Listening to a futurologist is always a voyage of discovery; you know that the speaker isn’t directly familiar with the business in the room, but they’ve invariably been invited to shake us up a bit.
Peter Hinssen, the chairman of nexxworks, with the obligatory missing capitalisation, kickstarted this year’s Cable Congress in Warsaw.
We were, he said, living in a world where technology has been absolutely normal. Not surprisingly he saw lots of old technology people in the audience.
Hinnsen took us through a collection of his favourite photographs and newspaper clippings. Along the way he lightly liabled Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg for his purchase of What’s App. One gets the impression Zuckerberg knows him and wouldn’t mind.
Facebook is one of the GAFAA Mafia; the collection of five companies that are responsible for much of the action on the internet. Between them Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Alibaba are creating the disruption the cable sector yearns to be a part of.
Hinnsen explained how Facebook has gone from having no mobile strategy three years ago to owning two out of five minutes today.
“Cable operators are becoming dumb pipes and that’s scarring the telco industry Sh**less,” said Hinnsen, using post watershed language. “And they are just getting started, the world is turning not into a connected world but one where information is now the oil”.
Reminding delegates of how children enter a TV free tunnel at the age of 11, Hinnsen told us the millennials could be the first generation that doesn’t come out of the tunnel.
In a world of rainforest start-ups, where only a few make the course, the bigger companies are the plantations. So often when the rainforests are imported they die.
Hinnsen’s advice for the cable sector. “I see you focusing on keeping control on the customer … The devices you have when you look through the lens of a millennial they won’t see you as being smart.
When we were asked to email our questions to the speaker it seemed more appropriate that we sent them over What’s App.
