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Rosensweig (left), chief operating officer of Yahoo! and a keynote
speaker at the conference. Photo © Nathan Mandell |
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Tech
conference highlights growing communications convergence
Because
technology evolves with startling rapidity, the coming years
will feature innovations that until recently seemed more the
domain of speculative fiction than everyday reality.
That view has, of course, surfaced before, since each generation
has seen its own technological marvels. But this message was
again voiced by experts at the Kellogg
Technology Conference (KTC), held March 30 at the James
L. Allen Center. Titled “Technology Today for Business
Tomorrow,” the conference focused on information technology,
as well as communications and entertainment media.
To keep up, experts said, people better get with the program
— the most up-to-date program, that is. For consumers,
that means leveraging the software and hardware that enables
them to send information back and forth among personal devices
— cellular phone, PC, Blackberry, laptop, TV, digital
music player and whatever other gadgets may join the existing
throng.
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Matthew
J. Szulik, chairman, CEO and president of RedHat, Inc.
Photo © Nathan Mandell
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For businesses, keeping up with technology means incorporating
open-source software programming into their IT systems. It also
means understanding the impact of nanotechnology as it makes
its way into the mainstream, and knowing how to market the newest
applications, many of which have never before been branded.
This intersection of technology and business is an exciting
place to work and study because new technology is “permeating
the consumer mindset,” said Pooneet Goel ’05, co-chair
of speakers and panels at the conference, which for the last
decade had been known as the Digital Frontier Conference. The
new name, said KTC organizers, is more inclusive and considers
the average consumer in greater detail.
“Take ring tones, for example,” said Sharmila Ray
05, KTC’s conference co-chair of marketing. “At
conception there was no idea that they would become a multibillion-dollar
market worldwide.” Similarly, “the concept of a
networked home in which you can order groceries online via an
Internet panel on your refrigerator is just emerging into the
mainstream,” Ray said. “This will redefine the consumer
experience in terms of efficiency.”
Other technology with obvious applications, at least to one’s
social network, is now available through a beta version of Yahoo
360, said Dan Rosensweig, chief operating officer of Yahoo!
and a keynote speaker at the conference.
Calling it the centerpiece of Yahoo’s My Media feature,
Yahoo! 360 is a one-stop shopping tool that combines blogs,
instant messaging, photo storage and sharing, Internet radio
and the technology to send text and photos from a person’s
mobile phone to a blog.
Rosensweig said all this connectivity has led to Yahoo! forming
a “Paranoid Team” that works around the clock to
maintain customer security.
Yahoo!, which in March celebrated its 10th anniversary, spent
these years pulling in an audience, said Rosensweig, who has
been COO for three years. In its second decade, the Sunnyvale,
Calif.-based company is focusing on “monetization, globalization
and disruptive technology to disrupt the technology of other
companies,” he said.
“We even ask our own staff, ‘How would you disrupt
this company?’ It forces you to stay ahead of the game,”
Rosensweig said. “You have to keep your head on a swivel
because of all the competition.”
Competition is also heating up in the open-source market, an
industry that has grown tremendously in the last five years,
said experts on the “Transforming Impact of Open Source”
panel.
In the mid-1990s, they said, only educational institutions and
a few companies made use of open-source software, software whose
basic code is made available for others to alter and customize.
But in the last five years, companies worldwide, especially
those in China and India, have been using Linux — the
archetypal open-source platform — and its competitors
as an alternative to Microsoft Windows.
To generate revenue, many companies that distribute open-source
software use a dual-license, or hybrid, model, explained panel
member Jeff Veis ’91, vice president of marketing and
business development at ActiveGrid, a commercial open source
company.
A General Public License allows users to modify and distribute
the software according to the license agreement. A commercial
license, which costs more, allows users to keep their modifications
as proprietary secrets, usually for competitive reasons.
Members on the “Unique Challenges of Technology Marketing”
panel, moderated by Mohanbir Sawhney, the McCormick Tribune
Professor of Technology at Kellogg, agreed that branding is
more important in technology markets than people think, because
brands provide comfort and stability in ever-changing technology
markets. However, branding in technology markets is different
from consumer packaged goods, they said, because the corporate
brand plays a far more important role in the brand hierarchy
than individual product brands.
The panel also commented on the importance of alliances and
partner ecosystems, as technology products tend to be modular
and require many different firms coming together to create offerings
for customers. They agreed that such collaboration can encourage
friction as partners jockey to control the end-customer relationship.
The panel also discussed opportunities to bring technology products
to the masses of consumers in emerging markets such as India
and China, and concurred that business model innovation is important
in creating “appropriate technologies” for emerging
markets.
KTC also featured keynote addresses by Geoffrey Moore, venture
partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures, and Matthew J. Szulik, chairman,
CEO and president of RedHat Inc. Additional panel discussions
considered the landscape of venture financing for the high-tech
sector and the convergence of home entertainment.
Commenting on the conference, Professor Sawhney noted: “Technology
is about creative destruction, disruption and change, whether
it is Yahoo! redefining consumer online services, or Red Hat
redefining the way software is built and marketed. The keynote
speakers and panels eloquently illustrated the change and dynamism
that makes technology markets so exciting.” |
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