A sell-out crowd joined ADClub DC for a Nov. 4 luncheon featuring Vint Cerf, Google’s VP and Chief Internet Evangelist. Cerf is a computer scientist whose contributions have been recognized with honorary degrees and awards that include the National Medal of Technology, the Turing Award and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Widely known as one of the “Fathers of the Internet,” Cerf, second from left in photo, is the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the Internet. Cerf served in multiple instrumental roles at DC’s former MCI, including leading a team of engineers to design advanced networking frameworks, including Internet-based solutions for delivering a combination of data, information, voice and video services for business and consumer use.
In his role at Google, he is responsible for identifying new technologies to support the development of advanced, Internet-based products and services from Google. He is also an active public face for Google.
Cerf addressed a number of questions during his presentation. One was regarding his vision about changes in the way we communicate. He noted that there is a new set of modalities starting to show up. One is gestural interaction with computers, such as making hand gestures in free space or touching a surface and making gestures that way; and the other is translation from one language to another. Google is doing a lot of work in this area. They handle 51 different languages that they translate back and forth, and are now working on real-time translation.
Cerf speculated about the trends towards more instant communications such as texting, Twitter and instant messaging preferences over email, especially among the younger generation. He speculated that the reason for the preference is because they are in the same time zone with most of their other friends. As they get older and their friends move away they loose the time-zone immediacy of interaction and that forces them to use deferred modes of communication. It will be interesting to watch as younger generations get older to see if their patterns of use change.
The recently introduced Google Wave is an experiment exploring the idea that all the various forms of interacting could be combined into a single interface - with the Wave program, a communication can be started and those involved can respond with any number of communications tools, such as a blog or instant messaging - and the Wave program will inject the communications into the appropriate target application. He noted, this could have some interesting side effects in that interaction can result into being permanently archived and indexed providing discovery and possibly legal discoverable. He thinks the unexpected side effects of tying together various forms of communications media will introduce both surprises and changes in our use, as we think more carefully about where our communications might show up.
When asked if he thought print would die and, if so, when, he said he does not think it will die. He noted the example of ebooks in comparison to the characteristics of the physical printed books. E-books can’t be resold, given to the library, given to a friend, shared with another e-book reader and there is some question about their permanence over time.
To the question, will technology become even more important to advertisers, marketers and communicators and, if so, how and why. He noted, the short answer is there is a proliferation of ways of interacting with each other and information supplied to us. For example, Google Maps, Docs, E-mail, Search, Earth are all enabling mechanisms for communications. All of us who care about advertising will see ways of using these different media to present relevant advertising to people who are interested. He anticipates that as we increase the number of ways we are enabled to interact with each other, there will be a path for creative ways of delivering relative information in the form of advertising. We have to stop ourselves from thinking too quickly about our previous modes of advertising and start thinking more about how people can interact with the information we are presenting and then going farther in enabling transactions.