There are a lot of good conferences — Supernova is one of the best. This year was the second time I have made the trip to San Francisco to attend. There were roughly 250 technologists, investors, business leaders and media who came together to network, share ideas, and explore the business impacts of many key innovations.
Supernova focuses on the decentralization of computing, communications, digital media, and business. (See the full agenda and the participants here). There are so many exciting things happening in these areas — distributed e-commerce, mobile applications, the power of the "long tail" in commerce and media, massively multi-player virtual worlds, business blogging, the video Internet, and voice over IP applications, just to name a few. It is hard to summarize. I will comment on the panel that I moderated and then highlight the four subject areas of the conference that I thought were most significant.
Something new at Supernova this year was the Wharton West Workshops and Technology Showcase — a day targeted at technologists and business professionals, and held at the state-of-the-art Wharton West facility. The panel I moderated was called "Connected Work" and the participants included Tom Ngo & Cydni Tetro from NextPage and Greg Lloyd from Traction Software. We had a far reaching discussion with the audience about how blogging and on-line information management can help users get a grip on managing structured and unstructured information, documents, and processes in order to make their jobs easier. A lot of the dialogue was about how blogging can become an effective enterprise communications tool.
There were many interesting people and topics at Supernova. I have summarized the four things I would say were most significant.
Microformats
Microformats may soon change the world. Check out Smashing Magazine for some good links on the subject. The basic idea is to create standard ways to share specific kinds of content. There are many examples but some key ones include calendar entries, contact information, geographical coordinates, and reviews. Each of these would have simple machine readable and people readable formats. There have been many attempts at this problem over the years but usually they focused on machine readable formats that were so complicated that people could not read them let alone use them. Microformats are taking a much simpler and more people-oriented approach — I believe this will become profound. Think of reviews. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a standard way to describe a concert, restaurant, new iPod or other product, music, recipe, geocache, cruise, etc. I think this is a big deal. Take a look at microformats.org for much more.
The Long Tail
Chris Anderson from Wired talked passionately about how the Internet makes it possible to exploit the “niche” portion of the distribution curve for products, services, and content — which turns out to be even bigger than the big “hits” that sellers have traditionally emphasized. Chris says to forget about squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment, he says, is in the millions of niche markets at the “shallow end of the bitstream”. See Chris’s “The Long Tail” story here.
Gaming
Gaming is getting to be really serious stuff. A professor from Stanford gave a presentation about why games are fun. It was a deep discussion about how the brain works. Researchers are looking at ways to apply gaming ideas and apply them to business. Could work actually be performed as part of playing a game? No kidding. One company has actually designed a call center around a popular multi-player on-line game. Gaming may also have implications for how recruiting and collaboration are done. Some of the speakers sounded the way some of us talked about the Internet a dozen years ago. They said that gaming is as important as TV, as big as film, the game world is the world, and that “everybody” is a gamer or will be. No doubt about it, over the past few years there has been a huge increase in momentum toward gaming. Gaming has a very real impact on our brains. Games know more about interacting with complex data sets than the best web sites of today. One speaker said that “if you aren’t a gamer you are a dinosaur”. Gaming is an everyday part of many millions of peoples lives. Hardcore gamers are 14-34 and are early adopters of new technology. Definitely revolutionary. There was considerable discussion about whether games are good for children. The consensus was that games are good at teaching kids about economics and other aspects of how the world works.
Jane McGonigal from 42 Entertainment & UC Berkely talked about “SuperGaming”. Jane’s vocabulary had very few words with less than four syllables. Massively multi-player games for use in sharing real-world environments. See janemcgonigal.com for some examples. The games she described are taking place in real social environments — no avatars — offline, not online. You can be “more or less” yourself. SuperGaming is social networking that uses shared rule sets that govern action and interaction. There is a known, common goal and a clear “win condition”. Supergaming leverages synchronized, playful behaviors. The SuperGames use PDA’s, cell phones, GPS, digital cameras, blogs, wikis, tagging software, and a dozen or so other things. Cultural trends are joining forces as part of SuperGaming. For example, smart mobs and live action role playing may intersect. Jane considers herself to be an historian of contemporary network behavior. Her vocabulary was close to Greek to most of the audience, but clearly what she had to say is a key part of the future.
The Genographic Project
Explore your own genetic journey — find out what part of the world your ancestors were from. Discover a DNA analysis that includes a depiction of your ancient ancestors and an interactive map tracing your genetic lineage around the world and through the ages. That is why the National Geographic Society, IBM, geneticist Spencer Wells, and the Waitt Family Foundation have launched the Genographic Project. The five-year effort aims to understand the human journey—where we came from and how we got to where we live today. This unprecedented effort will map humanity’s genetic journey through the ages. There is a lot to the story and each of us can literally participate by contributing our own DNA for analysis. “The greatest history book ever written,” Wells says, “is the one hidden in our DNA.” See the project site to learn more.
