The Jason Salas Experience

I was interviewed today for a Guam Business News piece of the evolution of web technology on Guam.  This is the latest in a long and storied tradition of me taking my time to reveal my thoughts at length, two sentences of which make it to print. 

Here's the full transcript of today's Q&A: 

I've been working with the Internet since 1994.  Academically, I studied marketing and music and I have a MBA in technology management.  I've been involved in product development for more than half my life and I've been writing software for the last decade.  

In a nutshell, I'm in charge of KUAM's presence in the interactive media space.  I'm tasked with overseeing that the news and entertainment information we produce is seamlessly expressed in as many formats and platforms as possible, and accessible across as many digital devices as we can support.  If it involves the Internet, it probably involves me.  So a big part of my job naturally revolves around the Web.

My days are typically spent thinking about how to leverage emerging technologies and newer innovations such that our content is relevant with them.  Our goal is Constant Connectivity: to make sure that no man, woman or child on Guam is ever without the ability to access our information or interact with our castmembers.

There was a minor surge locally that paralleled the national Dot Com Boom of the late nineties in which a lot of Guam entrepreneurs setup shop as "web designers".  Most of the web design crowd was made of converted graphic designers that were only as skilled at web functionality as the capabilities of their copies of DreamWeaver would allow them to be.  Not many people developed anything from the ground up.  

So a lot of the work was derivative and limited, and as a result was a hard sell.  At the same time, clients didn't really know what they wanted either and didn't have sound strategies for being online.  Having a web site was seen as a low-cost advertising cop-out rather than a strategic extension of your market reach.  And many more were just scared of the 'Net.  The whole ecosystem for many companies was a huge bust.

More and more, the microeconomy of Guam's web development industry over the years has begun the see the value in having sites that satisfy the two prime goals: form and function.  Small shops started to concentrate on specializing their teams - having a front-end designer for graphics, color scheme, fonts and layout; a programmer to develop features and components with a web framework, database and client scripts; perhaps a Flash expert for building rich user interfaces; and a content specialist person handling just content and search engine optimization.

The work's gotten a lot more segmented, but for the betterment of the output products.  We're seeing holistic web work now - projects that are pleasing to look at and easy to interact with while at the same time filling a functional gap.

I'm still not seeing as much up-front, pure development as I'd like to.  Aesthetic appeal draws me in, but if a site can't deliver any functionality or let me interface with the core competency of the organization it represents, I won't return.  I'd like people to come up with an original idea for an online service for the world audience in general - not just Guam - and really go to town.  Too much of what comes out these days is hack.  Let's see some original thought.

(I'm working on three such ideas right now - a TV-based social network; an artificially-intelligent content grouping service; and a geo-specific multiplatform events manager.)

At KUAM, we invest heavily into R&D.  Only about 4 out of every 10 projects we undertake make it to the prototype phase, and only 2 of those become products we put into our application pipeline.  But it's helped us create some really neat stuff for the web, or just in using web-based data with other platforms to enhance our broadcasting.

I tend not to look at sites in terms of their points of origin, because to do so misses the whole point of being online - it doesn't matter where you're from.  I don't value a site any higher than the next just because it happens to be done down the street from me.  If a site's of piques my interest, I use it.  

That said, I've always been impressed with the work coming out of Data Management Resources.  They've done a good job of conceptualizing a few neat ideas and putting them into play as real working products.  A couple of the local ad agencies also do slick UI work.

Vendors are creating automated tools that'll let designers build powerful web services quickly and easily.  That's going to make for some interesting opportunities for the right companies out here.

But again, people have to realize that building for the Web involves design AND development.  The difficulty is that rarely the twain shall meet.  It's total left brain/right dichotomy - most coders aren't concerned with visualization and layout, while conversely many web designers don't think algorithmically.  Each is its own discipline, and being good at either requires lots of practice.

There are several emerging platforms that really intrigue me.  New ways to access information, interact with data and deliver rich experiences are something I'm always on the lookout for to implement for KUAM.  From an access perspective, handheld devices, wireless access, cloud computing, software as a service, offline access, and more efficient media formats will get a lot of the limelight in 2009.

And there's lots being done with mapping and personalization to deliver customized content relative to precisely where you are in the world based on geolocation.  That's going to be huge.  One application of this we're already seeing is in the social networking space, letting you find friends nearby and collaboratively share multimedia with them.  That's an amazing achievement. 

We'll also start to see more AI and data semantics next year, opening up a whole new universe of possibilities to accurately finding, using and sharing data.

Wireless consumers are going to be getting online in ways they never have before.  They'll be enjoying rich experiences, not feature-reduced WAP/WML sites.  Overall, online services won't be as bloated as they are today; we'll use apps that aren't bound to one platform per se, but spread out over several devices and easily available as text, imagery, audio and video.  Most services are going to have web roots, but will also have counterpart desktop, texting and mobile equivalents (and even some non-traditional devices like televisions and specific Internet-aware appliances) that make using them very convenient.

Look at all the ways there are today to access and/or update MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and GMail. 

As far as how the Web continues to impact traditional mainstream media, it's a constant challenge.  News and content-rich web sites are the hardest type of sites to maintain because they're perpetual unfinished projects.  The number of ways to move and express data around is always rapidly expanding, and new gadgets come out all the time that require access to that information.  It's a daunting task.

The web professional who figures out how to apply these technologies locally is going to deliver some very innovative experiences.