An idea we've been batting around at Eastwick has gotten a bit of attention in the last few days. Simply put: the success of online social experiments will force vendors to apply what they've learned to the offline world. First we got Google maps -- the satellite edition, which literally enables Google to crawl the earth (we've always wondered if this was, in part, a PR move, signalling the direction for this company in a most surprising way). And now we're hearing about tech companies that are helping parents to locate and monitor their teens. And, as Jupiter's Gary Stein writes in his blog, Google is beginning to experiment with ways to apply its ad-serving technology -- the financial engine of its incredible growth -- to the print world. And why not? The print-ad market is much larger than the world that Google serves, and Google needs to grow.
We have our own take on what's happening here, and we will discuss it at length this Fall, here, here, here, and here (yes, we are trying our best to get the word out). In the meantime, we'd like to float this idea: the success of the great social experiments in the new, online world (and they are, in fact, social experiments) is beginning to pay off in exports to the old world. This new world/old world analogy came to us yesterday; we credit the semi-patriotic, bittersweet mood (homage to a more progressive, but difficult, era) that always seems to dominate this weekend.
Happy Labor Day. See you back in the old world, tomorow.
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