The Age of Context

In this talk from the 2013 NEXT Berlin conference, tech journalist Robert Scoble, known for his blog The Scobleizer, describes the five forces of context that set the conditions for what he calls the Age of Context: mobile, social media, data, sensors and location.

The topic builds on the book Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy, which Scoble wrote with Shel Israel. For product teams, the talk raises two practical questions: can you think of other forces that contributed to the rise of context, and how do these forces affect your own product or service?

Context-aware products often lean on patterns such as tailoring content to the user and choosing good defaults based on what the system already knows.