I just stumbled on a short presentation that VeerChand Bothra gave at BarCampDelhi on March 4th. It's really great! - in three slides it touches on several topics of recurring interest to me. :-)
I follow his Mobile Pundit blog for it's coverage of telephony news in India, but this was the first (well maybe the second) time I noticed how much our thoughts on telecom and cultural issues are in alignment. My thoughts, triggered by his presentation:
First, about user-created content. Mobiles are ubiquitous and as VeerChand points out, with mobiles, multimedia creation is easier than text creation. We're already seeing explosive growth in Internet-based picture sites, Flickr and the like. According to this article, most of the referrals to photo-hosting sites already come from blogs and moblogs. With 3G, user-created video clips are about to soar. Part of my interest in our recent acquisition of Openera Technologies is it gives us a peer-to-peer video sharing capability. As our "community-based services" kiosk at 3GSM suggested, capturing P2P shared video on behalf of the creator preserves an option for its later use in a moblog, blog or community homepage (think Myspace, Cyworld, or 12wap).
Second, the importance of communications technology to the advancement of civilization. This was the subject of my immediately previous post. VeerChand's comment was:
Language, the alphabet,cities, the printing press did not eliminate poverty or injustice. But they did make it possible for groups of people to create cooperative enterprises such as science and democracy that increased the wealth, welfare and liberty of many.
Third, communities dominate brands. For decades I've put more store in public relations than in advertising. With the advent of the Internet, it's now clear that chat rooms, blogs, etc., i.e. unfettered community discussions are more important than traditional PR. Organizations that candidly talk with their communities of interest get more useful input -- and more external credibility (leading to good PR) than any advertising or PR campaign could ever generate.
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