What's next for the Web? It was the unspoken question of many who gathered at the Web2.0 Summit in San Francisco this week. For Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired magazine, it all came down to a number - 6,527. Or, the exact number of days until now since Tim Berners Lee made the first webpage. All the innovation, the new wealth, disruptions in traditional media and the millions of Wikipedia entries - a seemingly impossible scale of human endeavor - had been created in that relatively short span. So, what are we likely to see in the next 6500 days?

Looking back, 2008 was an inflection point for the industry. In her annual high altitude scan of the new media landscape, Morgan Stanley internet analyst Mary Meeker pointed out that relative amount of time that consumers spent on websites has changed dramatically. When you look at the metric of global minutes, from 2006 onwards YouTube and Facebook have gained over 500 basis points of relative share, at the expense of traditional portal incumbents Yahoo! and MSN.

Behind this statistic are two underlying trends. Firstly, Facebook has become the Outlook and webmail client for an increasing number of people, especially kids. And in just the same way that free webmail anchored consumer loyalty to MSN and Yahoo in the early days of the Web, Facebook is building a new loyal base of socially networked fanatics. In his interview at the conference, Mark Zuckerburg revealed that 50% of Facebook users use the site daily. That's serious addiction. 



The second trend is even more unexpected. In the last year, YouTube has become the second most popular search tool for consumers. By August of this year, search queries on YouTube reached 9.2 billion (a 123% increase year on year), surpassing Yahoo! sites which had 8.5 billion queries. When I asked John Battelle, author of 'The Search' and CEO of Federated Media about this he said that YouTube’s growth was consistent with the trend of search being the navigational interface to information. For Battelle, Google's original innovation was allowing people to search for things using natural language phrases. The next interface evolution we can expect will be all kinds of inherent searches, whether it be through content recommendations or mobile phones allowing real time product comparisons. 



And in a way, that's exactly what Kelly envisages as the Web's Hollywood sequel. Or as he puts it - the World Wide Web as World Wide Database. Rather than simply sharing links to documents, the next generation web will be about accessing the implicit data. In Kelly's view, every object we manufacture will have a sliver of intelligence in it. The entire world and everything in it will go into a globally connected database of things, that is then shared and linked. We won't worry about how different devices operate or access content. They will all be windows into the same universal network. 



Ironically enough, it was a hardware guy that pointed out how this vision could impact on consumer lifestyles. Intel has been aggressively developing and releasing new types of low cost, mobile chipsets designed to power ubiquitous computing devices. Intel's CEO, Paul Otellini, demonstrated a device capable of augmented reality applications such as translating Chinese street signs in real time or showing you an animated overlay to a product in a toy store. It was, he admitted, a sleight of hand. A couple of giant computers under the couch were doing the heavy lifting for the demo. But, he said, by 2011 you could expect that a low cost chip as powerful as a current desktop PC would be available for your mobile device. Moore's Law, naturally. And, as Otellini pointed out wryly, no CEO of Intel wants to be the first to break it. 



Cloud computing, massive scale driven platforms, semantic webs, ubiquitous mobile devices, augmented reality - its a tall order - even for 6500 days. And if you find all of that a hard cocktail to envision, don't be surprised. As Kelly himself acknowledged, when he started Wired magazine in the nineties he expected the Web to be TV, just better. This time he's sure of one thing. Whatever comes next won't be the Web, only better.

It will be something completely different.

Along with Murdoch and Malone, Barry Diller was one of my longtime media mogul matinee idols. So it was with great anticipation that I sat down this week to hear him speak at the CASBAA convention in Hong Kong. It was a slow start, but things got interesting when he was asked what he thought was the future of the industry. This is what he said...

'There is going to a lot of chaos as scarcity is replaced by plenty. This ability to to press a button and publish to the world, which has never existed before, is going to change everything. When there is no barrier between publishing and the consumer, then all of the people in traditional media will have to adapt to a world where the historic methods of financing and distribution are going to change. So, that's what I think.' 



It's a salient observation. Media has long thrived on scarcity; a limited number of people producing a limited amount of content and a limited number of people distributing it. That's no longer the case - but of course, you can't blame everything on the Web. It's easy to forget the appearance of 500 channel subscription television and the VCR had a similar fragmenting effect on the other more established media of the time. Diller himself made his first big career move by pioneering the concept of the 'made for television movie' when he was hired by ABC in 1966. Typically based on a popular book and made for a fraction of the cost of a big budget movie - Diller's telemovies exploited the fact that new mediums create opportunities for new types of content with new cost structures behind them.



Of course, media companies are now faced with an entirely different conundrum. I chatted with Gautam Anand this week, who is Head of Content Partnerships for the Asian region at Google. YouTube have recently been cutting deals with Hollywood Studios and TV Networks like CBS to get long form, professional content shows on their site. So far that merely means more reruns of Star Trek and MacGyver on the Web - but it's a sign of the times. As Hulu proved, your best chance of selling online video advertising is with reliable Studio content rather than random user generated material. 



Still, to Diller's point - you now have millions of consumers spending their media time watching a combination of commercially useless user generated inventory, and professionally produced content which has been financed by a traditional distribution chain that is now under threat. So the real question for everyone now is whether the new business model of online advertising and paltry iTunes sales will ever be able to sustain the cost structures of creating content that we like to watch. The numbers are sobering. Hulu is on track to make about US$90 million in online revenues this year. That's a drop in the pool compared to the US$11 billion dollars that the US networks took in revenues for quarter two of this year alone. You ain't going to make 'The Soprano's' on post-roll video ad dollars, that's for sure. 



