Seminar 8:
Digital Convergence (and Digital Collision)

All sorts of information are increasingly being captured digitally - for example from cameras and microphones, from keyboard strokes, from a wide range of sensors. Digital information can be processed through microelectronics and using software like word processing, image manipulation, and specilaised music software (ranging from composition tools to mash-up systems). It can be transmitted through communications networks and delivered to PCs, home music centres, mobile phones... and the FBI, the recording industry companies, your friendly neighbourhood stalker, and users of spyware.

This seminar will examine the phenomenon of digital convergence, and the implications it has for:

• new products, and the search for the "ultimate device"
• blurring industry boundaries and the need for new capabilities and strategies
• intellectual property and the regulation of media industries.

A full set of references will be online shortly: here for starters, available via JRUL:

• I Miles 1997,"Cyberspace as Product Space" in Futures Vol Publish29 no 9 pp769-790 November 1997
• I Miles 1993 "Bringing Computer Power to the Consumer Market", Technology Analysis and Strategic Management vol 5 no 2 1993, pp151-171