Side Note: March Madness



Hello, Mister...

March Madness has several meanings apart from the popular American reference to some kind of baseball thing that has to do with college teams, presumably in March. To me March Madness is two things: first the mating season for rabbits (need I say more) and secondly this March for sure, a hole slate of weird ‘stuff’ – and don’t tell me that is because whichever planet is in retrograde.

 

Under ‘stuff’ I would file the funky weather for instance. That is, it’s been freaking cold and snow has been falling in all the wrong places, like South Jersey wants snow, really!  Dump it in Lake Placid please.

 

Next on my ‘stuff’ list:  MH370, the plane that disappeared, crashed, was blown up, hijacked by aliens, or swallowed by David Blaine who will spit it out in a month.  The ensuing madness of cultural “lost in translation” miscommunication, obsessive über-sharing of information of the wrong kind by the media, and the rampant conspiracy theories make it that more baffling that in our world today a plane could disappear mid-flight to never (?) be seen again.  

The Culture Code

There’s a book with that title I wish I had read after a year or so of living in the States.  The Culture Code found me in 2006, the year it was published and it was a veritable “aha” experience.  Clotaire Rapaille, cultural anthropologist and marketing expert (not without controversies), originally from France takes an advertising approach of distilling each experience, i.e. cultural differentiator into one word.  He gives the example of car advertisement in The Culture Code. 

 

What would the one word be that comes to mind when advertising cars to Americans?  It would be “freedom” – look at the truck commercials in particular – the car in the wild-wild west scaling some desert mountain, or roaming freely deserted down town streets:  it screams freedom to move around as you please.  How would you sell a car to Germans?  “Precision” – Germans want to know their car is of highest quality precision engineering possible.  No “over-engineered” Mercedes would ever come out of Detroit.

Big Data an Economic Dud?

James Glanz of the The New York Times asks the question if Big Data is overrated as the big new diver to spur the economy in an article from August 17th: Is Big Data an Economic Big Dud?

Big Data has been called the "new oil", a new asset group, but I agree with the article that we're talking about lateral shift of economic spending, not real growth. As Glanz points out as far as retail is concerned the digital world is replacing the physical one so there's no economic growth per se, but a shift. 

My Future

All this talk about trends makes me think about what I would like to see happen in the future. 

I had a talk with my friend and editor of my film, Terry Katz about what the next ‘big’ thing is going to be.  He agrees with me that Big Data will continue to capture our imagination for some time to come, but he’s hot on 3D printers.  I still have to wrap my brain around that. I’m thinking of cartridges in my house that contain, glass, plastic, metals, paper, poop?  At what temperatures are these 3D printers ‘printing’ if they work with metal – how safe are they?  I can go and BUY glasses I do not need to print one each time I wish to enjoy a glass of wine.  

The Cyber-Gap

The internet has opened up doors to unimaginable wealth of information, education and commerce opportunities; it has enabled emerging pro-democracy movements in Egypt and Algiers, has empowered dissidents around the world and is closing geographical and physical gaps around the world.

The Internet is hands-down a great enabler. At the same time the gap between educated and under-educated, poor and rich, rural and urban, empowered and disenfranchised is growing – rapidly.

How are young people around the world going to engage when they have no internet access? No access to on-line education, commerce, potential jobs and clients, information, social exchange, passing of ideas, or civic engagement? The more our world moves onto the internet the wider the gaps becomes between the haves and have not’s of internet access and economic power. This is also a problem for large patches of rural areas in the United States.

There are huge patches of land, some spanning entire states with a few urban exceptions with no cell phone and internet access through wireless towers, cable or T1 lines. In the US Satellite dishes are the only solution for those remote areas, if they want internet access. Satellites are expensive to install and their monthly fees can be too much of a burden for a house hold budget.

If we want to keep up economically with the rest of the world (Asia foremost and Europe too) we have to make sure that all areas of the United States have access to broadband internet. The lost potential of talent is too great to ignore.