Hot or Not. The Disruptive Tech Outlook for 2011

Great overview of new technologies and how they're confusing business today. Common themes are location location location, mobile, data and social. I can't think of one smart company that isn't experimenting in these areas (can you?). In a blog post Charlene also breaks down how you should prioritise where your focus lies: 

• User Experience. Does this technology pass the “no manual needed” test? Does it allow people to connect in new ways? Twitter is powerful as a platform, but inscrutable if you’re not familiar or comfortable with @ and DMs — which thereby limits its disruptive power. In comparison, social networks like Facebook are intuitive and provide tremendous value with the new experiences they enable.

• Business model. Simply put, can you make more money, or save costs because of these new technologies? And by using the technologies better and faster than your competitor, can you gain an advantage? An example of this is YouTube, which when deployed in a strategic way can lower acquisition and support costs for companies.

• Ecosystem value. The most disruptive technologies are when ecosystems get impacted. Streaming, on-demand video seemed to be the dominion of cable companies but then along comes Netflix who wasn’t even in the streaming business at all — but has the relationship with movie viewers who were sick of keeping track of red envelopes. Value shifts with the entrant of a new player who is able to tap into this new technology.

Here's the full deck. You can download the ppt and share. 

Simple Media Planning

Nice graphic describing the oft over-used but sometimes useful idea of Bought, Owned and Earned media.

Present Tense, Future Perfect?

A talk I gave recently on some issues facing advertising and how I try to help. 

Present tense (& future perfect)

View more presentations from Tim Sparke.

Our Mobile Future

Everything you need to know about the rise of mobile, tablets and virtual goods. Mary Meeker nails it and demos how fast change is occurring (I spend my life looking at this stuff and some was still new to me).

Mary meeker mobile trends 11 feb 2011

Here's my 7" radio edit. 

So Lo Mo - Social Local Mobile

Mobile advertising is still in it's infancy but its developing fast, has very high transaction conversion rates and is very viral. 

• Location-Based Services – Enable real-time physical retail / service opportunities - Shopkick
• Transparent Pricing – Instant local + online price comparison disrupts retailers - ShopSavvy
• Discounted Offers – Deep discounts drive foot traffic to local retailers - Groupon iPhone
• Immediate Gratification – OTA (over-the-air) instant digital product + content delivery - Shazam/iTunes

"Mobile is clearly becoming a new way people shop," Jon Donahoe, CEO Ebay

Click to read more ...

Why is DropBox so much more popular than other similar tools?

I love DropBox and I'm intrigued by Quora so I was happy to see this post asking why DropBox is so popular compared to other file syncing solutions. 

"Well, let's take a step back and think about the sync problem and what the ideal solution for it would do:

• There would be a folder.

• You'd put your stuff in it.

• It would sync.

They built that.

Why didn't anyone else build that?  I have no idea.

"But," you may ask, "so much more you could do!  What about task management, calendaring, customized dashboards, virtual white boarding.  More than just folders and files!"

No, shut up.  People don't use that crap.  They just want a folder.  A folder that syncs."

Exactly. DropBox does one thing very well and it doesn't try to make you do anything new. If you haven't tried it. Do. It's an amazing way to backup and sync your stuff. 

Why we struggle with Data Overload

I just found Linda Stone's writing on the back of a Henry Jenkins article. Boy is she smart. This article's so great I'm just going to rip it. She quotes Dee Hock, the Founder of Visa and his definition of how information evolves. She then uses it to describe how technology is evolving us, how we’re evolving technology and how both are evolving culture.

• Noise becomes data when it has a cognitive pattern.
• Data becomes information when assembled into a coherent whole, which can be related to other information.
• Information becomes knowledge when integrated with other information in a form useful for making decisions and determining actions.
• Knowledge becomes understanding when related to other knowledge in a manner useful in anticipating, judging and acting.
• Understanding becomes wisdom when informed by purpose, ethics, principles, memory and projection.

