martinjy.com — Martin Young’s blog

Wiki-woki. Straya’s cottoning on

Maybe it’s because I’m immersed in web strategy research for work, but I’m definitely noticing a shift here in Australia around wiki-woki stuff like HDTV, mobile web, RSS, social computing, podcasting, videocasting, wifi, and so on. (What’s wiki-woki? That’s a term my manager likes to use when I talk tech with him.)

Sidenote: If you’re from almost anywhere in the world other than Australia you’ll be thinking “Huh? Podcasting? Wifi? That’s, like totally 2003, dude”. Well, it’s a laconic place down here, and the fact is that the wiki-woki gear just hasn’t had mainstream penetration.

But things are changing. Some thoughts, most of which will be bleeding obvious to anyone who’s close to all this:

1. Broadband’s getting faster and cheaper. 1.5mbps 3gb/3gb ADSL1 plans are hovering around $50 a month, and 5gb ADSL2 plans are about the same (if you’re lucky enough to live near an exchange that’s hooked up). It wasn’t so long ago that 56kbps dial-up set you back $40 a month. You don’t have to be Sergey Brin to realise that cheap fast broadband = video and music for all, not to mention a better browsing experience for regular web sites.
2. Hardware and software is getting faster and better and cheaper. My 2001 20gb G3 iMac Ruby cost me well over $2,000, and boldly proclaimed that it was ready to be my “digital hub” whenever I was. It probably would have been, had I been able to afford a $1,500 digital video camera, a $1,000 digital camera, a $500 iPod, another $400 of RAM so that it would cope with the video editing and $500 for an external hard drive to store all the media. These days you can kit yourself out with a handycam, a digital camera (or maybe just your phonecam?), a fast laptop, an iPod, a big external HDD and a 19″ widescreen for around $3k.
3. Free wifi is on the rise. More and more of the mobile phones offered by our telcos for $0 on their Cap plans are wifi-enabled, the iPod Touch is already here and hopefully the iPhone will also make an appearance shortly. However, there’s hardly anywhere to actually USE the wifi. We still talk of hotspots down here. IMHO a hotspot should be the place that doesn’t have wifi. But Fed Square recently announced they would offer a free wifi network and I reckon this will kick things off. Their timing, I’m sure, is nothing to do with their 5th anniversary and everything to do with recognising that wifi device ownership is increasing. I reckon wifi’ll be all over the place in the capital cities by Grand Final Day 2008. Obviously this makes owning a Touch or a wifi-enabled phone vastly more appealing.
4. The rise of social networking is enabling Joe Blow to research products more thoroughly before purchasing them. I recently posed the question “health insurance - yes or no” on my family & friends blog and the discussion stretched to 35 comments (usually I get one or two). The slackarse hardware and software vendors who used to put out reasonable products, trick us into buying them and then sit back and watch us struggle to set them up and/or use them alongside the other products in our lives have realised that we (a) have learnt how to use our social networks for research, (b) can easily access those networks through cheap computing, and (c) consequently won’t buy anything that our network tells us is crap. Now we buy products or use software that works seamlessly with whatever we already own.
5. Tiny software companies are creating amazing web-based applications that do just one or two things very well. (And they’re making mobile versions of them.) I’m thinking Remember The Milk, Gmail (OK, so that’s not a tiny company), YouTube, Wordpress, Flickr, iTunes (OK, another not so small company) and so on. The key here is that those apps are built for the community, as opposed to products like Microsoft Office that are built for business. As such, the personal apps are much more personal/interesting/fun/simple/rewarding to use, and we’re more productive/entertained/relaxed/connected/happy as a result.
6. Podcasting, videocasting and RSS are going mainstream. iTunes is making it very easy (automatic, in fact) to obtain regular content whenever it’s published but watch it whenever you want. If you own an iPod you use iTunes to sync up your content and take it with you, even if that means just taking it into the loungeroom and plugging it into your TV. At the same time, cheap and capable hardware and software is enabling creative types to produce and distribute content for a fraction of the cost of the “traditional” processes. Variety and choice are becoming a reality.

Joe Blow is tech’d up, he’s getting and sharing content like never before, and he’s not going to tolerate any more crap from corporations that treat him like a dummy.