Technology: shaking up businesses, living environments and even our identities.

 Technology was always a tool employed to make our lives easier but now it’s challenging us to fundamentally change our business habits, living environment, and even our personal identities. These were the messages that emerged at the recent XMediaLab conference in Sydney, where creatives and technology folk converged to discuss the future of media creation and consumption.Initially a novel time-wasting device and gizmo to impress your friends, technology like the mobile phone and social networking applications have wholly infiltrated our personal and professional lifestyles. Unless we choose to live outside the system, we’re hopelessly dependent on technology to connect and engage with our surrounding environment.What does this mean for our identity? Before the internet an individual’s experience was typically restricted to our immediate geographic boundaries, defined by a handful of variables - such as social circle, economic pursuits, and media consumption.But the web is an ocean of different identities making it more important than ever to specifically define and express your identity, according to John Tarnoff, CEO of Newspeak Consulting Group and formerly head of show development at DreamWorks Animation SKG (Los Angeles).We’re being called to step up to a new level of competency, to be all things: artistic and technological, mentors and mentees, maintain perspective while being fully engaged.“We must become renaissance people, no longer specialise in narrow knowledge domain. Nor can we be generalists gliding above the fray and touching down where we please.He believes we should treat every action as an opportunity to provide a service, resolving problems through encouragement and support rather than criticism and punishment.“An attitude of service takes our ego out of the equation and brings us present to do ourbest work.”Understanding these base human qualities is important not only for personal identity and collaborating with those around you. It’s also the tools that can be used to appeal to consumers and target your product.Most consumer behaviours can be explained by the seven deadly sins - such as greed, gluttony, and envy - and these should be incorporated into products and services, according to Tim Chang partner at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Norwest Venture Partners. He’s not talking about creating application smut or digital sin, but being mindful of human characteristics when applying ‘gamification’ - building game mechanics into a product or service.“As humans we respond to games, games are just immediate gratification and feedback along a set of measurements and rules. Who doesn't like that?”“When you put these together, you can think about what would real life look like as a computergame.”The success of this strategy has been proven by the emergence of social game developers such as Zynga (words with friends), Angry Birds, and countless others. It has revolutionised the traditional online business models and given rise to “freemium” and micro transaction (MTX) products: hook customers with a free product and make them pay for value-add features and functions (eg. virtual currencies). The free removes the friction from the funnel, Chang said,“If you had just made paid up front that's too much friction, you're asking users to buy something before they fell in love with your service or tried you service.”But the rise of this new paradigm has come at the expense of the old gatekeepers of distribution: record labels, print publishers, and video game developers. We’re moving to the notion that “web is dead”, he said. The death of the traditional e-retailer and ad-serving websites such as eBay, Match.com, those goal was to lure as much traffic as possible to their site.“What you get now is these new layers emerging across mobile social game mechanics, pervading all these verticals. There’s a shifting of guard instead of Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo! the new platform kings are Google, Facebook, Amazon and open standards like HTML5."To see where this is headed, you can look at Japan which is almost a decade ahead of us in its mobile use and adoption. In Japan, according to Kei Shimada founder and CEO of consultancy Infinita, it’s commonplace for people to swipe their phones in public to capture virtual butterflies, representing coupons, and at McDonald’s to hear about meal recommendations.The American fast food giant teamed up with Japan’s largest telco NTT Docomo in 2005, to develop a service where people could use their phones to download food vouchers and then redeem these by “flashing” the device at McDonald’s. Employing a technology called near field communications (NFC), the kasazu coupon system has attracted nearly 20 million subscribers, half of which are “flashed” at a McDonald’s every day, according to Shimada. Not happy with with hordes of teens and tweens buying cheap Big Macs, McDonald’s wanted to deliver more relevant deals by tracking their buying habits in real-time using a customer relationship management system.“If I buy a Big Mac at 2am in Tokyo. They will know I bought a Big Mac and, they won't tell me, but they will know it's unhealthy. The following morning they can push me a coupon for a green salad, that's how it's used.”NTT Docomo recently teamed up with Twitter to allow people to follow each other by touching their phones together.While mobile and internet technologies are helping some countries to design the future, it is being used by other nations to bring their citizens out of the dark ages. In Ghana the market is being flooded with countless unbranded, Chinese-made Android smartphones, which would normally cost $150 but sold for the equivalent of $30.This anecdote was related by Dorothy K. Gordon, director-general of Ghana's Advanced Information Technology Institute (AITI-KACE), a joint-venture between Ghana and India to boost the African nation’s IT capability. She said that bandwidth costs this year are already 20 per cent of their 2010 prices, and are dropping further for the country’s 230 million residents. These factors have opened up the Ghanian market to the world, both as consumer and service provider.“All those people could have internet enabled devices, you have exponential growth inconnectivity. You have internet users, huge numbers of people joining Facebook and other social platforms. What I find fascinating is the understanding of the business of developing new products of using this platform have been done so quickly and effectively. It tells you how different the model is today, and how young that whole industry is.”The disruptive effects of technology are reaching into the depths of our personalities and extend to the furthest reaches of the planet, challenging us in new and exciting ways to exist and thrive in this undefined digital future. [Image Source]