#1 The transition from bureaucratic hierarchies to technology-driven networks
For centuries, the world has been organized in a top-down manner: decisions go down the pyramid from the man at the top to the people on the field, and information goes back up from the field to the top. And that made sense for the longest time because high transaction and communication costs made that the most efficient way to do business and government.
In the information age, that is no longer true. Media and industries were the first industries to feel it. Twitter and its crowd replaced the newspaper and its top-down army of reporters and editors. Youtube democratized the production of movies. Soundcloud allows music acts to rise outside the old music label. Now it's coming to hotels, education and more... #2 Unbundling
If you're still paying hundreds of dollars for your cable bill only to watch a couple channels, you need to make a change. Products and services were once bundled because of high delivery costs and little flexibility. Technology now allows companies to deliver more focused services and for you to buy just what you need.
And it's not just your cable bill. Education is being unbundled: increasingly the one-size-fits-all, 4-year university model will take a backseat to online education and lifelong learning, from the complete degree program to the one-off conference. "There are certainly more people watching this right now on the Internet than are sitting right now in this room," Wilson said. The reach of each educator is thus multplied as are the options of every learner. #3 We are all nodes on the network
Wilson did a little test with the room: those who, if forced to choose, would pick their smartphone over their laptop were to raise their hand. 80% of the auditorium did. In the emerging world, Wilson pointed out, that choice has already been made.
Because we now always keep a connected computer in our pockets, we have become permanent nodes in the network. We participate, willingly or not, in the value of companies that never could have surfaced just 5 years ago, and of course we get value out of them as well. This trend is evident in Uber, geolocalized dating app Tinder, peer-to-peer payment provider Venmo and many more companies yet to come.