The gathering this morning at 101 Park Avenue in New York was called the CEBiz Conference: E-ruptions Nobody Heard. It was organized by The Columbia Center for Excellence in E-Business (CEBiz) and sponsored in part by Booz Allen Hamilton. The conference was focused on marketing and consumer issues but technology played a large role in the discussions. There were three panels.
The first panel focused on "networks" with a lot of discussion about blogging, music sharing, social networking of various kinds, and of course the long tail. Panelist Hank Barry, former ceo of Napster, had a really good way of explaining the impact of the Internet on markets. He explained micro-markets by using the example of a merchant who sells Manchurian hamster supplies. Such a merchant can not afford mass media and perhaps can not afford any traditional marketing. However, by purchasing Google AdWords, any of the handful of people in the world interested in Manchurian hamster supplies and searching on Google will find the merchant’s store.
The second panel focused exclusively on Voice over IP (VoIP). There are many stories here at patrickWeb about this topic. (See the Internet technology category). Since a recent survey showed that 47% of the respondents had never heard of it VoIP and 20% thought it was a hybrid European car, you can tell it is still relatively new — even though it has been around for more than a decade. The fact that eBay paid $2.6 Billion for Skype, a European startup that offers VoIP to fifty million or so customers, tells you there must be something very real going on. There are a billion traditional phone lines out there and they will co-exist with VoIP for a long time, but the billion lines will undergo a constant reduction. Every day people are switching to either VoIP or to a cell phone. If this sounds strange just talk to kids and young adults — they start their careers, get their first apartment, and they don’t even consider the idea of calling a phone company to install a “line”. Tom Kershaw from VeriSign made the important point that people don’t buy technology, they buy services. VoIP is a service that allows people to talk to friends, family, and colleagues using the Internet.
The last panel, "Empowering Consumers; Undiscovered Opportunities" was moderated by Randy Rothenberg, Senior Director, Intellectual Capital, Booz Allen Hamilton. Three of us did our best to discuss key marketing issues from our perspective. Katherine Bagin, Vice President, IP Communications, AT&T was enthusiastic about how VoIP is changing the world and she emphasized that understanding the real needs and wants of consumers was the key. Eric Johnson, Norman Eig Professor of Business and Director, Center on Excellence in E-Business, Columbia University focused on "defaults" and showed examples of how the layout and sequence of steps on web sites can influence what people buy and how much they spend. I suggested that we are five percent of the way into what the Internet has in store for us and referred a recent essay I wrote about "The Bubble". As for the "next big things", I suggested that blogging and podcasting continue to be underestimated, that healthcare is about to change dramatically as people demand personal health records, and that geocaching is an example of a coming explosion in geographic based data. All three of these are areas written about here with much more to come.