The Korea Communications Conference lasted for two days in COEX in Seoul, in the Grand Ballroom no less. From June 17 to 18, over 100 attendees, speakers, panelists and moderators took on the big issues in communications on the peninsula. There were three tracks per session, and two sessions per day, but the Super-Panel session titled "The Challenge of Convergence: 2010 and Beyond" was the highlight of the conference.
The Super-Panel session dealt with the topic of convergence and was moderated by Kate Bulkley, a journalist and media commentator from the US who has worked in the UK since 1990. The first panelist was Yoshinori Imai, Executive Vice President of NHK, a Japanese television broadcaster. The second panelist was Carlson Chu, Senior Vice President of Product Development Management for PCCW, the largest communications company in Hong Kong. Thomas Crampton was the third panelist, the Asia Pacific Regional Director of 360 Digital Influence at Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide. Each of these people gave a short presentation and all had a different perspective to bring to the topic.
Yosninori Imai
Yoshinori Imai spoke about NHK's role as the only public broadcaster in Japan and its evolving challenges in providing content for its customers. He said that the company is being scrutinized in how they will be able to join together in building sustainable systems for production and delivery of quality content. He basically stated that it's getting harder for NHK to provide content that people want to see.
Carlson Chu
Carlson Chu of PCCW in Hong Kong also spoke about content, but from the dual perspective of content provider and telecoms company. He spoke about the launch of a quadruple play service in Hong Kong, which is a package of fixed voice, mobile voice, broadband and IPTV services. PCCW is in the unique position of both wanting to provide quality content and providing it for the lowest price possible in order to better serve its customers.
Mr. Chu spoke about the launch of a new product last week, "We launched another multimedia device to our service, its called the I1, I2." He explained that it is a portable multimedia device that can receive over 170 TV channels through PCCW's service. He concluded his presentation with the statement, "This is just the beginning of the challenges." He was referring to the company's need to address digital content and network bandwidth, the evolution of IPV4 to IPV6, and real-time customer insight and what to do with that as a business model.
He also explained that his company is able to track an extreme amount of information about its customers. "We can have a dynamic view of the customer in real-time," he explained as he put up a slide which showed a graph of customer data including the TV shows they watched, the web sites they visited, their online identities on each web site, and the items they bought both in online stores and on shopping channels. Despite having all this information, he admitted that "Getting real-time customer insight across platforms is not easy" because customers have different identities on different platforms. But PCCW is learning how to track customers across all platforms in order to give them more personalized services.
Thomas Crampton
The third panelist was Thomas Crampton of Ogilvy. Instead of focusing on one company's struggles with new technology, he boldly predicted five new Internet trends for 2010, one of the most interesting aspects of the Super-Panel. But before he began his predictions, he said, "I'd like to step back to before convergence." He spoke about the cultural and intellectual revolution that took place after the invention of movable type in Korea in the 1300s. He said that this shift in communication ability was without compare in the entire history of the world. And in this age of convergence, he believes that we are hitting a second revolution of equal or greater strength. "No longer do you need a press to communicate with the world," he said.
First Trend
The first trend that he predicted he titled ambient awareness. He pointed to the social communication service Twitter as a good example of this. It allows you to share all of your daily life with those interested in it. Another online service, called Plazes, allows you to share where you are and what you're doing with your friends, for those who travel a lot. Still a third example is Livestream, a video ambient awareness site which allows anyone to become a broadcaster of their own personal life. In Japan, a service called Otetsudai allows employers to search for someone with the exact skillset that they are looking for in a geographical area. So, for instance, a college student who knows how to run a 7-11 cash register can put their employment information up on Otetsudai and say that they will be studying in a coffee shop in a certain part of the city on a certain day. Then any of the 7-11 stores in that area, if an employee doesn't come in, can search geographically in real-time to find out what other potential employees they have in a five mile radius, allowing them to fill the hole in their schedule almost instantly.
Second Trend
The second trend that he identified was that email is going to disappear. He showed a graph that indicated that younger people are using email less than 20% of the time that older people are. Social networking has taken the place of email - sites such as Facebook in the US, QQ in China, and Cyworld in Korea. He said that these new means of communication eliminate the need for email entirely. He said that other alternatives to email such as P2, which is an implementation of WordPress. A conversation about one particular topic can be saved and organized in such a way that any third party can read the entire conversation in a short time and become familiar with the subject or job. He also said that Google Wave was the latest example of the evolution of communication. It allows email, SMS messaging, online messaging, graphs, charts, documents - in short, all forms of communication - to be in one format together as one, allowing people unrivaled communications with their colleagues or friends. These things are all making email obsolete.
Third Trend
He said that the third trend was going to be super-human socialization. "We are all now supermen of communication," he proclaimed. He referenced sociological studies done in previous decades which said that the maximum number of people that one person could communicate with meaningfully was about 150. However, with today's communications technologies the number can be in the millions. Ashton Kutcher, for instance, has 2,193,050 followers on Twitter. He can communicate with all of these people from his keyboard or cell phone.
A related aspect to this is the automation of communication. When people friend or follow others on social networks, some give automated replies in return which gives the impression of communication when actually none has taken place. Another specific example of this, he said, was the French national railway service's Virtuoz automated ticket agent. Some people believed that the automated online service was an actual person, when it was just a series of programmed responses. This technology has been given away and personalized into a kind of automated avatar which can represent you online, but is not actually you. And, these avatars could potentially interact with each other to create social networks among themselves, linking you automatically to other people who like what you like, do what you do, or have the same social circle you have.
