Faster Than You Think

At the RAIN conference in Vegas, Kurt Hanson addressed his attendees with his popular “State of the Industry” address.

While some of the same basic themes that Kurt has been espousing for some time were in place, he led off the session with something for all the attendees – and all of you reading this blog – to think about:

“Things are moving faster than we think.”

Then in his own patented, mercurial way, Kurt walked us through support data but also some anecdotes that suggest that while we’re all together on this merry-go-round, we aren’t always feeling the rising velocity because we’re too busy just hanging on.

Now this might not sound like a very profound statement to you on the surface, but if you think about some of the ways in which our world has changed in the recent past, it is a bit mind-boggling.

I’m not talking about over the past 10 years, but in many cases, in just a few years or even months.  Here are some anecdotes of my own – some of the things that make me sit up and wonder whether we even realize the pace of our tech lives:

• The iPad is now on sale at Toys “R” Us.  Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. is now blaming “thousands of American” job losses on the iPad.  What does this tell us about the increasing ubiquity of tablets, and the target audience for these devices?

• The Flip camera is dead, four years after its exciting debut.  We bought them for our professional staff just a few Christmases ago.  Now these devices are obsolete, thanks to smartphones.

• At the Easter egg prayer breakfast at the White House, President Obama noticed that Bishop Vashti McKenzie had an iPad, and said, “This is a hi-tech bishop.”  How many people are you seeing using iPads as you travel or make your way around your community? 

• Bing-powered searches are now up to 30%.  Do you still use Google for everything?

• The iPhone 4 is the second most popular “camera” among Flickr users, close behind the Nikon D90.  What does this tell us about gadgets that do just one thing?

• Activision has put the Guitar Hero franchise on "hiatus," begging the question asked on South Park about whether time spent learning to play guitar on a video game couldn’t have been better spent learning how to play a real guitar.  The response?  “Real guitars are for old people.”  Apparently not.

• The price of a Wii is rumored to be going down and fast.  Great, after I waited out in the cold two years ago to grab one for the highest retail price at Best Buy.

• Active users of Twitter apparently have problems maintaining their connections with each other, compared to the rest of the population.  As the stats show, daily tweeters have shorter relationships.

• In Q2 2011, Apple sold more than 18 million iPhones.  The laggard - the iPod down 17% compared to the same quarter in 2010 (see the earlier point about gadgets that only do one thing).

• President Obama does a town meeting with... Mark Zuckerberg.  And instead of wearing a hoodie, Zuck wears a tie. 

What changes are you seeing that confirm that things are moving faster than you think?

Comments

[Jay Deacon]

How do I know things are moving fast?

http://www.youtube.com/user/oldnavy#p/a/u/0/kD_9JFM67Bo

I see an Old Navy commercial asking smartphone users to Shazam it. When you do---not only do you get the single ready to download on your phone (hello breaking new artists), you get to shop for the clothes and learn everything about Old Navy you ever wanted. All that is missing is a #oldnavy logo on the bottom of the screen.

And as an Old Navy shopper---it makes me think my clothes are WAY more hip than they really are. (hard to spend more than $22 on a pair of jeans these days)

[Fred]

Wow, great example of retail moving very quickly on the new media train. Thanks, Jay, and enjoy those jeans.

[Chuck Jeffries-Smith KFOG-KNBR-KSAN]

Once in a Creative Team brainstorming session with (then-KFOG-KSAN GM) Dwight Walker, it was quoted (from Alice In Wonderland if memory serves) "Soon, you're going to have to run as fast as you can JUST TO KEEP UP. How fast will you have to run to get ahead, she asked? Faster than you can ever imagine..."

That meeting was in 1999

Chuck Smith

[Fred]

Chuck, we all have those memories of meetings, memos, studies that we've seen or even conducted. And now, you're dead on - "faster than you can ever imagine."

Dwight always had an eye to the future.

Thanks for reading out blog & taking the time to comment.