You may have heard of someone ‘sleeping through a revolution’. It happens. Rarely though does anyone remain unaware of a revolution that they play a direct part in. Does anyone even think about starting a business these days without registering a domain name and building a website? How much do we use our phones today for talking, and how much for exchanging mail, pictures, messages, interaction via social networks, reading the news, playing online games and watching films? Was it like that ten or twenty years ago? Today the Internet is an essential tool in our working and social lives, in getting ‘paperwork’ done, paying bills and doing shopping. Nowadays we might greet Siri and ask her to turn on the light, or tell our Google Assistant to set our alarm to wake us up on time to get to work. Did all this happen overnight or did the way we live and work change day by day without us even being aware of it?
There are ten DIDS conferences behind us now – ten great tales of the Internet. Year by year, DIDS has chronicled silent Internet revolutions. The eleventh DIDS is set to kick off a new decade – of asking important questions and of seeking to identify where we are today, of remembering where we came from and everything that has happened along the way.
DIDS 2020 asks: in seeking to provide Internet users with the privacy they sorely need, is their security being sacrificed? Do new protocols which ensure the privacy of access to online destinations at the same time compromise the basic structure of the Internet, and how does that impact the experience of end users? In leaving it up to the tech giants to take care of our online privacy will we end up seeing the Internet solely through their eyes?
DIDS will look at how the Internet has transformed business, and whether a commercial model based on active use of the Internet is a decisive factor for the successful promotion and sale of products and services. And while we are talking about promotion and sale, DIDS 2020 will look at the revolution the Internet has brought to marketing, how it has impacted the (r)evolution in the concept of branding and enabled the consumer to speak louder about the brand than the brand itself. And how brands have been dragged out from their comfortable spot in the marketing departments and thrown to the mercy of millions of consumers on the Internet – and what the effect of this has been.
Through a presentation of the results of recently conducted market research, DIDS 2020 will give an insight into the way Serbian micro, small and medium enterprises do business, focusing on their use of the Internet commercially. We will look at how companies choose their domain names, how much value they place on advertising in the Serbian market and how much attention they devote to security.
Since the Internet has come into our lives the world in which we wake up in the morning has become a radically different place.
We are riding the crest of a fantastic and terrifying wave of technology that is developing faster than thought, of information travelling faster than sound, of time and space that are more relative than even Einstein could have envisaged – and we do not give enough thought to the question of where that wave is taking us.
A great artist once said that cats look to the future with their eyes closed. DIDS looks with eyes wide open, and will not sleep while Internet revolutions are happening around us.
Join us on 19th March at the Hotel Metropol Palace in Belgrade.
Welcome to DIDS 2020!