In January 2007, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates predicted that within five years, the Internet will have revolutionized television to such an extent that “people will laugh at what we’ve had.”
Many bloggers jeered that Gates was hopelessly behind the curve. They already were laughing at the notion that television must be watched according to a broadcaster’s time schedule—or even on a TV screen. The so-called “legacy media” already were watching in horror as eyeballs and advertising dollars followed video to the Internet. Had Chairman Bill missed the memo?
Despite the smirking in geekdom, nobody seriously believes that the much-ballyhooed “convergence” of television and the Internet has reached its zenith. One person who just might hold a key to a very big change in how media is “consumed” is Twin Cities meteorologist Paul Douglas.
Yes, that Paul Douglas—the longtime television weatherman whose sudden April firing from WCCO-TV, part of a national cost-cutting move by parent company CBS, put a local exclamation mark on the financial woes of legacy broadcasters.
Early in 2007, around the same time that Gates was speaking in Switzerland, Douglas incorporated a start-up called Singular Logic. He and two equity partners, Minneapolis patent attorneys Douglas Williams and (joining early this year) Erik Svenson, have applied for patents on what they say is an unprecedented way to deliver advertiser-supported news, weather, and entertainment to computers and Web-enabled mobile devices, such as cell phones.
Singular Logic proposes to introduce two new services. The first, NoozMe, is expected to launch later this year. The second, tentatively called FocusGPS, would follow later. Both rely on the same patent-pending technology—and the same basic idea: Web users should be able to choose not just the particular news stories or other content they want to see at the time and place they want to see it, but also the kinds of advertisements they want to see (or at least are willing to watch) along with it.
FocusGPS, in a sense, would offer only advertising. It is envisioned as a sort of traveling shopper-alert system for mobile devices tracked by the Global Positioning System. Subscribers would come up with a wish list of products and services for which they are actively looking, sometimes specifying the prices they are willing to pay. They then would receive text messages or other automatic alerts from participating advertisers whenever they came within a preset radius of those products. (FocusGPS isn’t necessarily a service that Singular Logic would launch itself. If a mobile carrier such as Verizon or Sprint wants an exclusive licensing deal, Douglas says, “they would call it whatever they like.”)
