E-Media Tidbits

Esthr, via Flickr (Creative Commons license) Yahoo's Caterina Fake chatting with Niklas Zennstrom of KaZaa, Skype and Venice/Juiced this weekend in Munich.

Earlier today at Digital Lifestyle Days in Munich (an event hosted by German publisher Hubert Burda), a broad collection of technologists, developers, entrepreneurs and thinkers presented toan audience of media professionals and the like. (Streaming video. For a detailed conference report, see Bruno Giussani's lunchoverIP.)

Caterina Fake took the stage yesterday. Fake is the designer and artist who co-founded Flickr, and is now heading Yahoo's technology development group. According to her personal site, she is also writing a novel.

Asked about the present, Fake first observed that the dot.com era obscured the origins of the net: this new form of communication arose from a culture of generosity. Since then a whole new audience has come online, the infrastructure is there, interfaces have been developed and are understood, and new tools are available. All of this this has yielded a new set of behaviors.

What about the future? As Fake put it, we are confronted with the "sunset of the Web." She said, "The idea of a browser, of a Web page, is becoming less and less important. The Web is breaking apart. We set up our services online, but are then looking at the data on a mobile phone or PDA."

Fake described feeling "trapped" in her hotel room, where she had to make a call from a landline phone while working on a laptop with a wired connection to the Internet.

What does this mean for new services? Your device knows where you are and where your friends are. Fake was convinced that the next wave would be in "geo-locative' information.

Have you started geotagging all your content yet?