Further, she maps this evolution to a timeline:

• 1945-1965 - Noise to Data
• 1965-1985 - Data to Information
• 1985-2005 - Information to Knowledge
• 2005-2025 - Knowledge to Understanding
• 2025-2045 - Understanding to Wisdom

Today, we are Knowledge Workers evolving into Understanding Workers. Understanding Workers use technology to anticipate, judge and act. Think about it. This is what we’re doing with FitBit, Quantified Self, 23andMe.com, Facebook, and so many other technologies of this era.

As we move into an Era of Conscious Computing, we’ll also be moving deeper into Understanding and closer toward Wisdom.

Data gets a bad rep sometimes but as we all know, in the right hands it can be pretty amazing...

 

Content, An Illustrated History

View more presentations from Philip Sheldrake.

2010 in Numbers

People throw around way too many meaningless stats about the internet. Here's some good ones from Royal Pingdom which are worth a look. Essentially: Email's still huge. Most of the internet doesn't speak English. People really love sharing photos...

• 107 trillion emails were sent last year (294 billion a day). Of those, 89% were spam.
• There are 1.97 billion internet users in the world (up 14% on last year). Asia has 825 million, Europe has 475 million, North America has 266 million.
• There are 152 million blogs. There were 25 billion tweets sent. Lady Gaga had 7.7 million Twitter followers. Facebook had 600 million members. And 20 milion Facebook apps were installed a day.
• Internet Explorer's still the leading web browser worldwide with a 47% marketshare. Chrome has burst in with 14.9%.
• 3000 photos a minute are uploaded to Flickr. Three billion photos a month are uploaded to Facebook. 

The best holiday stat came from Mashable. Over New Year's weekend records were broken when we uploaded 750 million photos to Facebook. Wow. 

 

Money & the Cult of the Amateur

 

Fortune magazine ran a round-up of all the analysts who predicted seven key figures prior to Apple posting their Q1 2011 results. In one corner you had the analysts from Goldman Sachs, Piper Jaffray and Citigroup. In the other, amateur blogger analysts.

The amateurs blew the pros out of the water.  

'The bottom 20 spots were all held by professionals working for the banks and brokerage houses. Taken as a whole, the numbers they sent their paying clients were off by a margin (9.04%) more than twice as big as those generated by the guys who do it for free (3.94%).'

Of course, one swallow does not make a summer. It's too early to tell whether they'll consistently outperform Wall Street but given the freedom of information online, the lines between amateurs (who do stuff for the love of it) and pros (paid) are definitely blurring. 

Passion + Data + Insight = Win 

"Sometimes, I wish we were all amateurs again. I'd play for nothing. Ab-so-lute-ly free. But that's not the system." Dan Marino. 

I'm still trying to work out how significant this is but I get the feeling it's a pretty big deal. 

11 tech & media trends for brands in 2011

From the excellent Dan Calladine, some ideas for brands in the coming months... 

The world is changing rapidly and media is at the heart of these changes. Changes predicted a few years ago have happened, including mobile ‘arriving’, the ubiquity of social media and online video; in the light of this 2011 will be a year of consolidating on these gains and refining techniques in the new landscape.

1 – Monetisation 

Facebook will start to make lots and lots of money.  Facebook say they’ve only really made enough ‘to keep the lights on’ so far, but once they really start the money will come flooding in. Through deals with partners like Paypal they can take a percentage of transactions, and with more and more things sold on the site, this will soon amount to billions. Other media owners will do longer term and deeper deals with brands on more of a revenue share model – for example a permanent position on the site paid for by a share of sales, rather than by impressions or clicks.

Entertainment companies will continue to prosper, but the big winners will be companies that take micropayments – for example a small amount to download an extra level of a game, or sell a virtual item that makes the game easier, like the tractors in Farmville. Mobile game companies like Rovio have made millions from downloads of games like Angry Birds for less than €1. However at the same time a few big, expensive blockbusters like Call of Duty will also break records.

Implications for brands – Think about what you have that can be sold, and the ways in which you sell.  Can you sell directly, or through channels like Facebook and the app stores?  Do deals to make sure that you sell in the best environments.

2 - More Advertising

Click to read more ...