Links
Thursday, November 16th, 2006Today I participated in the Links Executive Summit in Santa Barbara. The overall theme of the conference was content, and participants ranged from old world telecom players (e.g. AT&T), to those that sell to telcos (e.g. Cisco, HP, IBM), to those in the media value chain (e.g. Nellymoser, Real), and all the way to the President of the Houston Texans and the Chief Content Officer of Netflix.
Those last two provided some interesting perspectives that help illustrate the opportunities and challenges in the mobility revolution.
As I’ve discussed before, context is a key component to the Mobility Revolution and this became a key theme throughout the day. Location is one of the first ways that context is being built into mobile applications (e.g. Sprint’s announcement today with Microsoft of location-based search). Location is particularly relevant to Jamey Rootes, President of the Houston Texans. In Houston, the Texans have a growing and loyal fan base. Under the structure of the NFL’s national/local structure, there are ways in which the Texans can build upon that valued base with unique content within their immediate vicinity, but not beyond. Therefore, Jamey is very interested in progress being made to make mobile content contextually relevant to the Texans fans in Houston.
Another theme that continually came up throughout the day was about the challenges of finding the right content within the constraints of mobile devices. Ted Sarandos, Chief Content Officer for Netflix provided a clear picture of the challenge. Netflix offers nearly 70,000 titles. Yesterday, 35,000 of those titles were ordered by customers, so there’s real activity across the entire portfolio. How can Netflix customers wade through so many titles? They find what they’ll enjoy, Ted claims, because of the Netflix personalization system based on the ratings that Netflix customers provide. In effect, the titles that appeal to each customer rise to the top with amazing consistency. For mobile content to overcome the navigation challenges, similar ways to intelligently simplify the process will need to emerge, undoubtedly helped along by the awareness of context.
Overall, some great discussions and congratulations to the Heavy Reading crowd for putting on a well-run event!




