TechTomorrow Event Challenges Attendees to “Build a New Reality”

Central Ohio played host to a number of key events this week that helped shine the spotlight on the region’s bright future and economic potential.  Among them: the International Economic Development Council’s annual meeting, the 6th meeting of the Ohio Early Stage Capital Summit, which brought together venture capital firms from across the country with promising young technology companies seeking funding, and the 9th annual convening of CIOs in Central Ohio, which until this year, had historically been known as CIOhio. This year, the CIO leadership exchange changed its name, expanded its programming and its reach into a three-day event that attracted nearly 300 attendees from across the nation. 

TechTomorrow, as the event is now known, also expanded its focus from purely traditional technology issues to ones surrounding how technology can and must play an increasing role in helping corporations become and remain competitive in an ever changing business landscape.

“Building a New Reality” was the conference theme and keynote speaker, John Battelle, helped set the tone for this theme with his thought provoking Welcome address.  Battelle is considered a global thought leader on the tech-driven transformation of business, the economy and our culture, specializing in particular in areas where business and the Internet overlap. 

Battelle shared insights on what he calls the third wave of the interface culture, namely the “Conversation Economy.”  The first wave of the interface culture started in the mid 1970s according to Battelle.  This was when computers were first used to automate back office functions such as accounting, inventory management, etc.  The programming was very complex, non-intuitive and required specialists to program and interface with the computers through complex languages such as Fortran.  It is estimated that a little over 10 million people interfaced with computers during this, the first wave. 

The second wave came in the early 1980s when, through the PC and the Mac, interaction between the back and the front of the office became possible.  There were somewhere around 500 million participants in this interchange which allowed basic users to easily input and extract data and information from and with computers.

In the early part of the 21st century, with the rapid adoption of the Web and the launch of companies such as Google, came the start of the third wave of the interface culture.  Google allowed users to express their wants, their needs and their demands through search and then reorganized the delivery of information based on the assumed preferences of the user. After a decade on the scene, Google has helped develop a culture of users that expect the world to reorganize itself around their wants and their needs. 

With Facebook, blogs, YouTube, Twitter and others – came the advent of users talking back.  Currently Facebook has more than 1 billion users and there are more than 200 million bogs on the Web.  These, and other Internet exchanges, represent what Battelle calls the Conversation Economy, and the anticipated continued growth of this phenomenon is staggering.  
In fact, according to Nielsen ratings, the sites that are growing most rapidly are those that provide platforms for user generated content.  Since December of 2007, Google’s traffic, as measured by unique visitors, has grown 8.8 percent, Yahoo 2.3 percent, CNET 17.1 percent.  Yet traffic has grown tremendously to sites such as YouTube (80.4 percent), Wikipedia (28.3 percent), Blogger (48.2 percent), Facebook(72.2 percent), and Flickr (85.6 percent).  WordPress.com, a content management system which enables users to publish on the Web, has grown 202.2 percent during this time and Twitter has grown by more than 1,100 percent in the last year alone. 

As a result of these trends, Battelle says that companies who want to remain competitive must join the conversation.  He contends that this shift will probably be the hardest transition companies face in the next decade and that it will force major changes in how companies are organized and how they deal with information.  One of the most disconcerting aspects of this shift – many of the decisions that impact your company and your job will be out of your control. 

Battelle contends that companies are already in conversations with their customers whether they know it or like it.  These conversations are determining brand value and sales and if a company refuses to join the conversation, then it will be powerless to influence it.

So how are companies supposed to adapt to the Conversation Economy?  Future issues of TechWeek will outline Battelle’s insights on how companies can realign themselves to join the conversation.
For more information on John Battelle, see www.battellemedia.com