Welcome to our monthly curation of emerging technology news tidbits and trends that help inform the research we do for our Avanade Trendlines program. Let’s discuss any thoughts you have in the comments.

Technology: The future of interactive livestreaming
We are getting closer to interactive livestreaming, which “plays with the boundary lines between audience and producer. Combined with the transformative properties of play, it is a vibrant space of new media development that builds on the history of television.” Consumers are beginning to think about interactive media not just as a nice-to-have, but as something they demand.

Why should you care? At Avanade, we’ve been watching this trend of customer co-creation, where consumers have an active dialogue with brands that shapes products in near real time. Interactive media will be one of the first forms of customer co-creation at scale. The singer/songwriter John Mayer projects a livestream during his concerts and in the future could allow fans to control visuals, choose the next song or even collaborate with the artist on stage. Co-creation goes beyond talking about a target market and focuses on how to cultivate the brand community.

What will the next social network look like?
In 1977 science fiction author James Graham (J.G.) Ballard published a work titled “The Future of the Future,” in which he described the future world: “Every one of our actions during the day, across the entire spectrum of domestic life, will be instantly recorded on video-tape. In the evening we will sit back to scan the rushes, selected by a computer trained to pick out only our best profiles, our wittiest dialogue, our most affecting expressions filmed through the kindest filters, and then stitch these together into a heightened re-enactment of the day. Regardless of our place in the family pecking order, each of us within the privacy of our own rooms will be the star in a continually unfolding domestic saga, with parents, husbands, wives and children demoted to an appropriate supporting role.” That sounds eerily like Facebook and Instagram. So what will the next social community look like?

Why should you care? Gaming is starting to show the building blocks for the next digital communities. A concert that millions of people attended took place in Fortnite. Even Google is getting into gaming. Users come to watch but stay to shop and keep debating and discussing with a community of other gamers. Brand owners need to watch this space to see how communities will evolve.

Profile: Margo Georgiadis and the future of genomics
Margo Georgiadis is CEO of Ancestry.com and was previously CEO of Mattel and president of Americas for Google. “More than 26 million people have shared their DNA with one of the four leading ancestry and health databases. Georgiadis urged consumers to be careful which company they choose to do business with because not everyone has the same privacy standards.” Georgiadis says, “As leaders, we need to take responsibility for thinking and anticipating those issues and setting high standards for the way in which we do business.”

Why should you care? Watch the video in the linked article as Georgiadis talks about the current genomics market and where it’s headed. Today it’s still in the early discovery phase where the overall business model isn’t clear. The long-term play is for wellness, and Georgiadis is trying to figure out how Ancestry.com can keep making money while waiting for the market timing to be right and still doing right by its customers in terms of security and privacy. This is a great lesson for thinking about future digital business models.

Easter eggs are back!
“Over the years, Easter eggs in tech products have largely disappeared (except in video games). Like any other software, Easter eggs, so named for the hunt to find them, cost time and money to design, build and debug … These days … they are meant to entertain, to lure potential hires, to pay tribute to executives — or to amuse programmers themselves.”