Beginning Of The End Of E-Mail

Are you or are you not sick and tired about the current most popolar method of global communication? Is it not ineffective, time consuming, error-prone, hard to manage and after all to fast to cope? Yes I am talking about emails.

And yes eventually Emails will be gone!!

We will have to get used to new communication tools that enable us to work more efficiently on our daily projects. Emails will not vanish but will have to be cut back to what they were in the beginnings of the digital world: A digital letter. Projectbased communication via email is a waste of time and resources however it is difficult to eradicate.

I found the below article from Lisa DiCarlo in forbes.com. It was written in July 2005, so you can tell the problem is not new but for me personally the situation is getting worse.

NEW YORK - Earlier this week I was reminded of the opening lines of the popular 1980s Whitney Houston song "The Greatest Love of All," which declared that "children are the future" and that adults should "teach them well and let them lead the way."

If that's true, then e-mail may be at the beginning of a long, slow decline in usage. According to a study by the Pew Internet and American Life project, barely 5% of American teens aged 12 to 17 prefer e-mail over instant messaging as their digital communications method of choice. Teens view e-mail as a way to talk to "old people" or institutions like companies. Kids, it seems, prefer the immediacy and mobility of instant messaging and text messaging to e-mail, which they might some day refer to as snail mail, the same way most people over 30 refer to the U.S. Postal Service.

Pew reports that some teens have as many as seven screen names to accommodate their enormous IM buddy lists, which typically limit users to 200 names. Why does any of this matter? Why should you care how kids spend their parents' dough? Well, like Whitney says, these kids are the future and they're leading the way. American teens, an astonishing 87% of whom are online, are what's helping drive the consumer electronics industry, including development of new products. Witness the Walt Disney Co.'s (nyse: DIS - news - people ) foray into the kiddie-cell phone business with Sprint (nyse: FON - news - people ).

Further, millions of today's teens will become tomorrow's white-collar workforce. What they are used to using and prefer to use today will carry over to corporate America in the next decade. As the younger digital generation infiltrates the workforce they will take their preferences with them. They will set the technology agenda. That's not to say that e-mail use is dropping. It is still the most popular Internet application. According to the Radicati Group, over 130 billion e-mail messages will be transmitted worldwide every day this year. That number should more than double to 276 billion in 2009.

Corporate users and consumers will swap 14 billion IMs per day worldwide this year, a figure that Radicati expects will more than triple to 46.5 billion by 2009. The number of free public IM accounts will grow to 1.1 billion in 2009 from 816 million today, while corporate IM accounts will more than double to 126 million in that time frame. Pew says that 89% of Internet users use e-mail daily, about the same percentage as 2000, but that the "popularity of e-mail and intensity of its use is waning" in favor of IM. For corporate users, IM might provide a good alternative to e-mail. The scourge of spam and viruses have not yet hijacked IM services as they have e-mail systems like Microsoft's (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) Outlook.

Further, so-called "presence" technology, which lets users know when and if you are available, are becoming an increasingly valuable business tool. Businesses "see the value of IM and are giving in to users' demands for it," says Teney Takahashi of the Radicati Group. On top of that, Microsoft itself may be helping to marginalize e-mail with the upcoming version of Office. It lets teams of people work together in real time on documents, which bypasses the need for e-mail altogether. It's not likely that IM will ever replace e-mail, simply because the latter is such an ingrained part of daily business life and because the lack of IM standards and protocols inhibit interoperability between different systems. But there's no denying where the momentum is. Just look to the children.

The end of the CD is near

Turnover figures decrease rapidly. Finally the silver sound carrier really seems to fade away.

Three weeks ago two million readers found a CD in the "Mail on Sunday" of the musician, who today is called "Prince" again. "Planet Earth" as the current album was also presented at the entrance free of charge to the guests of his London appearance .

Now the extravagant publication methods of the dwarf from Minneapolis are as legendary as his early records. But obviously Prince again sharpened his sense of business: What is a CD worth after more than hundred years of recording? And after 25 years of digital self-destruction?

If even local bands do no longer sell CDs at concerts to not endanger their fan t-shirt business? What‘s a CD for 15 Euro worth, if a t-shirt brings 30 Euro and is produced in Bangladesh?

For years obituaries have been written about the CD. Now Robert Sandall who was Director of communication at Virgin Records during the crisis years from 1996 onwards is seriously singing the swan song so one can only comment: “It comes to an end”.

Sandall writes in the reputable "Prospect Magazine" that we are to blame.
In the 1982 CD rush nobody in the industry listened to Maurice Oberstein, Polygram boss at that time who said: "We are giving away our master tapes!"

The short term price duplication for CDs was followed by a disastrous decline in value. Musicians realised that concerts served no longer to promote CDs but the other way round.

The figures: In the first business quarter 2007, compared to last year, world-wide CD business again lost around 20%. Sandall writes about the German market: "82 million Germans converted into a nation of bootleggers, who are spending cents on albums, which did cost 40 DM in former times.

