Jim starts by talking about the two computing eras in the last 20 years, and then branches into the 2010’s era:
- 1990’s - Store and compute
- 2000’s - Search and browse
- 2010’s - Know and do
He then continued referring to the “Old magic” with the “New magic”. I don’t need to go into the old magic because we have all lived it – but he says cool things about the new magic. It’s going to be based on new radical ways of interacting with your digital world.
Know and do
This era will be based on three things:
- Data – not the web, but your own index to the web
- Experiences – “takes the data and weaves into cool things”
- Ecosystem – Cloud and devices
Whittaker talks about the paradigm switch from generic search to specific “experiences” tied to local knowledge of data, that is, not the web but the personal indexes to the web based on how we interact with it: location, timing, history. Underlying it of course is that “Data is currency”. This all leads to “experiences” in the sense that the data needs to be harvested by app developers with data owners, at a local basis, to design those experiences.
Data is tied to experiences which are tied to data gathering/harvesting to something that is the data ecosystem: clouds and devices. Most experiences are drawn in “canvasses”: space and time. Most experiences can be mapped to both spatial and temporal a relationship, that is canvasses for the experiences to unfold. Example of an experience:
“I need a vacation”. Where would such experience start? Maybe in the calendar, and it does not need to leave there. Whittaker then went into a lot of interesting scenarios such as “Decline all my meetings and show me some flights”. After this your calendar would show flights in the calendar, and as you choose one, then screen changes with suggestions for hotels and discounts – all in the calendar. Plus it shows some recommended activities that you can just pick and have them neatly fit into the calendar. It ends with a nice one-week calendar with a vacation created from an auction system for the best experiences you might want to live.
As a new era starts, Whittaker explained that it becomes difficult for the incumbents. We just started, so the winner is still not know, and he invites us to join in developing new experiences in this new paradigm.