Earlier this month I spent a few days in the US attending Telespan in Las Vegas and SXSW the tech, film and music mash-up in Austin, Texas. Both were inspirational and provided food for thought for my return to our company.
SXSW 2013
Some of the presentations were around some of the technological and societal advances that are happening now, some presenters stretched the thinking a little further; things that would break industry norms and others just seemed to paint on a bigger intellectual canvas; taking on some of the planet’s biggest problems.
Something that was of great interest to me personally and from a business perspective was that of big video.
We have a perfect storm in formation, we have:
- Low cost HD cameras
- High speed broadband
- High spec laptops
- Smart TVs
And now we have an emerging internet browser standard for real time communication (Web RTC), this will allow video via a simple web browser, no client downloads, no trouble to set-up and no hassle.
This will mean that video will increasingly move out of the boardroom and into our lives. Video usage is already shifting, it is more consumer focused, it’s around distributed teams and remote working, it’s beyond departmental meetings – it’s now job interviews, integrated into corporate functionality, it’s friends and family, it’s now natural and not the exception.
We need to think of video as an application, the value of video is not in the technology but in the application of and use of it. With technology so integrated into our lives now, it is hard to ignore the importance that video now plays every day.
Another interesting keynote speech was from Elon Musk, the serial tech entrepreneur – I’m still in recovery.
One would have thought that to co-found and eventually sell PayPal to e-Bay would have been enough for most business lifetimes. Not our Elon. From 2005 he has been the CEO of SpaceX who design, build and fly commercial spacecraft. SpaceX has a contract with NASA for supplying the International Space Station; in fact NASA is now his largest customer.
Elon founded SpaceX in 2005 with the express objective of taking life to Mars and for humans to become a multi-planet species.
That just about edges my vision for our company.