The once largest market of Europe today is not larger than the Dutch." The "Prospect Magazines" does not event count the percentage for Germany anymore. France went down 25 percent, Great Britain 20, America 15. The record store chain HMV halved its business within only a year. More severe than the numbers however are the conclusively voiced concerns about the future.
Robert Sandall thoroughly destroys exaggerated hopes that losses can be adjusted by an exploding download trade (40 percent growth in Germany). For him the download boom is hardly more than a proof for the fact that the music consumption changes and recorded music rapidly loses value.

One accumulates music pieces as rumbling files in cheap devices. CDs and MP3s are what musicians distribute for free, what sticks on magazines or falls out of Sunday newspapers.

In April “Mail on Sunday” was already delivered with "Tubular Bells" to the readers. An album, which established Mike Oldfield’s fame in 1973, above all however it established Richard Branson’s conglomerate Virgin, today a part of the EMI.

While canned music loses out, live performances seem to be moving very dynamically in the opposite direction and are experiencing a renaissance.

If even conservative music buyers, i.e. Heavy Metal fans use free download offers today in order to save their money for journeys to live festivals there is not much to promise to the old CD.

Translated from an article from Michael Pilz, published in the Berliner Morgenpost Newspaper on August 9, 2007.

BE SMART

This is a personal love affair that I have with this beauty. My last car was a Range Rover, before that I had a 5 Series BMW.

The Range did about 1 mile per gallon which at German gas prices is a killer (even for a compay car). But as it is with guys and cars the decision to buy a Range was not entirely rational. So when I had enough of it (and enough fun with it, I have to admit) I decided that now it was time to do something about my CO2 balance. So I bought a SMART. And I bought it fully loaded. Only thing it does not have is power steering (tough guy!) and a GPS (I only use it in town). It is a convertable and has the smallest Diesel engine on the market and it does about 60 mile per gallon in town. Now beat that!!

It has this funky semi automatic, no clutch but stick shift. It is fun to drive and once I am in it, I have more headspace than I had in the Range. I will probably have to drive it for the next 100 years to bring my CO2 balance back to neutral, but I am somehow looking forward to it.

SMART in the US in Fall of 2007 at a dealer next to you. From 14.000 US$

P.S. SMART is a Brand of Mercedes-Benz!

Ever dreamt of knockin out a call center agent?

I found the below article at forbes.com under “communication devices of the future” and automatically had to think about how I would use it. Just imagine how efficient call centers would perform if physical action would be possible to react to bad AND also to good service. Hug or punch the call center agent of your choice. That would certainly give the 3rd dimension back to the flat world!

Empathetic Communications
Sensitive, touchy-feely people need to communicate effectively, too. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon's Project on People and Robots have created The Hug, a multi sensory wireless phone and fuzzy pillow that lets people communicate using sensors, heating pads, gently buzzing motors and arrangements of lights while they carry on a telephone communication. The point of the Hug is to allow a physical interaction to carry over long distances, using the same technology that can carry data and voice.
The functionality of this device may seem pointless or even comical, but the underlying idea of using technology to communicate both emotionally and physically could lead to richer, more personal communications in the future.

TED An incredible think-tank conference

I came across this incredible site and thought this would probably add value to you as well.

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.
The annual conference now brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).

The site makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free. More than 100 talks from our archive are now available, with more added each week. These videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted.
The TED mission: Spreading ideas. We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately, the world. So we're building here a clearinghouse that offers free knowledge and inspiration from the world's most inspired thinkers, and also a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other. Over time, you'll see us add talks and performances from other events, and solicit submissions from you, as well. This site, launched April 2007, is an ever-evolving work in progress, and you're an important part of it. Have an idea? We want to hear from you.

The TED Conference, held annually in Monterey, is still the heart of TED. More than a thousand people now attend — indeed, the event sells out a year in advance — and the content has expanded to include science, business, the arts and all the big global issues facing our world. Over four days, 50 speakers each take an 18-minute slot, and there are many shorter pieces of content, including music, performance and comedy. There are no breakout groups. Everyone shares the same experience. It shouldn't work, but it does. It works because all of knowledge is connected. Every so often it makes sense to emerge from the trenches we dig for a living, and ascend to a 30,000-foot view, where we see, to our astonishment, an intricately interconnected whole.
In recent years, TED has spawned some important extensions.

TEDGlobal is a sister conference held every other year, and in a different country on each occasion. The first conference was held in Oxford, England, in 2005; the second, in June 2007, is to be held in Arusha, Tanzania. The themes of the global conference are slightly more focused on development issues, but the basic TED format is maintained.

TEDTalks began as a simple attempt to share what happens at TED with the world. Under the moniker "ideas worth spreading," talks were released online. They rapidly attracted a global audience in the millions. Indeed, the reaction was so enthusiastic that the entire TED website has been reengineered around TEDTalks, with the goal of giving everyone on-demand access to the world's most inspiring voices.

Today, TED is therefore best thought of as a global community. It's a community welcoming people from every discipline and culture who have just two things in common: they seek a deeper understanding of the world, and they hope to turn that understanding into a better future for us all.