by Patricia Sellers
I’m back from Brainstorm Tech in Aspen. Among the CEOs at Fortune‘s three-day confab: Ursula Burns of Xerox , Barry Diller of IAC , Tim Armstrong of AOL , Bobby Kotick of Activision Blizzard , and Susan Lyne of Gilt Group.
I saw plenty that excited me (Flipboard for the iPad is cool, and I downloaded it right away), but I also heard lots that made my head spin. Experts told us, for example, that we’ll be multitasking more in the future — providing media companies an entree to cram more content, on multitudinous platforms, into our overcrowded brains. Walt Disney media networks boss Anne Sweeney talked enthusiastically about the opportunity — as I explain in a post called “Steve Jobs’ mark on ABC’s Lost” on the Brainstorm Tech site.
I also wrote about “Hyper-Personalization,” another trend that’s exciting but creepy. As I say in “Does the Internet know you too well?” Google’s Marissa Mayer thinks that super-customization on the Internet, based on users’ online behavior, is an even more interesting business opportunity than hyper-localization — which currently captivates the tech cognoscenti.
And there was lots of buzz at Brainstorm around online games — a favored way to connect Internet users and (importantly) collect their credit-card information. Personally, I don’t get why anyone — much less 55-year-old women, who are among the most active gamers — spend their money buying virtual goods. But Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus was with us to explain the phenom. As Sunday’s New York Times profile of Pincus noted, his company, which markets games like FarmVille and the new FrontierVille, has accumulated users faster than Facebook in its first three years. Zynga could surpass $800 million in revenue this year.
If you doubt Pincus’ competitive drive, let me tell you, on Saturday after Brainstorm Tech ended, I went on a 27-mile bike ride with him and seven other hardcore cyclists. While I held up the rear (proudly), Pincus was solid up the mountain — and drafted like a banshee all the way down, finishing first. Brainstorm Tech producer John Needham, who flew those 13 miles with him, told me, “Drafting behind Pincus is like riding an express train.”
