 Hi, this is Gerhard Leonhard, media futurist in Basel, Switzerland, with another edition of Gertube. Today I want to talk about how the two realities that we use to keep separate, which is one on the internet, where we are online and one offline, with some people calling this a meat space, how those two things are actually converging and becoming the same. So we're no longer actually living in a world where we can say, okay, we'll go on the internet or we're off the internet, because now we're basically always on and always connected. And this is going as far as now saying that we can actually like on Facebook, for example real life things. We can go to places and like them by just pushing a button on the mobile, identifying the place and liking it on Facebook. So we have this overlap of always being connected, actually always leaving comments on physical locations. Google has, for example, in Google Maps, you can note a location and then you can go to a store that has a QR code, a quick response code and scan it and leave a message about the place or give it a rating. As you can see in this photo now, people are actually using like buttons for conferences. So you can take a photo of the person and upload it and like them in real life. And this convergence is happening everywhere in Israel. You have a fun park that's run by, I think by Pepsi and you check out the video on YouTube. Basically what they do is they, when people come in, you register, you give them your Facebook name, you log into Facebook, you get a wristband. So when you're wearing your bathing suit, you get a wristband. The wristband has a little radio chip in it that locks you into Facebook. So when you go down the slide, you come to the end of the slide. As you can see in this picture, if you like the right, you can push a button and then your Facebook page would say you like the slide that you just went on to. So you have this real overlap of online, offline. We have this idea of social commerce, for example. Facebook is allowing people to log in with a mobile phone. And then the gap, for example, is saying if you log into the mall, then you can come by and pick up a free pair of jeans if you are registered as a person that likes the gap brand on Facebook. We can already see, for example, there's a direct relationship between people liking a brand on the Internet, like on Facebook or on Twitter, and buying stuff. For example, Starbucks has about 22 million fans on Facebook, and each of those 22 million drinks twice as much coffee in real life. So people who are following Starbucks on Facebook are much more valuable for those that don't, and clearly that's a question of convergence. We're going to see this complete convergence everywhere, my favorite places in Google, augmented reality, mobile phones, television and the Internet converging. So in two years, we won't be talking about being online, we'll be talking about constant connectivity, and the only real future that we have in terms of being offline is a mental state, meaning that we don't want to be connected, we don't want to take to anyone. But it's not a technical issue. So this convergence will mean a lot of things for us in the future. It will mean the constant availability of all kinds of content, which means competition for our brain space and how much stuff we can take in. It will mean issues like attention deficit disorder, which we're seeing around the world, addiction to gaming, as we've seen in Korea. All these things have to be worked on in the future. Those are big topics. But nevertheless, the convergence of online and offline are crucial factors, for example, for e-commerce, for retail, for people trying to do stuff with media, for location-based services, Foursquare, Instagram and so on. So quite an interesting trend. I think ultimately, if you look a little bit beyond that, what we're seeing right now sort of in the geeky sector using Android phones and now the iPhone is augmented reality. So it's the idea of superimposing data. If you have a mobile phone, you can hold up the screen over the Golden Gate Bridge, and the phone will recognize the bridge and bring you data about the Golden Gate Bridge, like the data when it was built, Wikipedia data, whatever is available from people on the internet, as you can see on this slide. It works quite well using an app called Layer, L-A-Y-A-R, Layer.com. You can check it out on YouTube, but it's quite an interesting tool. There's also a map that's being used widely for core navigation called Wikipedia, that you can put on your Android phone. And as you're driving, you see in the data, when you're going by, you're seeing the data of the restaurant or how much the gas costs or whatever right in the picture on the mobile phone in the photofinder. And so this is really interesting stuff. Basically, the convergence of online-offline is very real, and we shouldn't really be thinking about online businesses or business models. It's all the same now. It's almost the same as saying 20 years ago, you and the fax business when you use a fax machine. So let's forget about the online-offline reality. It's the same thing now, and that's the bottom line for what I want to talk about today. And I do hope to see you on my websites eventually, which is mediafuturevis.com and the future of Dot Biz. And this is Gerard Leonhardt. Thanks for listening, and see you next time.