Eventually, in my opinion, two things are going to happen. Firstly, there will be more online video advertising dollars around. That will lead to the creation of well established regional video aggregation platforms, financially capable enough to support a true wholesale distribution market for studios and professional content creators. Secondly, making movies and TV shows will get cheaper, Hollywood guild strikes notwithstanding. 



Just take movies as an example. The average cost to make and market a major MPAA member company film was $106.6 million in 2007, and at least $35.9 million of that was pure marketing. Digital distribution doesn't eliminate marketing costs altogether, but tapping into social networks effectively does mean that you don't have to buy expensive TV commercials and billboards anymore. While we are slashing costs, you can also take a red pencil to the expense of producing lots of physical film prints for cinemas. That leaves the last big ticket item - talent costs. As content franchises like James Bond or Marvel Comics action films become more like product and merchandise platforms - leading actors may start to weight their compensation in the form of backend product participation rather than upfront salary. 



Just like what is happening now in the music industry - when everyone makes money on merchandise and commercial endorsements, piracy is not a problem. If anything, it pays.

Consumers have had a seemingly indefatigable fascination with gadgets as they shrink into smaller and smaller form factors. Lately though, the main thing getting tiny has been price points. From PCs to video cameras, the best selling items in the market are low cost units. Naturally, there are big trade-offs in performance. It's worth thinking about why no one seems to care.

Firstly the numbers. The FT newspaper reports reports that the new category of 'netbooks' - low priced tiny laptops with small 9 inch screens - are on target this year to sell 10.8m units, rising in 2009 to 20.8m, or 11-12 per cent of the entire laptop market. To that point, Microsoft came out last week with the observation that virtually all the growth in new PC sales in the developed world in recent months had come from this new category of computers. No wonder they are accelerating plans for a cloud based application suite. 

Along a similar vein, the real hit in the consumer electronics world lately has not been the iPod but Pure Digital's Flip video camera. Selling for under $200, the Flip has become the No.2 best selling video camera in the US, and has shipped over 1 million units. The brand is rapidly approaching 20% market share. Not bad for a low resolution, low fidelity device with only an hour's video storage. However the Flip does have a killer app - the ability to directly upload videos to video sharing websites like YouTube and MySpace with a flip out USB plug.

I have two observations about this cheap and cheerful trend. Firstly, as more of the heavy lifting in software moves to web based applications and consumers gain access to faster mobile broadband -  this takes a lot of pressure off devices to be super powerful themselves. Why process, when you can access the super computed results of a Google, Amazon or Facebook? Why store, when you can stream?

Secondly and most importantly, consumers are discovering that the real fun in communications or  content these days is not what your device can do, but how it relates to their broader social interactivity. Taking a video in high resolution is well and good, but it's much more interesting to shoot something and share it with your friends who will immediately comment on it and forward it around. HD post production is a time killer and requires too high a learning curve. If anything, social media has conditioned us for instant gratification. And fortunately for now at least, that has a low price tag.

I was walking around today through the chaotic streets of Hong Kong with Bloom, Brian Eno's generative iphone app providing a soothing soundscape. It's hard to quantify how much joy something so simple can give - not to mention something that only costs $3.99. Bloom uses algorithyms to create and evolve patterns of sounds, at once random and yet strangely structured.

Generative systems are popping everywhere lately. You find them at the heart of complexity theory - the same science that lies behind networks, chaos theory and viral distribution. And they are particularly relevant to music. I caught an interesting exhibition at MoMa in New York a few weeks ago on the origins of music experimentation in the sixties when artists like John Cage used all manner of numeric or occult systems like the i-Ching to create what he called. “Indeterminate Music”. Media artist Toshio Iwai has also recently collaborated with Yamaha to create the Tenori-on, an innovative visual sequencer featuring a 16x16 matrix of LED switches that form a "visible music" interface. You can watch a cool video of Joi Ito playing with his one here. 


Although generative systems make for great toys and music applications, I get the sense that there is potentially for truly great art in all this. I was recently giving a talk at the New Media Days conference in Denmark. One of the other keynotes was Jonathan Harris, the creator of We Feel Fine. Watching the simple but profound results of an algorithm that tracks how people in the world are feeling based on blog entries that begin with 'I feel' was humbling and beautiful. 

If the greatest artists of our past were impresarios of the paintbrush and pencil, it's not inconceivable that the masterpieces of the future will be elegant lines of code.

But it did provoke another thought. What we are seeing now is what you might call the third phase of the mobile evolution. Phase one was about transforming eighties mobile bricks into slick, design lust objects. Phase two was about figuring out how to make mobiles impersonate your Walkman and personal video player. Phase three, in my opinion will now pit Apple, Google and Microsoft against each other as they all attempt to control the ecosystem for cloud based applications.



I won't speculate as to the odds of who will win that, save for making two observations. Firstly, cloud based platforms are, in the end, a winner takes all game. It comes down to scale. More users means more data, more data means more value, which in turn increases your ability to play dirty to win even more users. 



Secondly, the rise of the mobile data cloud is (another) big wake up call for Telcos. The more that value is delivered as a result of cloudware rather than software, bundled content or product design - the more commoditised the simple act of providing a data pipe becomes. Unlocked handsets are the future, as are unlimited mobile data plans that allow the dreaded voice over IP. As the pools of fast WiFI expand across urban areas, and geeks figure out how to make mesh networks easily run on mobile phones - the days of being able to charge monopoly rents for merely plugging holes in people's network coverage will draw to a close far swifter than anyone on the executive floor may realise.