What Happens In Davos Doesnt Stay In Davos

For those unfamiliar with the term Davos, it is worth knowing that it is a tiny Swiss town that once a year hosts the World Economic Forum (weforum.org). This year's conference of world leaders, random billionaires, movers (and shakers) was held from Jan. 21 through 24. For a clear perspective of the participants, one needs only to note that the airport was jammed with nearly 2,000 private and government jets ferrying bigwigs and high-falutin hot shots to the picturesque mountain hamlet.

Making headlines at this year's event was Google's executive chairman, Eric Schmidt. Journalists had a field day with Schmidt's comments during a panel discussion in which he proclaimed, "The Internet will disappear." People tend to notice when a Google honcho makes such a proclamation.

What Schmidt meant wasn't that the Internet will actually "vanish," it will simply become increasingly seamless in the lives of people. "There will be so many IP addresses ... so many devices, sensors, things that you are wearing, things that you are interacting with that you won't even sense it," he said. "It will be part of your presence all the time. Imagine you walk into a room, and the room is dynamic. And with your permission and all of that, you are interacting with the things going on in the room."

As predictions go, this was not particularly bold. Certainly it wasn't a science fiction-type leap into a distant future in which humanity labors for robot overlords. It was simply a very likely extrapolation of current technological trends. In effect, Schmidt is looking at a transistor radio from the early 1960s and predicting Sony's Walkman in the late 1970s. However, that does not make Schmidt's forecast any less significant.

In considering his prediction, it seemed clear that coin-op is particularly well positioned to meet this new seamless future. Coin-op and amusement equipment that interacts in a variety of ways with such portable devices as smartphones seems easily within reach. Some of that interaction is already taking place in relatively modest ways, but how seamless and sophisticated that interaction eventually becomes is the big question.

Another question is just how these portable devices will interact and what form this type of communication will take. Interestingly, Schmidt did not make even a mild prediction for the types of platforms that are likely to come to market. "All bets are off at this point as to what the smartphone app infrastructure is going to look like," he said. "I view that as a completely open market at this point."

Schmidt is a serious person. He's not given to the type of off-the-cuff remarks typical of television talking heads. And he is not prone to proclamations specifically crafted to garner headlines. In many ways, his remarks are a restatement of the long-established Metcalfe's Law. More of a rule of thumb, than actual law, Robert Metcalfe stated in 1980 that the value of a network is proportional to the total number of compatible communication devices it includes. This is something operators should instinctively understand, since the value of a route is most often determined by the number of locations.

Another technological law that operators will no doubt understand, though not yet named, states that today's whiz-bang tech convenience matures into tomorrow's necessity. While there is not yet a bandwagon to jump on, the evolution of this seamless connectivity is something that warrants careful and continued scrutiny at every level of coin-op and amusements