PJA Blog: The Complex Brand

The Ides of March — it must be…conference season.

We are, as you have been hearing since 1980, in a year of disruption. A very long year. Out of disruption comes, of course, opportunity. As long as you’re on the right side of it.

Here’s what I learned on one little conference tour of duty. Some of the pieces follow. You can make a lifelike reality or revel in the bricolage.

• Google is erecting a 30-acre server complex, sited on the Oregon coast to be proximate to cheap power and to the Pacific Crossing high-speed cable network
• British Telecom’s new 21CN central switching office contains a giant world Ethernet network that has eliminated 100,000 network elements
• Long Beach airport recently mocked a terrorist attack and used Packethop mobile mesh networking to create an instant video-capable communications network where none existed before (and they got the terrorist; nice that we can at least do it in simulations)
• In China, Wal-mart has 73 stores and 36,000 employees, but acts predominantly as IT supplier since most of the goods come from, you guessed it, China
• CDC has an office in Second Life, as does Reuters and BBC, which holds concerts in it. And you can take off your clothes and not even get harassed

All of these realities are about high-energy intersections among the worlds of IT (a $1.2 trillion industry), telecom (a $1.3 trillion industry), content (a $1 trillion industry) and business services (a $213 billion industry). A few of the high-energy intersections create markets such as IP TV, Business Process Outsourcing, Gaming, VoIP, RFID, etc. It is these markets where IT has a double-digit growth path to 2010. In general IT, a sluggish 5 to 6%.

Other interesting sound bytes:
• In 2006, we captured, created and shared 160 exabytes (1 exabtye = 1 billion gigabytes). In 2010, we will capture, create and share 645 exabytes.
• 70% of this information will be consumer generated, 85% will incur enterprise responsibility, and 90% of it will be unstructured
• The real device explosion over the next 3 years will be phones and camera phones, not computers (although phones are becoming computers, so never mind)
• USB computing (flash drives with software that plug into screens) are set for huge growth
• Internet commerce will hit $10 trillion by 2010
• IT is moving into the direct line of company revenue, service and customer experience, and will reach customers through the company IT ecosystem, which is rapidly becoming a large interconnected social network. Oh, and IT will become more of a strategic partner (see 1980 comment above).

And what are social networks? Try this one: “A social structure made up of online nodes that are either individuals or organizations.” (For this I got a free pass?)

And possibly the most interesting factoid, which was really an aside:
• Eyes process information at 1 gigabyte a second
• Ears process information at 1.544 megabytes a second (T1 speed)

Next time someone’s not getting your point, you’ve got a great comeuppance: “Your ears are like, so T1.” No wonder we can better leverage the screen with better UIs: we’re wired and hired (we struggle and juggle) to create more immersive, more compelling online experiences. Unlike this government memo I’m typing. Just check back in 2010. It’ll be so disruptive you won’t know what to think.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 19th, 2007 at 10:35 am and is filed under Branding, Interactive, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.