[Last week I wrote a commentary piece for Media Daily News, a well respected on-line newsletter for media and advertising professionals, and a publication of MediaPost Communications.  As a futurist, with extensive experience in the fields of media and entertainment, I think that there is a new era we have entered in the world of media and marketing.  I have taken the liberty of providing last week’s column to you in order to share these thoughts with you.  Apologies to those subscribers who may have already read this last week.]

Three months ago, I had an “aha” experience that led me to the realization that we are in the High-Touch Media era.
I was on a Newark-bound plane out of Chicago that had a scheduled departure time of 4:30 p.m. Due to “weather” and “flow control,” the departure time came and went. We rolled out onto the tarmac and waited in a long line of planes. 5:30 came and went, then 6:30. So here we all were on a completely full airplane at dinnertime, with no food on board and people getting surly. All of a sudden the flight attendant came on the intercom to announce that due to the generosity of two passengers, everyone would be getting a free Dove candy bar. Evidently two employees of the Dove company were going to a candy convention with their new product line, so they had a duffle bag of candy bars.

Needless to say, the mood on the plane elevated dramatically as empty …

Steve Jobs made the expected announcement that Apple would market the iTV , the gadget that will link the Apple computer in the den to the television set in the living room. Most of the reporting on this announcement was around the coming wave of downloading movies onto the computer and then transferring them to the television set for viewing. The analogy was made to the music business and the iPod and iTunes, as in “Jobs has done it again”. All true.

Yes the early and partial disintermediation of the theatrical distribution system for movies has begun. Yes, Jobs is out in front as he was in downloadable music. Yes he started with one studio and others would follow after the holiday season. Yes the price for the iTV is affordable. This is all good, particularly because of the expected ‘ease of use’ of Apple products. To me however, this announcement was about something else: the breaking down of the barrier between the television experience and the computer experience. That is where the transformation will be.

Ten years ago was the beginning of all the talk about ‘convergence’. This generally meant the convergence of the television set and the personal computer. People spoke of it as an eventuality, and that it would happen soon. Efforts such as WebTV came along, but were too soon and didn’t have the fundamentals down as far as the television side of the equation was concerned. Even …

A couple of months ago I made a post with this same  title.  I opened that post with the following language:

“Across the full spectrum of human endeavor, it is often hard to see what the future might be. Trend lines can be seen, and directions understood, but specific pictures of the future can be vague.  However, our future shows up most clearly in the area of technology.  Technology lets us see new potential.  It shows us new tools that may or may not become universally useful but provides us with possibilities to expect.”

Since I have an attraction to the ‘new’ and I consume a lot of media I often read about things that are interesting, but when combined with another news or product story point to a clear trend or possibility.  As I wrote in a recent post, part of being a futurist is pattern recognition and connecting the dots. Therefore I realized that, from time to time here at www.evolutionshift.com I will have posts like this one, hence the numbers.

We all know that in the past decade, the price for computer hard drive storage has dropped precipitously.  Then came flash drives that, in the past couple of years have also dropped dramatically in price.  You can now buy a flash drive with 1 gig of memory for less that the price of 256 MB two years ago.  The other dynamic is the miniaturization of memory.   Memory that fits in one’s shirt pocket

 There was a recent mention …

As readers of this blog know, I believe that, in many large and significant ways, disintermediation is a fundamental force of reorganization in the world today.  We live in one of those eras of disintermediation.  If you are new to this blog, check out the archive on this subject.

We all have our guilty pleasures in life.  The trashy shows on TV that we watch but don’t really talk about, the Internet sites that we go to in private moments of mindless fun, the celebrity filled magazines that fill us up with the seemingly glamorous lives of celebrities. 

The other day I was checking out my RSS feeds on my browser page, and on a site that I like, Thought Mechanics, I saw the following post title  “Jimmy Page at 14”. [This on a site that usually has good, issue oriented entries] All my life I have been a Led Zeppelin fan and have considered Jimmy Page to be one of the 5 great guitarists to come out of the 1960s.  To be able to see him at age 14!  I immediately clicked the link and then watched a clip from a 1957 BBC program with ‘James Page’ playing in a skiffle band and, during a break between songs, telling the interviewer that when he grew up he wanted to be a researcher to help solve Cancer if it hadn’t been solved by then.  This clip was grouped with other clips relative to Led Zeppelin: Aerosmith playing with Led …