Technology historically pushed people away from each other, isolated them, allowed them to work independently, Laura Lang, CEO, Razorfish/Digitas Group, told attendees during the afternoon OMMA Global keynote on Wednesday in San Francisco. Today, technology gives us the ability to connect. So when you hear the words social and media, it's important to remember the pathway it creates, an emotional connection from the brand to the consumer. Lang says marketers who thinks of social media as another channel for advertising are already out of the game. Think about this: 25% of the top links in a search query returns …

The best-made games begin to approximate reality, and at a certain level of refinement and precision, they can actually be used to predict the future, according to Matt Story of Denuo. In a gaming promotion tied into Pontiac’s sponsorship of last year’s NCAA tournament, Denuo partnered with 2K to aggregate the results of many hundreds of video game basketball matches to predict the outcome of matches in the real world. In a testimony to the accuracy of virtual player and team profiles, the predictions forecast the winner 75% of the time.

Consoles will probably dominate the hardcore gaming experience for the foreseeable future, but they present problems for advertisers, especially in terms of scalability, as the different console makers are reluctant to cooperate in ad networks, according to the panelists at OMMA Global’s in-game advertising track. Matt Story, a director at Denuo, pointed to online, console-agnostic games on the Web as an easier, more attractive proposition, offering ubiquity, scalability, and receptivity:  “It’s in your social networks, it’s on your phone, it’s everywhere.  From a creative standpoint, it allows us to always have a message on.â€� Here the gamers “are in a …

ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick is pretty excited about a new Gmail plug-in, Raportive, that allows users to access the information trail of people who send them emails. He's so keen on the application, that he used the highest top blogger accolade, calling it "awesome." But another top blogger, TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, quipped, "That's a low bar of awesome."

When asked what gets him excited Om Malik says, "The move toward simplification." He thinks the user experience comes next. The inherent complexity is going up so much. Any innovation that happens around user experience is going to be successful." What he calls not the best mousetrap, but the easiest to use mousetrap.

What's the TechCrunch chief's biggest dream? "Getting my own home organized correctly," he said, disclosing that he's got "stuff lying around all over the place," and that he wishes "somebody could fix that. He's hopeful that somebody can. Possibly Microsoft, citing the Redmond, Wash-based tech firm's "Future Home" tour, which provides a vision of, "what a home will look like, not just down the road, but in a few years," he said, not just a bit wistfully.

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington compares tech blogging to the Wire, where all the old drug dealers got together and reminisced about the old days when they were all friends. "That is what's going on here," he said of sitting on stage with GigaOM's Om Malik and Read Write Web's Marshall Kirkpatrick. "We are seeing the end of hand-crafted contact," says Michael Arrington. People are rapidly fine-tuning and evolving their content. "If we don't evolve, what happened to the New York Times will be done to us." "I don agree with you," says Om Malik, "The headlines have a huge …