Rudy de Waele about "We Media"

Rudy de Waele, Founder, M-trends.org

Rudy is a Thought Leader in the
LAB on MEDIA and Human Experience
An immersed experience of a Do-Tank
May 29 & 30, 2007
Location: Girona near Barcelona, Spain
http://www.clubofamsterdam.com/event.asp?contentid=657

Club of Amsterdam: Rudy, you are a leading consultant to the wireless industry. This industry is developing very fast. In most cases I get the impression that products once reaching the customers are already outdated. How does the mobile industry relate their product development to "quality of life"?

This is indeed an industry where products have an average 'lifecycle' of approximately 2 years. Device manufacturers are designing products to different target customers, with the flashy, shiny, trendy products as to be used by the opinion leaders, early birds/first movers and trendsetters first, and while learning from their experience, the manufactures designs new and improved products that will fit the mass market demand in 1 or 2 years.

"Quality of life" is very important in mobile and wireless since every new generation of phones adds something new to satisfy the demands of the consumer and meet the expectations set by the marketing of the products. Don't forget that the mobile phone is the most sold 'aspirational gadget' of all times.

For example the new data services, all multimedia (camera, images, video, mp3player, webbrowser, etc.) integrated now in nearly any standard phone, was just unimaginable only a couple of years ago. Note that a typical high-end smartphone can match the performance of a mid-range laptop computer only five years ago! Nokia don't call them phones any longer but multimedia computers... But these new gadgets might bring also new addictions, away from TV or PC to smaller screens such as mobile devices.


Club of Amsterdam: New technologies are getting more hybrid. Virtual worlds merge with the "real" world and in this context the user experience is also changing. How does the future consumer create his "personal" media experience?

The youth of today wants to stay connected all the time with their network of friends, news, entertainment and events around through the PC or the mobile... the universal sense of belonging has translated itself in the need to 'stay connected' or 'always on'.

In 5 years time, my 'wearable media' (MyMedia) device will be able to do a lot more things then what is currently possible, it will have the capacity to store entire movies in good quality, my whole music catalogue, photo album, design- and project works just on my mobile device, to take that with me wherever I'll be, to connect it to other devices and (bigger) screens and enjoy that media together with friends. There will be a lot more possibilities for the user to be 'always on' connected to the internet, the news, entertainment and stay connected to my social networks connected with my friends and exchange more content. So, pretty soon, anyone will have the tools and the possibility to create his own media channel, through audio or video. An explosion of user-media is yet still to come.

The virtual will more easily connect with the physical world through taggable objects, once tagged with a phone through image recognition, qr-codes or 2D codes, will bring you directly to some added-value or complementary content or information on the subject tagged.


Club of Amsterdam: What do you expect from a dialogue about media and human experience?

Raise a set of questions that are essential to create a good human experience in relation to the rapid technology developments of today. To think and discuss about those questions and to put forward some essential issues towards the industry. What is the influence of all this media to our children, society in general? What can be done to improve this? How can we improve our learning systems using media annd technology to make sure our children can rapidly change/adapt to deal with the future changes? Who will control global digital access in the future? What about universal access? Multilingualism? Mobile learning systems? Media conglomerations? Is this really we media or their media? How to organize the overflow of information coming to us? Wikipedia example? Who owns what kind of information and who can manipulate what?

Thank you Rudy!