CAMBRIDGE—It’s 10:00 am and already the man in suspenders has captivated his audience. But another star is now shining bright. Marc Davis, Social Media Guru at Yahoo and a graduate of the Media Studies program at MIT, is talking about mobile media in a panel on the topic at this, the second annual Futures of Entertainment conference.
Davis says Nokia figured it out. In fact, their N95 phone isn’t a phone at all, it’s a socially-aware video camera. A phone is now a content production tool and the physical world is the new frontier for interconnected networking. We’ve entered the age of “real-time geo-aware content production.” Davis is pretty smart.
Davis clicks around and explains one of Yahoo’s research and development projects, ZoneTag. He says high end Nokia phones allow mapable photos to auto-appear on Flickr from one’s cellular camera phone. “A collective map of human attention, that’s what we’re building.”
The other panelists talk about how messed up the mobile platform is at the moment, especially when compared to Asian and European models, which means there’s a massive opportunity in mobile for all involved–the handset makers, the networks, the content producers and the advertisers.
Google is about to enter the market the panelists note, and should they purchase 400Mhz spectrum at auction and deliver an iPhone rival in their gPhone, they may be in a great spot. Which is great, but I don’t own any of their gStock, so I’d like to reach this mythical spot de greatness by delivering mobile content that people value. I’ve never done that, so it’ll be a challenge. One I’m a degree better prepared to pursue having learned what Marc Davis is working on.