Every day we create and store more digital stuff, cramming hard drives, Web storage spaces, and memory cards with photos, songs, e-mails, and massive multimedia documents.
Problem number one is that this rampaging river of data is coming faster than we can organize it. Problem number two is that it is spreading across multiple devicesPCs, handhelds, cell phonesmaking it difficult to remember where we stored that e-invite to Warren Buffett's birthday bash. So why hasn't anyone yet invented the perfect personal content management system that catalogs all this stuff?
Panelists tackled the question at the 2005 Cyberposium conference held at Harvard Business School on January 29th. The panel, called "Beating the Flood: Personal Content Management in a Converging World," brought together executives from companies who are offering parts of the solution.
Irwin Gross, general partner at Worldview Technology Partners, outlined what he sees as major opportunities in the personal content management field:
- Easy ways to move content around from one device to another.
- Managing intellectual property rights and updating them for the modern world.
- Management tools for creators and users of RSS and other content feeds.
- Silent, automated, reliable backup.
- Sharing contentwhere, when, and how should Uncle Bill have access to your family photos?
The first opportunity, moving content around, "is the biggest opportunityno one does it," Gross said.
For Microsoft's Joe Belifore, general manager of the Windows eHome division, the single device where it all (or much of it) comes together is a television set powered by a PC running Microsoft's MediaCenter, which manages music and photo files and high-definition TV; provides access to e-mail and the Web; and manages other content as well. An inexpensive adaptor allows users to share that content on other TVs and devices around the house, he said.
At Yahoo, the answer is to provide "anywhere, anytime" access to your content through Web services such as Yahoo Photos, said Brad Garlinghouse, vice president of Yahoo Communications Products. Yahoo sees itself as "building bridges to islands of data" that we all are creating, he said. Yahoo provides a wide range of Internet-based services including e-mail and messaging, content aggregation, music downloads, personal financial info, and content delivery for cell phones.
There is no search technology that is going to enable the user to find everything she or he is looking for. |
Irwin Gross, Worldview Technology Partners |
For start-up search company Blinkx, the answer is to provide a contextualized search both of your own computer's contents and the wider Web, said Suranga Chandratillake, co-founder. Traditional searches using Boolean terms will not be able to keep up with the proliferation of formats and the increase in locations where we store data, he said. Blinkx is able to peer into a wide variety of media typesTV listings, pdf-formatted files, e-mail, a spreadsheet on your desktop computer, blogsand guides users through the search, quickly culling results to get at what the user is most interested in.
Google is assembling the parts of personal content management, but it is not clear yet how they will come together, said Lars Perkins, a Google general manager whose photo cataloging product Picasa was recently purchased by the company and made available for free. One underlying problem, he said, is that basic PC file and storage systems were designed in the 1960s, and did not envision today's multiple formats and huge file sizes. And people don't take the time to organize their information.
Eventually, the best answer will be smarter search, Perkins said, characterizing search technology as in just the second inning of its evolution. The right user experience will combine services and software and be transparent to users, he said.
"But is search the best technology to underlie a personal content management system?" asked moderator Wade Roush, an editor at MIT's Technology Review.
With content tagging and taxonomies, search can be made much more effective, said Perkins. And "people like to browse," said Chandratillakethe key is making that browse more productive at each click along the way. Still, he admitted, it was difficult to envision just one product that could serve all the information management needs of consumers.
"There is no search technology that is going to enable the user to find everything she or he is looking for," said venture capitalist Gross.
There was debate as to what the correct business model would be to power a personal content management system. Microsoft's Belifore said consumers want to spend only a small amount of money and get a highly leveraged benefit in return. The challenge for entrepreneurs, he said, is that asking consumers to pay something like $11.95 a month is a massive sales job.
But Gross pointed to the multibillion-dollar market for phone ring tones as one piece of evidence that "there is an enormous amount of money to be made." The challenge is finding the content and services that will convince consumers to change their habits.
If you can provide people with a way to get the information they need quickly, you will make money, Chandratillake said.
One undertaking that will help towards development of a PCM system, Belifore said, is the work of the Digital Living Network Alliance, which includes some 180 companies. The group is developing standards by which various devices can swap content.
"But we all agree interoperability has a huge way to go," he said.