CB: You’ve said that your conference “set the stage for disruptive innovation.” How so? What will that look like?

BS: I think it’ll just look like more. You’ll have everything that you have today, it’s just that computation gives more-more opportunity, different media formats, more opportunities to generate insight, tell stories, and bring people in who can build bridges from legacy skill sets to the newer skill sets. There is no limitation to what someone is going to invent in terms of combining existing legacy interfaces and newer interfaces like Twitter, Digg, and others sites that are impacting the news.

CB: Accepting that there are no limitations, how long will it be until we stop talking about this arrangement as a point we want to get to and start talking about it as where we are?

BS: What Web 2.0 enables in software development is a really fast development process. So you can go from an idea to a working prototype to something that lots of people can use very quickly-on the order of a couple of months. What I think will happen is at some point, and we might already be a couple months into this, there will be a twelve-month window when you see an explosion of creativity and interfaces where people understand what existing tools they can leverage. And then it stands to reason that once people start seeing where the sweet spots are, you could get another boom going where it will seem like at the beginning of twelve months we’ve got the world we’re in, but by the end of it, we’ve got a completely different world. That hasn’t started noticeably yet. I’m hoping that what we did at Georgia Tech helps to push that forward, maybe even trigger it.

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