Give it to the children

I went to this thing yesterday with Dave and SarahK. It was better than I expected and hosted at the design council, Convert Garden. The title was – Understanding the future of mobile devices, which instantly rings alarm bells in my head.

It was my first time to this event, so I was a little uneasy about the format of the meeting (as such), not enough questions from the floor for my liking and no real debate. But I was attracted to the event my friend dmarks and by the listings of previous meetings, also on the website.

The key points for me were Joe Odukoya's talk, which was a round up of different technologies and when were expecting to see them become common place. I did question the lack of discovery in his chart but mainly to start a debate, which didnt work. But yeah over all good simple and entertaining presentation. Just the kinda person I would invite to talk in college. Maybe just maybe?
One of the suprising things for me was the fact eastern markets prefer cables, hence why bluetooth, wifi and even infra red were not common place. Scarey! Also he pointed out the America market is run by the corps while the european market is run by consumers, hence why wireless instant messaging will be more popular here than wireless email or push to talk.

Ok till then I was ok with everything, then this guy Dr Simon Roberts does his presentation.
He presented the idea of bottom up content rather than top down – yes because we havent heard that before. But then he went off on how the early adopters are to blame for a lot the issues with mobile technology. I was like what the fcuk! Anyway, it didnt take long for people to challenge him and a guy from IDEO said the most sensible thing of the night. Give the technology to the kids and they will do something different. The point he was putting across was the fact technology when it first comes out is expensive, yes of course the early adopters will be a certain group. Make it cheap and afforable and give it away and you will see a new group of early adopters doing different things.
Early adoption isnt bad, just in its current state only a few can be the adopters.
However Simon did bring up some good points and a subject I've never heard of before. Kinship? – I tapped down, The study of linkage, Relationship of people and content.
And i was wondering how sematics and otologies fits into this?
Also he had some good quotes including this one. We use people to find content, we use conent to find people
and this European have a fear of falling. Eastern Asians have a playful nature.

Remind myself to get there early next time and get a seat in the crowd rather than the edge. Will be going to the next event for sure…

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Author: Ianforrester

Senior firestarter at BBC R&D, emergent technology expert and serial social geek event organiser. Can be found at cubicgarden@mas.to, cubicgarden@twit.social and cubicgarden@blacktwitter.io