The Future of New Media

This post by Janice Fraser reminds me of my past experiences during the dot com era. There was a flood of capital into the Internet world that prompted a mass migration towards website design, web apps, and business based on the web. Ideas and concepts moved so quickly that business plans were constantly changed (remember the shift from b2c to b2b back to b2c to p2p?)

Janice says:

We had such big thoughts back then. We were excited, idealistic, and naive. It was a time when the Internet richly rewarded smart, passionate people. Anyone was free to create wildly improbable, but very cool, things.

Of course, that changed. With real money came real responsibility, and explosive growth prompted implosive failure. By fall of 2000 — just five years after the launch — the innovators were tired and the “innovations” failed to impress.

After the dot com 'new economy' faded, the focus changed to making the current business more efficient. But the landscape for new media is shifting. All the talk about technology "convergence" in the late 90's was too early for consumers to accept. A lot of people talked about using cell phones to pay for merchandise at retail stores, listening to mp3s on their PDAs or cell phones, but it never happened. It's not that far fetched now to think about watching videos, purchasing music or playing online games on a phone now. Yahoo is getting into TV, google is moving towards interactive advertising, and Apple is synonymous with HiDef DVD authoring.

Things are about to change in a big way. The convergence of interactive media, video, games, and music is coming. TV networks, video game companies, phone companies, cable companies are all overlapping eachother to capture this idea of cross-pollination of media. Look for huge changes in media (and our idea of media as it is today) to happen in the next year to three years. By then, the dot com crash will be 6-9 years old, which is just in time for the 8-12 year olds to shift the idea of media in a huge way.