Fourth Trend
Game playing is not going away. Instead, aspects of playing games are going to be incorporated into the larger Internet. For instance, Apple's latest Safari browser automatically categorizes sites based on what you most visit. But this service is not available at all levels of the program. Programs are beginning to have levels, which are called things like novice, intermediate, and expert, and allow people to have only the number of options available to them with which they feel comfortable. People can only unlock the higher difficulty level of a program when they have mastered the previous level. Another example of this is the graphing of information in a game-based fashion.
Another aspect of this will be virtual worlds. Second Life, a virtual reality which was vastly over-hyped by the media, is still a poster child of what is possible online now, and might be possible in the future. Virtual realities that are more than simple game spaces or puzzle areas will become more important to people in the next few years.
Fifth Trend
The last trend that Thomas Crampton predicted was the visualization of data. The Internet already allows all of us to find data and information in ways that used to be extremely difficult and require a large research staff. With just the click of a button any random Internet user can create extremely detailed charts, graphs, and other ways of visualizing information which can change the way we look at the world. One example that he cited was Gapminder.org, which measures that health of the whole world. It is a time-based graph of social and economic prosperity which can show the rise and fall of different countries from the 1800s to 2007. It shows just exactly how the population and demographics of the world are growing and changing. In an interactive demonstration, he showed that Asia was growing fast in all sectors, climbing up the stat graphs steadily from the 1800s onward. He also showed a Google Maps mashup of the world charged to show the number of cell phones per capita by country. Each country stood out from the globe in relative height based on the number of cell phones per person in the country. Korea and Japan were extremely tall cliffs, while Hong Kong was a needle jutting into space.
He made the point that data visualization is not just about presenting data, it is also about seeing the world in a whole new way. He demonstrated this by showing a kind of story flow map done by one man who went to hunt whales in the Arctic with Eskimos. He set up a camera to take a photo every five minutes, and also gave himself the option to take more photos during exciting periods. Then he arranged the photos in several ways. He arranged them by a kind of heartbeat frequency, showing the exciting chronological moments which held more photos per minute, and the slower boring moments, which held many less photos. He also arranged them all on one page together, showing their overall color - the prevailing color was white, with a lot of yellow for the boat in the middle and a lot of red for the blood at the end.
At the end, Thomas said that there were two more possible trends that didn't make the top five, which is the transformation of identity and the concept of digital natives. He showed his web page, Thomascrampton.com, and said that he didn't really care if people remembered his name or not, but he hoped they remembered his web page, because that includes many more links and information about his work than just his name. He referred to his web page as a heavy identity. He also said that people who grow up using the Internet, digital natives, would become vastly different culturally and experientially from those who did not. The Internet would transform them, and they would become like a digital tribe.
Discussion
After the presentations were over, Kate Bulkley the moderator opened up the panel for discussion. She began by saying that what we have traditionally defined as media is changing. Is it media, or is it content How can we define it She addressed a question to the panelists by saying, "How is media consumption developing and how do you adapt to that Carlson, when you developed that portable device, was it because you saw a change in media consumption or was it a technological idea" Mr. Chu responded by saying that he did believe that there was a change in behavior for many of his customers. He said it was too early to see how many people would use his company's new portable television set because it was launched just one week ago, but he said that interest had been high so far. He said it was both for the customers' changing needs, for the revenue stream, and to try out new technology - it was going for all of the sectors at once.
Kate then directed a question at Yoshinari by asking him about something he said during his presentation. He said that HD TV would bring people back to the television, and she asked how that would happen. Yoshinari responded by saying that the major broadcasters in the world are like giant container ships - they cannot steer easily in water, but they can be safe in rough waters. Also, when they lower their cargo, he said, they use cranes and barges and sometimes small boats. "So we are like a big cargo ship in taking the best of the available means that will help us to go safely and to serve the mass market," he explained.
After that, Kate steered the discussion to the additional services that PCCW provides to its users, since it is both a broadcasting and communications company. She posed the question, "Are these over the top services a threat or an opportunity" Thomas responded by saying that they were both. He pointed out that some people don't even need a broadcaster anymore - they can go straight from the creator to the end user. He views this part as a tremendous opportunity, because new channels can be opened for people to consume media that are completely open to large, traditional media companies as well. He said that the I2, the mobile TV device from PPCW, reminds him of an iPhone application that lets you view media on your iPhone which you select using your computer, in the sense that it is a new channel for distribution.
Carlson also agreed saying that it is both a threat and an opportunity. He pointed out that with extra services, the long tail of profit from content becomes even longer, which is an opportunity for traditional media companies. But, on the other hand, he said, it will take time to explore different business models for entrenched broadcasters. Yoshinari offered the perspective of some people in his industry, which was "Some people say that anybody denying us money is our enemy. Some people in our industry think that." But he went on to say that the translation for convergence in Japanese is the word normally used for fusion, and he preferred fusion, or hybrid, as a better word to describe what was going on. "I think that creating a hybrid with television will help us to be able to survive. We are open to getting along with over the top services. But we are very careful." He said that it is the nature of the large broadcasters to be conservative and careful in what they do.
All in all the Super-Panel was the highlight of the conference, sparking more discussion that was repeated in other venues throughout the rest of the day.
