Content is only half the story ...

Yes, content may be king, but as it isn't a dictatorial world we live in anymore, content without its adept partners is nothing.

The biggest partner of content I see today is context. Providing content without the knowledge and more importantly the understanding of context, is not only useless but can be severely detrimental to your product or service. On the other hand, providing content with a deep understanding of context can let you provide rich, experience-filled platforms and ecosystems that can not only add but in fact multiply the value of your product/service.

Here's an example. I have started relying a lot on my cell-phone to provide me turn by turn directions. Yes, my phone happens to be fancier than most and gives me directions right out of the box for free, but that apart, I still tend to view textual directions on the phone more than rely on my ears to catch the soft voice of the automated TTS "blasting" (pun-intended) in the car. The GPS in the phone provides an excellent contextual piece of data when I am in "directions" mode (see screen-clip below)

With one extra piece of information (when I have gone too far), it takes away all the hassles I have had with using Google maps on my iPhone or Android overshooting turns and then having to find my way back . Fantastic! ... and then I start thinking ...

All business schools will teach you about content, but none of them will formalize context. Why? My understanding is that because of the fast changing definition of context. What is context? Is it location, is it the content access form-factor (read mobile vs. laptop vs. tablet), is it surrounding social activity? What is it?

Academia has always struggled with defining fast moving targets, but eventually succeeds in getting it right and putting it in a much better way than any other body does. However, for now, once we look beyond the mires of educational difficulties, we do see concrete examples of how context exists along with content in the best products and services out there today and possibly tomorrow.

About a year back, I heard a pitch from the founders of the Where app. He explained how Where was planning to have last minute fire-sales on perishable items such as end-of-day restaurant deals to folks who were in the same area as the restaurant. By doing this, the restaurants could convert their certain losses on meat, fish and dairy products that they could not preserve through the night into small but reasonable profits, while gaining the social good from the community around. Reflecting back, I cannot stop linking this example to context. Location, time and social contexts have all come together to add value to a simple coupon based service - and not on those "I don't want it but I can't resist buying it" items on Groupon; but on real useful items that people need. Imaging having such fire sales in a city like Boston or New York even as late as 1 in the night. Students can get an inexpensive break from their busy nocturnal lives and do social good for your restaurant by "FaceTweeting" about the great meal they had in the dead of the night! You can give that Wendy's, Taco Bell and KFC around the corner a run for its money!

Another fabulous example that shows how context can be much more valuable than content comes from nobody else but the world's most hated Operating System manufacturer. Microsoft's productivity future video (below) is full of how contextual content enriches productivity and the value of the human life.

Take out context and the future will be a megadump of disorganized content that will take someone years and years to get their head around; driving many to insanity!

Unless we start looking at solutions to tomorrow's problems with "when, where and why" in mind, our method from today of solving them with "what" is not going to suffice; much in the same way that our method from yesterday of "how" alone did not suffice for today's problems.