opportunity grid

My good friend Chuck Hamilton at IBM is part of a team championing “serious games” and “serious play” as an emerging global business opportunity.  The driving vision is that a major part of the world’s economy may be transacted within virtual environments like SecondLife within a generation.  In retail, for example, the text-heavy flatness of online shopping will be replaced with bustling, shopper-intensive, clerk-attentive, and product-rich 3D experiences.  I’m sure many of these dreams will come to virtuality, but I’m much more interested in how they will come to reality – how our first and second lives will blend productively using mobile media.

I’m old enough to remember television sets with knob channel-changers; when there was only a knob-full of channels to be found.  Who can even count the channels now?  A similar explosion of opportunity is about to revolutionize your mobile existence.  Are you ready for a thousand-channel lifestyle?

A simple demonstration of this phenomenon leaps forward from the recent Winter Olympics in Turin.   Turin is laid out on a classic European city grid with a number of open public squares sprinkled across the urban landscape.  In terms of ‘programming’ an analog city, this is a perfect design: a set of discrete ‘channels’ where the 2006 Turin organizers were able to ‘broadcast’ distinct crowd-pleasing offerings in a variety of locations.  It works well but there’s a profound scaling problem (like the knob channel-changer): what happens when you’ve got enormously more events than town squares, and the events are transforming faster than a printed program can keep up-to-date?

Ants and bees build amazing homes, but no creature can match the human obsession for augmenting living landscapes with built structures. And you haven’t seen anything yet.  Think about our deeper obsession with media.  What happens when we’re able to augment our built environments with media structures? Cities formed of bricks and glass are about to be reformed with media and meaning. Welcome to the semantic city.

The world is experiencing an interesting reversion of power from nation-states back to city-states.  While recent world is flat thinking focuses on the growth of a planet-state, the real phenomenon is that nation-states are diminishing with respect to both the planet-state and city-states, so that creative city-states are peaking strongly on a flattening landscape.  So yes, the world is already city-spiky.  And the spikes will get much sharper as mobile media begin to reinvent urban experience.  How and why?  Urban lifestyle potentials will expand enormously as the semantic web couples with ambient culture and built infrastructure.