Innovation Monitor: Audio, Holograms, and the Future of Events

Innovation Monitor: Audio, Holograms, and the Future of Events

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Welcome to this week’s Innovation Monitor.

The NYC Media Lab just held our annual Machines + Media event, hosted in partnership with Bloomberg. This is one of the Media Lab’s longest running events, exploring the intersection of how machines create media. As topics like Natural Language Generation, Deepfakes, and the ethics of algorithmically ranked content have all become mainstream, the event feels more important than ever.

You’ll certainly be hearing and seeing a lot more from M+M, but in putting together the experience, I thought a lot about the evolution of how events have evolved — and what lies in store in the future.

Like so many things, the onset of the pandemic pushed things virtual — this week’s M+M was no exception. Understanding what content works and how people engage with digital experiences has been a crash course, and one we’re all still working on.

While I’m excited to get back to in-person experiences, I recognize that remote events create opportunities for more diverse audiences to interact and learn. This week we’ll look at how events have evolved in the past year, and where they could be going.

As always, stay safe and thank you for reading, and if you were forwarded this email, you can easily sign up here!

All best,
Erica Matsumoto The audio-only event We’re naturally visual creatures — the oldest painting in the Chauvet Cave dates back over 36,000 years, according to a new carbon dating timeline. But before prehistoric artists were creating wildlife scenes with charcoal, our ancestors were humming chants, inventing myths, and passing down generational history.

As Clubhouse CEO Paul Davison noted in a CNBC interview, voice is the oldest medium: “We’ve been gathering with other people in small groups and talking since the beginning of civilization…. Voice is a durable medium.”

Will this last? Yes, I think so. Unlike visual storytelling, which has experienced a slew of awesome innovations over the years, live audio’s tech highlights began in 1876 with the first phone call, hit another milestone when the first sounds transmitted over the radio in 1906, and most everything else has piggybacked off those two until the digital era — and even then… (Clubhouse has been described as both the “Gen Z alternative for radio” and “Discord for old people.”)

Despite that, the BBC World Service reaches 150M weekly listeners. And billions are ready to be exchanged to get a foothold in the live audio space — from Microsoft’s $10B offer for Discord, to Spotify buying Clubhouse rival Betty Labs, to Twitter and Facebook entering the arena.

While the live audio rooms in Twitter Spaces and Clubhouse can accommodate events, it gets way more interesting when a virtual ticket gate is involved. Twitter’s Ticketed Spaces is a combination of Eventbrite and Clubhouse, allowing anyone with 1,000 followers and three previous Spaces events to charge a fee.

Closely related, live audio is a new addition to the sales funnel. On Twitter, for example, those that pay for Ticketed Spaces might be more inclined to become Super Followers, paying to see someone’s tweets, sort of like short-form Substack. But the discovery problem… Speaking of curation, Robinhood competitor Public is launching its own live audio feature. Yes, it’s mortifying to think that the r/wallstreetbets crowd could actually get a voice, but Public is taking precautions: “Public will initially program these chats with moderators it pays, meaning not just anyone can start a conversation. It’ll host about three events a week, and users will receive a push notification to join.”

That’s one way to solve the discovery problem for audio-only events, and a sustainable one given Public’s funding. But not scalable. Clubhouse, and really Twitter Spaces, are still software v1. As Ben Thompson noted:

“Remember that the essential characteristic of v1 digital products is that they simply copy what already exists offline. For Facebook that meant digitizing connections between friends and family, and for Twitter it meant broadcasting conversations as if you were sitting at a bar. Such literal translations, though, have limits…. What truly makes a category is v2: products that are only possible because of the unique properties of digital.”

For v2, look no further than TikTok’s algorithm-first recommendation engine, which supplants the inferior social graph for supervised learning that has proved massively successful. The hybrid event Audio-only or the “traditional” Zoom-style conference, either way virtual events have become a mainstay post-2020. Hopin recently raised a staggering $400M, including investment from LinkedIn — the company’s VP and Head of Business Development Scott Roberts has said “virtual events are here to stay,” and that LinkedIn is planning to make it easier for its users to extend their reach on the platform.

Joe Davy, CEO at event marketing company Banzai went as far as to say that “the last purely in-person event ever to occur has already happened…. the world of either is behind us.” Marketers now have to think of catering to a number of varying consumption habits: in-person, live online, on-demand, VR spaces, even MMO-like, avatar-filled gatherings (oh, and holograms). As Digiday notes:

“Using an in-house technology called Dreamwave, Active Theory was able to mimic the festival’s in-person experience with avatars for event-goers to move about the online world as they would in real life. There was also a chat feature that made for social interactions. Overall, the virtual festival was different, but considered a success, proving that virtual film festivals can be done well, according to IndieWire.”

The biggest example of this is coming up in September: Dreamforce has expanded to SF, NYC, London, and Paris, and will be hosted both online and off. This Week in Business History

June 11th, 1978: Texas Instruments launches the Speak & Spell

On this day, TI launched the Speak & Spell, a red device that allowed the user to type in letters and have them read back to you in the vocal intonation that helped define what we conceive of as a computer’s voice (that is, until Alexa came along). This was no simple toy, as:

Its debut marked the first electronic duplication of the human vocal tract on a single chip of silicon. Speak & Spell utilized linear predictive coding to formulate a mathematical model of the human vocal tract and predict a speech sample based on previous input. It transformed digital information processed through a filter into synthetic speech and could store more than 100 seconds of linguistic sounds.

And this piece does a great job exploring the cultural and educational impact of the Speak & Spell.

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