Digital Design Blog

Futures of Entertainment Mobile Media Panel: Praying for Change

Conference coverage of the Futures of Entertainment 2
Panel Topic: Mobile Media
Panelists: Marc Davis (Yahoo), Bob Schukai (Turner Broadcasting), Alice Kim (MTV Networks), Anmol Madan (MIT Media Lab)

In 2000, Avenue A | Razorfish had an office in Helsinki and soda machines powered by WAP. The whole industry threw around terms like 3G, CDMA, and GSM with abandon. Sitting in this panel, 7 years later, I had felt both a weird sense of deja vu and an exciting moment of illumination: mobile could finally happen. Maybe.

The panel’s luminaries highlighted how mobile could uniquely deliver on the relevancy promise of digital (with all the metadata and profile info we have to a

sk for from you on the internet being something a carrier already knows about you and can pass on to content providers - stuff like location, friends, and usage data.) This quickly led to a discussion of privacy and of how much control users has and should have on their own data.

The most difficult part of this conversation and others like it, though, is its immediate futility.

Mobile, like it did in 2000, holds so much opportunity and risk. But in the US - with current infrastructure, is locked out of those debates and designs. So, we’re left, in the short term, with fairly rudimentary options (alerts, mobisodes, cell phone cam UGC) and a perpetual state of “testing the waters” while we wait for the big game to start. To get more momentum, some destabilizing and disruption needs to happen. The iPhone was a good start, perhaps something like the UK Skype-powered phones Bob mentioned will set off a larger chain.

Other Highlights:
- Yahoo’s FireEagle forays around users’ control of their location info
- Yahoo’s ZoneTag trials around auto-geo tagging for flickr
- MTV’s work with Flux creating a universal user profile