What Ray Rice & Donald Sterling can Tell Us about the Future of Capture

For those of you who attended the Harvey Spencer Associates (HSA) Capture Conference last week, you got to see a cool presentation by HP Autonomy's Christopher Surdak on doing automated capture from video files. Examples that Surdak presented included matching license plate numbers with car models to protect against stolen vehicles and analyzing faces taken on video at airports for matches against dangerous persons databases.These aren't exactly examples of the transaction-oriented capture that HSA typically focuses on, but you can see where it could lead. Harvey likes to give the example of being able to take a video of a car engine that is not working right, and sending that video to the cloud - where analysis is done and then the user is sent a list of parts that they can order to fix the problem.


In DIR's annual news review and predictions presentation, I offered my opinion that as millennials and born digitals take over the workforce and smart phones and other computers continue to advance, videos and photos are going to become increasingly important to conducting business. Traditional documents are destined to become so yesterday.

A recent sports news story helps bring the point home about how much more powerful video cam be as a means of communication than traditional text. Many of you have by now surely heard the story of Ray Rice, the Baltimore Ravens running back that has been driven out of football due to his being caught beating up his fiancee this past offseason. Here's the timeline:

• Story comes out about Rice beating up girlfriend/fiancee. 
• Rice gets suspended for two games.
• People get up in arms about the light punishment and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell stiffens NFL's domestic abuse policy - but nothing more happens to Rice
• Video comes out showing what Rice admitted to
• Rice's team (Baltimore Ravens) terminate his contract and league suspends him indefinitely

 From this ESPN story on the Rice incident: "The source said that Rice admitted to the Ravens from the start that he was guilty of striking Janay and, for the most part, accurately described what they eventually saw on the video. But the brutality of the assault when seen on the security video made a different impression."

So, basically, until everybody actually saw what Rice was doing, the full impact of the event was not realized. As a text-oriented guy, this kind of disturbs me, because I really wasn't surprised by the video and had a hard time believing many people are just now becoming outraged with Rice's behavior. But then again, we had a similar situation with Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling earlier this year.

If you remember, Sterling was essentially driven out of the NBA after a recording surfaced with him making racial comments to his ex-girlfriend. Shocking right? Well, not so much.  As far back as 2006, Bomani Jones wrote this article for ESPN's Page 2, entitled "Sterling's Racism Should be News." In spite of this, big name athletes and Coach Doc Rivers continued to sign with the Clippers from 2006 through 2013. Then, they acted all surprised when his racist rants were caught on audio recording this spring.

The bottom line is that apparently, nobody in the mass market pays attention to text media anymore. Which brings me back to my point about multi-media being so much more powerful than text. Maybe traditional documents still have a place in business today, just like there is still print/text media out there being published. But as things move more toward video, audio, and the like in mass media, I don't think there is any question they will also move that way in business transactions. Didn't Blackberry rule the business world before iPhones took over the consumer market and then moved into business? The momentum in favor of video is just too great. Expect more video in business in the next few years!