Sept. 3, 2013, 6:01 a.m. EDT
Top tech trends changing how we live, work
Technologies you don’t know about: ‘mocial,’ ‘FOMO”
Technologies you don’t know about: ‘mocial,’ ‘FOMO”
By Amy Hoak, MarketWatch
Howard
Tullman is a trend spotter. And he says there has been an alarming increase in
the number of things you know nothing about.
These concepts affect the
places you work and shop, as well as your life at home, said the chairman of
Tribeca Flashpoint Media Arts Academy and managing partner of G2T3V, a
technology venture capital fund. In a recent talk at 1871, a co-working center
for digital startups in Chicago, Tullman gave attendees a crash course on
today’s new vocabulary.
Below are some examples.
‘Porous workplace’ and ‘Wiki-Work’
These days, work is done
everywhere.
Your
home, your office, your home office. More than that, you need a "porous
workspace," where you can work any time, any place.
It’s changing the way
that offices are designed and making a home office or work nook a must in the
modern household. It’s turning the local Starbucks into a work hub. And that
blurred line between office and home, full-time and freelance, will only get
blurrier over time.
A porous workplace is one
that allows more employees to engage in projects, regardless of location. And
wiki-work describes how the web has permitted employers to distribute work in
“new and amazing ways,” allowing, for example, the stay-at-home mom with a Ph.D
to work on a project or college students to earn extra cash, Tullman said.
“Everything is going to
be about real time and not real place,” he said.
In the future, more
people will piecemeal their workloads, working multiple freelance jobs instead
of full-time positions, he said. “By 2020, 40% of the U.S. population is going
to be acting as free agents,” he said.
There will likely be more
sharing of office spaces and resources, he said. Or people may just work from
their dining room table.
Just consider the website
TaskRabbit, where people are able to outsource errands and jobs to a community
of those willing to do the work. They’re people who have scraps of time while
they’re commuting, or people who work after hours. They’re retirees and
stay-at-home moms. And other matchmaking sites are going up all the time,
Tullman said.
‘Video uber alles’
Don’t feel like reading
the dry instructions to build your bookcase? IKEA provides online video
instructions for the assembly of home products.
And more of that is to
come. In fact, much of what we learn will eventually become video-based, from
finding out how to assemble toys on Christmas morning to taking piano lessons,
Tullman said.
‘Mocial 2.0’
Simply put, “mocial” is a
combination of mobile and social, and suggests how everything we do is
connected to the phones we carry around in our pockets and purses, Tullman
said. Given that our phones have GPS capabilities, soon companies will be able
to tell a lot more about us.
“When you go into a
store, we can see your movements in your phone,” Tullman said. Stores could
track your “dwell time,” or how long you looked at a display, for example. That
could help retailers make more strategic decisions about how they lay out goods
on their floor.
“There are a few
companies that are doing in-store tracking and metrics,” he said, but in the
future “it will be an industry.”
Companies typically have
no qualms about using your information.
For example, credit-card
companies can predict who will get divorced in the first few years of marriage,
he said. These companies care about your marital bliss because if you get
divorced, you are more likely to dishonor your bills. They look for same-city
hotel charges, flowers sent to an address other than your home,
self-improvement charges and if you’ve been in bars that are aimed at singles,
Tullman said.
‘Niche
networks,’ ‘manufactured addiction’ and ‘FOMO.’
Social
media status updates have helped create a “fear of missing out” (or FOMO) among
people. This causes them to be competitive in virtual activities for rewards of
badges—not money. It also makes them feel like their lives aren’t as exciting
as those of their Facebook peers.
“Status and the ability
to have all this crazy personal information…sucks us into this fear that
someone is doing something cooler or more or exciting,” Tullman said. “We all
get caught in it.”
This can also create what
he calls “manufactured addiction,” concern, for instance, that you’re No. 97
out of someone’s 100 friends. People become obsessed with getting a better spot
on the list.
That’s not to say there
isn’t a backlash brewing.
People
have a growing desire to cut out the noise, and “seize back the conversation
from the blowhards and big mouths,” he said. “Niche networks” are narrowly
focused, and involve the assembly of posts that members will find worth
listening to and talking about.
Amy Hoak is a MarketWatch editor and columnist based in Chicago.
Follow her on Twitter @amyhoak.
