Ian Pearson, BT’s much-quoted futurologist, has gone on record as saying that people will soon need a “digital bubble” to protect them from unwanted marketing messages:
“…there will be chips all over the high street relaying information and you will be bombarded with digital information everywhere you go,” said Pearson. “You will need a digital bubble force field Û a shield that lets through what you want and blocks everything else.”
His vision seems identical to that scene in Minority Report, with Tom Cruise’s character striding through a mall being bombarding by advertising holograms.
Unfortunately, what Mr Pearson seems to have overlooked is that this type of marketing would be a clear breach of The Data Protection Act in the UK and thus illegal. Other markets have similar laws – or would introduce them damn quickly if a Minority Report scenario were to emerge.
An alternative scenario, which could be closer to what Mr Pearson has in mind, would be something like Siemen’s Digital Graffiti or Nokia’s Local Marketing Solution. This may involve promotors broadcasting unsolicited messages, but you’d need to have an application on your phone installed and switched on to receive them, and both systems allow filtering of unwanted messages. So, the permission lies in the recieving end, rather than the sending end.
If I were an academic looking for a project, I think a smart, learning filtering system would be a worthy project right now. The challenge would be to have something easy to use, yet sophisticated enough to allow for the nuances of personal preferences. Plus it would have to have the ability to learn on-the-fly based on user reactions.
There’s also an opportunity to build a powerful, trusted third party brand who you allow to do the minutae of your filtering for you. In one sense, this is what we did at ZagMe. One of the reasons why subscribers loved the service was that a lot of filtering was done behind the scenes and they could tweak their own settings as well.
This means that people only got messages they were, at least, very receptive to, which makes the system better for both promotor and customer alike.
Mr Pearson went to on speculate that his “bubbles” would also broadcast personal information about people, like today’s personal home pages on their websites. In other words, he thinks there’s a future for MoSoSo’s too. I think he might be right about that element, at least.
Story via ZD Net. Makes a change from their fixation with reprinting press releases from anti virus companies reporting infestations of mobile viruses, which means that one more single occurrence has been spotted.
Image from The Bubble Man show.
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