Generation C

AvailabotI follow the work of Schulze and Webb with interest, and have for as long as they’ve been around. They’re an R&D consultancy, helping other companies think about the way in which their business can adapt and be enhanced by the opportunities that the internet and other modern technology offer. I don’t know that they’re always right, but they’re always thought-provoking. And their presentations are very entertaining.

I think the slides of their talk from ETech this year provide a lot of material to think about for the near future, from the idea having a little action figure on your desk (that’s your actual desk, not your computer) that moves in some way to indicate when one of your contacts has come on line, to the more abstract idea of RSS-I (RSS-Interactive), a means of developing an aggregating system like RSS for all the little decisions that websites ask you to make, so that you could queue them all in one application, and process them later in a batch of yes/no (or similarly simple one-click decisions) rather than having to visit each website, in response to an email or other push-prompt.

Their big insight, though, is their notion of generation C – the generation coming into maturity now, who don’t really remember a time without the internet, and whose response to not being offered the exactly the product or service they want (particularly on-line) is to go away and build it themselves. That certainly describes a lot of my friends, even the ones who aren’t terribly technical themselves – they’ll just talk someone else (often me) into building it for them…

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