eComm 2008 - Day Two
It is the second day and I attended all the session, however with nearly 88 speakers in 3 days it is definitely on track to take a toll on the mental facilities. The highlights this time were centered around two theme: Human interaction with technology and Broadband Access.
Adding a nice twist to what can often be a monotonous drone of product pitches and techie jargon, Dawn Nawfus an anthropologist from Intel and Marc Smith a sociologist from Microsoft reminded us of the human side of technology.
Dawn gave a good pitch as to why simply “stirring” in GPS is not always something the customer wants. Technology must allow the consumer to define place, because its not always where the body is.
Marc illustrated some recent work on how technology can facilitate the “spark gap” between people. Curiously, it will all be on the record as persistence will play a key role in the future as mining machine inscriptions become a core piece of social software.
On the Broadband Access front Brough Turner and Bob Frankston both gave calls to new user owned paradigms for last mile solutions tarketing layer 0f infrastructure. Unfortunately they were preaching to the chior as few telco executives were in the room to recieve the message. Hopefully a grass-roots movement will start.
