3 Tech Trends I Love That Are Shaping Today's Landscape

Adapted from a Medium post I wrote earlier this week.

As technological advancements are blooming all around us, I recently took a step back to reflect on the ones that seem to be having the most direct impact into how consumers are behaving and interacting in the world. Three came primarily to mind: evolved attention spanning, decentralized personal assistants, and the analog to digital conversion of the physical world (the physical object internet).

#1: Evolved Attention Spanning

There is no doubt that consumers below the age of 35 are significantly shifting the way they allocate their attention to media. Gone are the days where TV viewership was the key to the adolescent heart.

The younger the consumer, the less TV they continue to watch
Those days are rapidly dwindling. The millennial generation is the first wave of digital natives: having moved from the linear confines of the boob tube into handheld and other internet-enabled devices.

While innovation comes out of the Netflix, empowering binge watching weekends of House of Cards and Orange is the New Black, the intoxication of human-to-human broadcasting is picking up.

Undoubtedly, the belle of this year’s SXSW ball will be Meerkat, the one-to-many live streaming Ustream-meets-Snapchat-meets-Twitter platform that’s raced across silicon valleys, beaches and alleys in the past week. The mass increase of charging stations should make it laughable at least to find people setting up videos a few feet from one another. Someone will ineviatably make a terrible decision while live streaming… and for once, the Internet won’t have a copy of what happened!

Beyond Meerkat, however, consumer attention continues to move into a self-driven id exploration. Anonymous concept sharing in the form of Yik Yak, Secret and Whisper got much attention last year, though it appears to be breaking into the mainstream this year. Snapchat continues to reign as the peak asynchronous one-to-one-to-maybe-many-at-scale communication network?—?with Stories getting to be rather interesting ways to tune into bits and pieces of the world of your friends. Between anonymity and ephemerality, we are without a doubt being exposed to more of the “true colors” of our friends and world around us?—?which undoubtedly makes the content more intriguing for a consumer base that has become tired of finding their Facebook feeds full of weddings, babies and other “look at how happy I am” content.

One fact seems to be increasingly true of how the populous plans to consume media and allocate their attention: it’s increasingly non-linear and driven by the self-indulgence of that consumer. Meerkat is threatening the status-quo, which makes it interesting to see how the evolution will grow.

But it’s not just about how people will increasingly talk less with one another with their noses in their screens, it will be about how we get increasing access to something that’s only been available to the upper echelons of society: personal assistants.

#2: The Decentralized Personal Assistant

The beautiful thing about Uber at it’s core was that the service gave popular access to something that was only reserved to the highest income bracket: a luxury car service. In exchange for a slight premium, Uber (which funny enough started its mass awareness at SXSW in 2011) offered the benefit of a guaranteed car showing up to your door within a short period of time. A service that was typically reserved for people with personal assistants was now available at the tap of a screen.

The beauty of Uber has spread so quickly across the tech scene, that it has its own meme, with companies describing themselves as “Uber for X.” While some of the potential for mass distribution is limited (I’m looking at you, Uber for medical marijuana delivery), the trend itself should not be overlooked as our attempt to find ways to get things with just the pressing of a button.

The benefit that personal assistants have given to their constituents has been the reintroduction of time back into their busy lifestyle. Not all services can be as simple as press a button and get instant gratification, but the concept of the decentralized personal assistant remains: focus repetitive tasks that may require some subjectivity and definitely time away from the end user and they will have time for other things.

Consumers are not burdened with needing to pay for a full time assistant, however the new services introduced into their lives give them time to focus on the most high value activities. Some of my favorite services bringing the love and time back to the populace:

Instacart: Do your grocery shopping from the luxury of where ever you are. Remove the 1–2 hours you spent each week pondering why salsa is in the sauce aisle, but Sriracha is in the “Asian foods” section. Meatloaf ingredients recommended. Pants optional.

Reserve: Booking a meal, but not sure exactly where to go or when your favorite spots have availability? Don’t like the hassle or time of waiting to settle the check? Tell Reserve a time window and how many people you want to dine with, and they’ll do the rest. (Disclosure: I invested in this company.)

Washio: Even though it takes 15 minutes if you’ve got a washer/dryer in your house, and definitely a whole lot more time if you don’t, getting your laundry done takes time out of your week. Plus, who really wants to fold their pantaloons? Showing up in a 30 min window and bringing back your clothes within 24 hours, Washio gives you back time that you would have otherwise spent popping quarters into a machine into more high-value time allocation, like cruising Yik Yak.

Luxe Valet: This takes a step beyond the duties of a personal assistant and gets you valet parking at your beckon call. Taking the world beyond Uber into our personally owned vehicles, the rate of $5/hour allows you to cut it close for your appointment and not worry about finding a place to park your vehicle. I really hope they extend into the future the ability to be designated driver home if you have one-too-many margaritas at dinner.

The beautiful part of this decentralization, also, is that it’s creating employment mechanisms in a world where employment rates have been a sensitive subject for nearly a decade. More volume flowing through these services will likely merit a central dispatch service at some point, but for the time being, I’ll enjoy what I can get at scale.

While much criticism can be placed to these services making us lazy, the reality is that they pay back the most valuable commodity to consumers: time. And as that time proliferates to differing media consumption patterns and social interactions, one more theme has emerged: the interconnectivity of the analog world; it’s the physical object internet.

#3: The Physical Object Internet

There has been much discussion (ad naseum) of “the Internet of Things.” Unfortunately, this discourse has mostly focused on what happens when you get internet connectivity into common objects like your car, refrigerator, and smoke detectors. Don’t get me wrong: this stuff is pretty cool. I love my Leeo at home, knowing that I will get a push notification should a disaster like a fire happen at my home while I’m gone.

The real excitement that’s mounting, however, is that through the proliferation of location services on wearable devices (iPhone included), paired with beacons, we are beginning to get a better understanding of how objects in the physical world interact with one another.

Companies like Gimbal (and the more elegantly designed Estimote) are slowly placing beacons onto objects in the physical world, announcing to the world of applications that they are around. The first application of the interconnection of the internet with the physical world is proliferating with services like Google Wallet and Apple Pay where one physical object (humans), using their unique interface with the digital world (phone with unique thumb/bio data) to announce to a passive listening digital device (payment console) that you are ready to conduct a transaction.

As more devices come into the world that are internet enabled, proximity is growing increasingly important. For example, if I store my bicycle in my garage and I have an internet-enabled garage door, slapping an Estimote beacon onto my bicycle and routing listening information to my garage door can help bridge the connection into the internet that my bike is properly stowed in the garage. The opportunities this creates to prevent common issues such as theft (or at least theft awareness), is increased when you consider the contextual clues that can be determined from these beacons sensing what is nearby.

These measurements are also empowering a slew of visualization companies, like Datasnap and Umbel, who aim to bring analytics into a world of physical design and layout that has been eternally relegated to being managed by opinions. The enablement of these awareness data points allow us to better design a world of “no interface” innovation, as was so eloquently described in Re/Code earlier this week.

These innovations are certainly just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the innovation that's swirling around us. From where I sit, the media opportunities loom large over these trends and I am excited to continue to chip away at driving value to end consumers through the form of advertising.