... who the hell they are. I just know that at this moment in time, people who can see this billboard are listening to Montovani or that people who can see this billboard are listening to rap.
The billboard then changes its message based on who's receiving the message. Why would I try to sell ocean cruises to kids, or skateboards to older people? The benefit to the driver is they actually see something that's applicable to them. The benefit to the advertiser is that they get their message to the right people. And the guys selling the space can charge more because it is a particularised message to a particularised segment.
Did you work on that project?
No, we didn't. The frustrating thing about a lot of the stuff we work on is that we can't get clearances to talk about it.
How quickly will the sensor world evolve?
I think with this particular vision, we got out in front of ourselves a little bit. We're still working out some of the physical issues with RFID and reading through liquids and metals and things like that. Aside from that, there is a missing underlying infrastructure. We can put devices everywhere, but then you have to be able to provision them, know when they're sick, know how to fix them. You'll see lots of it within the next five years, but things will only really take off, at least in their full flower, once you can assume the infrastructure is there.
We have a vineyard up north and the idea is to optimise the output. If we can report on the microclimate of a vineyard, we can start to optimise how each portion of the vineyard is utilised. We can measure sunlight, we can measure leaf moisture, soil moisture, temperature. After the sensors started gathering data, I think [the people running the project] told me that something like two thirds of the data coming in was these things saying, "I'm out of battery. I'm broken. I've lost contact."
I recall being at an Accenture event five years ago and one of the consultants showed me an experimental videoconferencing system, and the consultant said that one of the problems they had is that people in tests said they didn't like getting incoming video calls.
We have a much more casual system here. We have a video tunnel set up [between Chicago and Palo Alto, California], so researchers can see each other walking by like they would in a hall. They'll stop and just have a face-to-face conversation, so it's a different paradigm. And of course we built a prototype for that, but when you saw things, the cost of doing that would have been crazy.
