Traveling to another city could be a lot more interactive in the next few years. Picture yourself stepping out of the airport and point your phone’s video camera at something only to see any news story, dining menu, coupons, short documentaries or whatever you can think of. That seems to be the next step for news.
Jeff Jarvis posted some points on his blog BuzzMachine about these possibilities. Out of all the videos this one is my favorite:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b64_16K2e08]
This is an amazing opportunity for news organizations to reconnect with their customers and get some optimal advertising opportunities that can garner the amount of money they need to run an efficient business.
Every address, every building, every business has a story to tell. Visualize your world that way: Look at a restaurant and think about all the data that already swirls around it — its menu, its reviews and ratings and tags (descriptive words), its recipes, its ingredients, its suppliers (and how far away they are, if you care about that sort of thing), its reservation openings, who has been there (according to social applications), who do we know who has been there, its health-department reports, its credit-card data (in aggregate, of course), pictures of its interior, pictures of its food, its wine list, the history of the location, its decibel rating, its news…
And then think how we can annotate that with our own reviews, ratings, photos, videos, social-app check-ins and relationships, news, discussion, calendar entries, orders…. The same can be said of objects, brands — and people.
Jarvis suggests adding these qualities to people as well as to buildings and points of interest, but I’m not sure how I feel about that. First that would require us to have some kind of RFID tag on us at all times, allowing the government to track everything (even what they can’t right now). But also, I’m just not sure there is a good market for that. Yes, it’s great to know more about other people, but there is a sense of privacy that I know would like to have, and I think I’m part of majority in that respect. (Note I said “sense” because I am aware that privacy is realitve nowadays.)
Anyway, if news organizations (such as Gannett or News Corp) could pick this technology up and get it working before Google does it for free, it might be the direction needed for news to get back on track to a successful business model.