They came to the Santa Monica pier from different directions.
One of them is a guitarist who has been playing for over 20 years and has a sizeable subscriber base on YouTube - nearly 250,000.
He sets up a mic and invites people to sing while he plays the guitar.
Most beach goers have nothing more on their minds than to snack, chit-chat and while away a lazy afternoon.
Then, a cautious Indian girl strolls by with a friend, and he invites her to sing.
They go back and forth on the songs she knows and what he can accompany her on.
Finally, they settle on a Daniel Ceasar song, and she begins hesitantly at first, and then gets into the flow.
And it turns out that she's effortlessly good.
The collaboration works even though they don't know each other at all and come from different worlds. But that doesn't stop them from connecting and creating some great music together.
She's learned classical Indian music for over 10 years. And he, of course is great on the guitar.
They'll go their own ways, and it is clear that the young singer, Monica, is not a career musician, even though she's a natural.
Her Instagram handle, which she doesn't immediately recall still has attracted over 9000 followers.
And we'll leave it there, just like the video, which now has over 1.5 million views and growing. A moment in time when two talented people came together and created a ripple on the beach one weekend evening.
And most other visitors remained blissfully unaware of the viral video taking shape.
AI and ML are old hat. Welcome to the Metaverse
(Update: This post was written 2 years ago. Obviously, things change, and I got it gloriously wrong. Zuckerberg lost billions. I lost face)
There's a change of guard every few years.
The old chestnuts don't work as well anymore because everyone's using the same jargon.
Then you begin to hear the whispers of something new. Which becomes a flood and in time, what everyone is building into their product!
Not so long ago, AI was the gate that opened venture capital in every business. Loads of big data churned into some marvelous new insights and products that could build the next billion-dollar business.
In practically every global software business, there is an AI component. If you ask the promoters, they will whip out one nugget after another to tell you how they identified a key need, churned data and then put in place a process that simply made it incredibly easy to take the business to whole new level.
So, what exactly is the Metaverse? Facebook describes it one way, but Epic games has another approach.
At this stage Facebook has had to play on the backfoot because they are weathering several storms of agitated legal and social scrutiny from lawmakers and other pressure groups.
The basic description of the Metaverse is the next stage of the internet where it moves from screens to objects of everyday use and the interactions that will result.
There's a long set of essays written about the Metaverse, if you are interested in trying to understand where this is going - or whether you want to go the way Epic believes is the right one.
Reminds me of the time the web moved from 1.0 to 2.0. But that was gone before you knew it.
What your location data is worth
Remember how Google Maps emails you a nice little infographic about the places you visit every month?
This was before the pandemic, of course and it was interesting to the extent that you looked at it and said - 'Oh ok', and probably forgot all about it.
But once the data is online, it is never forgotten.
And there are companies who harvest data, not from the phone alone but the apps you have installed.
There was a company called Foursquare who allowed 'check-ins' to restaurants, cinemas or other locations and conferred titles like 'Mayor of X Starbucks' for example.
It seemed like a harmless but essentially weird thing.
But all that data of movements to places adds up to a profile of your life.
If you visit religious places regularly, the fact that religion is important to you will come through clearly.
Or if a person is in the habit of having a drink every evening at a favorite restaurant, the location data will show the regularity of visits to the place. That data is of interest to companies targeting drinkers.
Extend these examples and you see how easy it is to build profiles of people's interests without them filling a single form, or even posting anything in social media.
Most people have nothing to hide. But when their preferences can be extracted in tangential ways, marketing to them is just the tip of the iceberg.
The location industry is apparently worth $12 billion. That could be a conservative estimate.
Every week, I'll plant a few ideas in your mind on branding, behavior and markets. Triggers for your thoughts. Spread the word to your friends. All you have to do is click the link and enter an email address.
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