D5: Hanging Out With Digerati

As a self declared innovation junkie it doesn’t get any better then being at D5: All Things Digital last week. Need I say more than Bill Gates and Steve Jobs on stage together for the first time in 20 years? It was incredible. I know I date myself but I had an Apple 2-C for heavens sake! These two iconic visionaries led us to enabling technology with the potential to change the world. For that they are entitled to awe and respect. But for my money we are slow to leverage it for things that really matter; better health care, education, public safety, and a higher wage innovation economy.

My takeaway from D5 is we are moving headlong into a world where all things are digital and digital media behemoths are waking up from a deep sleep. Kudos to Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher from the Wall Street Journal for convening such an impressive group of digital media leaders. I was proud to be there. We are fortunate that Walt Mossberg will co-host BIF-3 with Bill Taylor and an exciting line-up of innovation storytellers on October 10-11 in Providence. I am confident that we will advance the Business Innovation Factory mission to enable collaborative innovation at BIF-3.

Is Content or Platform King?

Now that the jetlag and IT star gazing from D5 has worn off, I am left with a strong impression of the evolving digital media battle field and its polarized combatants. In one corner is big media with an underexploited library of digital assets. If anyone thinks that big media will relinquish control of distribution rights and advertising revenue from their content without a death fight just watch the $1 billion lawsuit filed by Viacom against Google/YouTube to block them from posting the latest video clips from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert without sharing the advertising booty.

Les Moonves (CBS), Ann Moore (Time Warner), Phillipe Dauman (Viacom), and Peter Chernin (News Corp) all shared confident “content rules” arguments with D5 participants. They are convinced that content will drive value and are aggressively building capacity to package content for distribution across multiple distribution channels.

In the opposite corner are the upstart platform companies that create motivated user communities and aggregate eyeballs to capture advertising dollars. Google has taken the industry by storm leveraging its commanding lead in the search market into an advertising sales juggernaut. Google’s acquisition of You Tube puts it at the center of the user generated content revolution.

Chad Hurley and Steve Chen from You Tube were clearly the upstarts at the D5 big media picnic. They are the new media icons for the inexorable trend toward user generated content.

Steve Jobs demonstrated how easy it is to watch You Tube videos on the big screen TV in your family room with an Apple TV set top box and a broadband connection to the web. IP based platforms and networks are the new mantra and D5 reinforced my belief that we will be able to move digital content seamlessly across our PDA, laptop, and television screens within the next 3-5 years.

The Rhode Island Advantage

D5 was a great opportunity to pitch Rhode Island. Most were surprised to learn that Walt Mossberg comes from the Ocean State! There were no other state economic development people at the conference. (There was one other country however as Ireland had an impressive presence.) I can assure you that no one was spared our Rhode Island innovation @ scale and Business Innovation Factory story. Most were intrigued by the notion of a state as a real world test bed and intuitively get why Rhode Island is well positioned to leverage its size to pull it off. The real attention grabber is RI-WINs. I came back from Carlsbad energized by the interest in our effort to be the first state in the country with a border-to-border broadband wireless network as a platform for enterprise innovation.

D5 only strengthened my conviction that we need to make innovation central to how we reposition our economy. Jobs and income growth depends on it. Better solutions for health care, education, and public safety depend on it. It is good to be back in Rhode Island. We have a lot of work to do.

RELATED STUFF:

• Watch the Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Highlight Video from D5
• See Walt Mossberg in action at BIF-3 in October
• Register for BIF-3