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Computer scientist Bill Buxton predicts a near future where cellphones will be equipped with projection touchscreens.(nextMEDIA)

One idea seemed to permeate session after session at nextMEDIA, a digital communication conference held this week in downtown Toronto: keep up with new technology or be left in the dust of those who do.

More than 450 content producers, advertisers and media executives spent Monday and Tuesday at the Toronto Design Exchange, a classic art-deco building engulfed in a modern office tower in the business district.

Delegates learned how to hawk their wares to today's consumers: people who are using ever-smaller screens and increasingly trying to avoid time-consuming advertising.

Presenters urged news organizations, advertisers and anyone else trying to reach the public to learn ways to communicate that turn consumers into participants or risk being forgotten in a world changing faster than ever.

There's no question technology is becoming more adaptible and multi-faceted, says 60-year-old Bill Buxton, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research and a pioneer in human-computer interaction. He says it's just a matter of how fast it will change and who keeps up.

“If the dimensions of any one thing changes, it becomes a different thing,” Buxton says, advising companies to avoid developing one digital strategy and assuming their work is done. “Don't invest in the technologies, invest in the people.”

As an example of the future he envisions, Buxton displayed a phone technology he expects to hit the mainstream in the next couple of years: the projection touchscreen.

Screens on contemporary cellphones are too small to practically share photos or play games with more than one person, he says. The solution: using a projector to turn any surface into a touchscreen that can be read by the phone's built-in camera.

At the same time touchscreens would allow massive displays to be stored in one's pocket, monitors will become cheap enough to end up on virtually any surface, predicted Buxton's colleague at Microsoft Research, Curtis Wong.

“In five years we think it will be cheaper to have a wall-size display than to (add decorative panelling to) that same surface,” he told a rapt crowd Monday afternoon.

While the need to remain current may seem obvious to some, not everyone realizes just how quickly things are changing, market researcher Kaan Yigit says.

He noted that those in charge of making media don't always realize that people between 12 and 27 years old are more likely to get rid of their cable, newspaper subscriptions and home phone line before their cellphone and home Internet.

By the end of 2010, according to one presenter, more people will be accessing the Internet through their cellphones than through desktop or laptop computers.

This quickly approaching reality has left some TV producers and advertisers scrambling to adapt, often involving hastily-created Twitter accounts and contests that leave viewers less than motivated to participate.

Marketing strategist Tony Chapman, whose company Capital C conducted a successful Nissan Cube campaign mostly on Twitter, says the key to harnessing social media is to target a key demographic and let them promote the product to their peers.

“We wanted (to target) people involved in the creative class and to mobilize their creativity,” Chapman said Tuesday afternoon, describing the contest in which 500 invited participants created web campaigns proving why they should win a free car.

“They made videos, did art, promoted the Cube on Twitter... We reached about five million people in this campaign.”

His advice to advertisers trying to wade into social networking was to make sure they have something interesting to say and are willing to have a dialogue with consumers. The days of advertising on TV -- where a consumer takes in a message without being able to respond -- are nearing an end, he says.

“I have now gone from a world of shouting loud to listening generously," he says. “If I am going to go in and invade your webs... I have to have something to say that has some meaning to it.”