ReadWriteWeb.com reports Google CEO Eric Schmidt envisions a radically changed internet five years from now: dominated by Chinese-language and social media content, delivered over super-fast bandwidth in real time. Figuring out how to rank real-time social content is “the great challenge of the age,” Schmidt said in an interview in front of thousands of CIOs and IT Directors at last week’s Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Orlando 2009.
Gartner is the largest and most respected analyst firm in the world and much of what Schmidt said in his 45 minute interview was directed specifically at business leaders, but ReadWriteWeb excerpted what they believe is of interest to anyone who’s touched by the web.
Highlighted comments include:
• Five years from now the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content.
• Today’s teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years – they jump from app to app to app seamlessly.
• Five years is a factor of ten in Moore’s Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today.
• Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance – and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.
• “We’re starting to make signifigant money off of Youtube”, content will move towards more video.
• “Real time information is just as valuable as all the other information, we want it included in our search results.”
• There are many companies beyond Twitter and Facebook doing real time.
• “We can index real-time info now – but how do we rank it?”
• It’s because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that “is the great challenge of the age.” Schmidt believes Google can solve that problem.
RBR/TVBR observation: It is now and will be tomorrow a cross-platform multimedia information advertising business. For broadcasters (this is the majority of the radio and television business) the challenge with reward will be by building asset value with a strong brand on the internet with your website(s). When radio and television learn the necessity of being interactive with the web then the business will see dollars in advertising and growth in visitors or as in media terms audience.
The buzz over the past five years has been cross-platforming but the talk is over the cross-platform is the necessity in the coming decade. RBR-TVBR also has had to reinvent ourselves during the past five years and right now RBR.com – TVBR.com visitors have grown 5 times the size from just one year ago of October 2008 to October 2009. In a nutshell what we at RBR/TVBR have learned is the web delivers Online Traffic and Traffic = Customers = Revenue.
The major key for radio and television broadcasters is the web and if you engage fully as RBR-TVBR has done then once again the mediums analysts write about as being on life support will regain their dominate position because radio and television have one major advantage of anyone else – the Power of their Tower – the Louder speaker which connects to consumers to drive visits to their websites. With your programming cross-platformerd with the web it delivers Niche Targeting for your advertisers.
Think about this as you move into 2010.
