated content.  People filter it, they provide good information.  The benefits far outweigh…although you do get trolls.  Once people can’t be anonymous, they stop saying bad/dumb things…)

Privacy? The password solution is completely inadequate for protecting our digital identity.  This is a huge business opportunity…we are on the cusp of a real problem.  People are getting blase about it. When you start creating digital footprints everywhere, you’re leaving footprints…

When will desktop computers be dead?  Aren’t they dead already? You’ll see screens – you plug your tablet into a screen with a keyboard…that business is over.  Even laptops are becoming tablets with screens…

2 comments:

Paul Simbeck-Hampson said...

Wonderfully insightful post, really appreciate the effort, so many of the points resonate, especially the tablet / mobile issues - guess that's why it's been a natural tendency for me to dive into QR, AR et al...

Mike Kunkle said...

Cammy, I subscribe to Learning Visions via email and sometimes I'm not timely, but I always get to reading your latest posts.

I'm not a big blog commenter, generally. I put things in my favorites, I forward good stuff to my colleagues and employees, and sometimes I share on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook. But I probably don't reach out to my favorite writers enough, and I'm trying to change that.

I've been around a long time in the training space and I'm big into real-world performance impact (which sometimes, to my chagrin, seems to take a back seat to the latest bright shiny objects). I like your blog because you share such practical advice that is still grounded in good instructional design principles. I also appreciate how often you share notes like you did in this post.

So, I just wanted to say thanks. That's part of why I made the comment the other day on Twitter, about you and another fave of mine, Cindy Huggett (who once met with a friend and I virtually to share some virtual learning tips, with once mentioning her own awesome book).

Thanks for what you do, Cammy.

Mike