In a recent article published in Harvard Business Review's Working Knowledge (11/10/08), Martha Lagace reported on the panel discussion, "The Technology Revolution and its Implications for the Future," moderated by HBS professor David Yoffie. Here are some key points:

• The social media landscape continues to grow and evolve -- that includes the 1.5 billion people in the world who have Internet access, more than 300 million with broadband access to the home, and the 3 billion with cell phones.
• Capitalizing on social media is still all about advertising, but how advertisers benefit from it is still being worked out.
• Managing the colossal growth of information created on the Web will drive investment in that area.
• Companies are still trying to figure out how to combine what they know about customers from the physcial world with what they learn about them online.
• Innovation in the form of scalable Web applications may come from any quarter, from the garage to the corporation, with as little investment as $10,000-$50,000.

The key to all this technological innovation, however, is creating simple applications that are relevant to the people using them. "...people want to organize their experience according to their own interests." One possible solution is to "...create a dashboard of simplicity that is very open to the whole Internet, not just to the company it may be associated with, and will elevate social connections in a way that drives dollars," said Sue Decker of Yahoo! read the whole article