A WORLD OF DIFFERENCES

YOUTH WILL BE SERVED

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This week’s reading is about the Entertainment and Media companies and their growth and opportunity analysed through 5 shifts roiling today’s industry. It raised questions like the relations between the industry and shifts defining it but it also had a lot of complex graphs and statistics and that part I did not like.

Among all those five different shifts being analysed – Demography, Competition, Consumption, Geography and Business Models -, one particularly raised my attention. Demography and the Youth Movement.

Exhibit 4 : Youth Movement  / “Across countries, there is a strong correlation between the relative size of the under -35 population and growth in E&M spending.”

The reason I decided to focus on this shift rather than another one is simply because I am young and feel connected to this movement, and this generation of new technologies.

Young people consume media more than ever today, they even adopt digital behaviours and are therefore more open to digital spending. It is no longer uncommon for someone to own three screens or more (phone, tablet, TV, Laptop…). Young people today are born in an era where screens have always existed and it might seem more instinctive for us to be attracted to it. And therefore buy it… I would be lying right now if I said that I wasn’t watching The Bachelorette (I know, but Masterchef isn’t on anymore), and checking my Facebook while writing this post. Screens are everywhere nowadays and they will keep appearing.

Astrid Scott’s talk last week at University about Research Development in big Media Companies was really inspiring when it came to all the new technologies that we will soon be ‘in touch’ with, and before we know it, we might find ourselves owning a talking fridge in five to ten years.

Moreover, spending money on digital devices becomes almost inevitable if you want to be connected, even  with your friends. TV’s and Radio’s are now slowly being replaced by smartphones and smaller devices but their cost isn’t getting any smaller.                            It is also getting socially acceptable to think and relate to older generations as ‘not as connected’ and not big consumers when it comes to new technologies. If your mum doesn’t type on her phone with one finger.. is she really your mum? It has become a ‘thing’ in society where older generations aren’t as comfortable with technology as the youth is.

In this reading, Chris Lederer and Megan Brownlow argue that “In Pakistan, where around 70 percent of the population is under 35, E&M spending is projected to grow at a 10 percent CAGR  (Compound Annual Growth Rate) through 2020.” In opposition, Germany and Japan sport a meager E&M of about 2 percent.

In conclusion, growth in E&M spending is more influenced by the age of a country’s population than by its wealth. It obviously takes more factors to the E&M growth like mentioned in the introduction, but Youth seems to be, along with its connection to technology today, getting more and more influent to the market.

THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

by Klaus Schwab

Nowadays it has almost become hard to be and feel ‘disconnected’ as digital technology grows faster than ever. I’m not a science expert but Google told me that the First Industrial Revolution used water and steam power to mechanize production, the Second one used electric power to create mass production. The Third Industrial Revolution used electronics and information technology to automate production. Now we are living through a Fourth Industrial Revolution; the Digital Revolution. It is characterized by what Schwab describes in his reading : a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres.

One notion really struck my attention in this reading

I was particularly attracted to the notion of Remote Monitoring as I have recently found myself surprisingly being surrounded by it. Schwab describes it as ‘a widespread application of the IoT. Any package, pallet or container can now be equipped with a sensor, transmitter or radio frequency identification (RFID) tag that allows a company to track where it is as it moves through the supply chain.’

Indeed, this tracking system helps customers continuously track an item/car almost in real life time as they progress until being delivered/at destination. It is hard to imagine such technology has become so rapidly and sneakily a -normal- part of our every day life.

The first company that comes to my mind is indeed Uber and how they can nowadays track a driver’s car and let you know exactly where the car is on a map. Ordering a pizza has never been that fun, being able to track on the company’s website when your pizza is being cooked, wrapped and delivered. Moreover, mails and parcels can nowadays be tracked and followed until delivered. It is a continuously growing technology and I would have never thought such advanced technology would become so present and affordable in our lives. Five years ago it would have sounded more like some ‘futuristic spying stuff’.

I did a bit of online search related to track monitoring and especially on the Uber company; it is the company I am the most familiar with as I catch an uber every weekend after work.

For most of the users, services like Uber are so popular not just for convenience or easy availability of cars but also for the sense of safety that comes from knowing that your car is being tracked by GPS. I’d like to know how this advanced technology works and see if it is as safe as ‘everyone’ claims it.

In an article on http://gadgets.ndtv.com/ it states :

“The truth however, is that these cars are not being tracked by standalone GPS systems that would be hard or impossible to disable by a driver – instead, going off the radar is apparently as simple as turning a phone off. That’s because Uber uses a phone-based GPS system, which it uses to track its cars in much the same way that it tracks the location of a user.”

Now that is something I wish I did not read.

So how far is the tracking monitoring system going to go ?

“In the near future, similar monitoring systems will also be applied to the movement and tracking of people” – Klaus Schwab

To be continued…