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Next Generation Tech: Teens Plugged In!

So today I attended the Next Generation Tech: Teens Plugged In!, organized by SD Forum. The event featured several teens from middle school to high school sharing their insights of their “always connected way of life”. Why? In 2006 American teens spent over $195 billion and a large portion was on technology.

The event took place at the HP Pavillion in Palo Alto and included breakfast and lunch (those braggels with fresh cheese were great!).

I can’t say the event was astounding but it had some interesting things.

  • Elementeo’s CEO and Founder, a company that has a product/game for teaching chemistry to kids, is a 13 year old kid and was there. The company is having a lot of requests and requests keep pilling up
  • When the kids were asked about the coolest gadget to come: iPhone.
  • Anne-Marie Roussel, Microsoft’s Director of Strategic and Emerging Bus. Group couldn’t shut up with Zune. “Because it’s not talked in conferences”, “It has WiFi and the iPod doesn’t”, bla bla. You know what? Teens don’t care about Zune or any other Microsoft product whatsoever.
  • Anne-Marie Roussel said that instead of observing kids, we should talk to them. Yeah right, assuming that kids actually know what they want. My sister didn’t know she wanted an Hi5 profile until her friends told her about Hi5. So, kids won’t come up with things they’d like to address like “You know what I want, Microsoftee PR agent that can’t shut up? What I really want is a social networking website where I can share photos and be virtually harassed.”
  • Questions asked to middle school kids were dumb. When you ask dumb question you don’t expect them to come with brilliant answers. A shame though, there were some bright kids there.
  • Kids are not looking for the “one website does it all” thingy. They’re fine with one site for social networking, another for watching videos, etc..
  • In a recent survey in the USA, 50% of the kids say they want to open their own company. If that very same survey were to be done in Portugal, 0.005% kids would have said they wanted to open their own company.

As soon as I remember more interesting stuff I’ll keep updating this post. Stay tuned.


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