Earlier this week, Web 2 Summit announced Points of Control: The Map, an interactive visualization of this year’s conference theme. Ideated by conference chair John Battelle, and through many many weeks of brainstorms, discussions, and editing – it was brought to life by the team at Blend Interactive.
I had the pleasure of project managing this effort and am enthused with the way it turned out. There will be an added layer of interactivity in Phase II, launching later this month.
Post written by John Battelle, cross-posted from Searchblog
As themes for conferences go, Points of Control is one of our favorites. Our industry over the past year has been driven by increasingly direct conflicts between its major players: Apple has emerged as a major force in mobile and advertising platforms; Google is fighting off Microsoft in search, Apple in mobile and Facebook in social; and Facebook itself finds itself on the defensive against Twitter and scores of location startups like Foursquare.
Nor are the Internet’s biggest players the only ones in the game – the rise of tablet computing has revived nearly every major hardware and handset manufacturer, and the inevitable march of online payment and commerce has roused the financial services giants as well. You know we’re in interesting times when American Express is considered an insurgent in its own industry.
The narrative is so rich, it struck us that it lends itself to a visualization – a map outlining these points of control, replete with incumbents and insurgents – those companies who hold great swaths of strategic territory, and those who are attempting to gain ground, whether they be startups or large companies moving into new ground. Inspired in part by board games like Riskor Stratego, and in part by the fantastic and fictional lands of authors like Tolkien and Swift, we set out to create at least an approximation of our industry’s vibrant economy. (And yes, we give a hat tip to the many maps out there in our own industry, like this one for social networks.)
The result of our initial efforts is pictured above, you can go to the complete map here, and read the rest of The Map narrative on the Web 2 Summit blog.
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