Googlezon Scenarios for Digital Worlds

I really love this future of media scenario made in Flash. It tells the story of Google (organizing all the world's information as a distributed search, storage, and media engine) and Amazon (organizing all the world's commerce as a "social recommendation engine") partnering to create Googlezon, which puts Microsoft and the New York Times out of business by 2014. I post it for two reasons:

One, the format itself is an incredibly compelling way to communicate possible futures—something that can help us think more deeply about change and prepare for new opportunities. I'd like to see more futures work (not sci-fi, but self-consistent, systematic, trend- and data-driven scenarios...OK we'll call it sce-fi, "scenario fiction" :-) in an abbreviated audio-visual format like this. And two, to ask the question:

What would your own video game/interactive simulation/digital worlds/metaverse version of this scenario look like? What milestones in and around these areas leading up to what we see happening now would you include, and what future developments and convergences in simulation, entertainment, virtual economies, rapid prototyping, mixed-reality and mixed-reality business (I like that term...) do you see happening as an extension of deep trends? You have to see the (/a) wave to surf it...

Comments

[Dimitar Vesselinov]

Transcript:
http://www.masternewmedia.org/news/2004/11/29/summary_of_the_world_googlezon.htm

Audio:
http://www.webtalkradio.com/INTERnewsIS25.shtml

See also:
http://divedi.blogspot.com/2004/11/future-of-media-2.html

[Jerry Paffendorf]

Thanks for the links, Dimitar. Good stuff.

[Shawn Smith]

And a big hello from the owners of the googlezon blog :)

S.