With the end of 2011 coming up, a lot of blogs and sites out there are evaluating the past year and making predictions for the next. Lance Ulanoff at Mashable.com has shared the five tech trends he thinks will break big in 2012. Here’s an abbreviated description of them:
- Augmented Reality: Ulanoff predicts that, at the end of 2012, it will be difficult to find anyone who hasn’t used AR-technology at least once.
- The Micro-Payment Economy: More and more people (and companies) will capitalize on the fact that it’s now easy to sell your own products online, without complicated business models or advanced software.
- The Rise of the UltraBook: As notebooks are getting thinner and tablets are packing more and more processing power, these two will meet in the shape of an “UltraBook” – a device with all the utility of a laptop, but with the sleek design and good looks of a tablet.
- Social/Digital Exhaustion: Although far from prophecizing the death of social media, Ulanoff predicts that the public in general will reevaluate their social media presence, and how the modern digital lifestyle affects both private and professional aspects of life. What the results of this will be remains to be seen…
- Mobile Chip Wars: As a result of mobile devices becoming increasingly popular, tech companies will be battling each other in order to develop next generation’s micro processors.
Mashable reports that passengers flying with KLM Airlines might soon be able to pick their seat partner based on Facebook and LinkedIn profiles and -preferences. See the video below for a more comprehensive explanation.
It will be interesting to see how this initiative falls out; maybe in the future, seat partners are automatically matched according to Klout score..?
Twitter recently released some statistics from 2011, regarding the number of tweets per second. Some of the events that generated the most tweets per second were:
- Japanese earthquake and tsunami (March): 5 530 tweets/second
- End of FIFA Women’s World Cup (July): 7 196 tweets/second
- MTV Video Music Awards (August): 8 868 tweets/second
Notably, Steve Jobs’ resignation from Apple generated more tweets per second than his actual passing away…
YouTube has now publicly launched their new and improved site design. Apart from mimicking Google’s visual profile to a larger extent, channels are given a much more central role. YouTube now identify themselves as the digital and web based counterpart of cable TV, and in the same way that you zap between channels on your TV, you’ll be zapping around YouTube channels.
An example of new features is that it’s now easier to post YouTube content directly to Facebook and Twitter.
Check out the new YouTube, and read up on what’s changed here.
Social media and the digital world is, as we all know, difficult to fully grasp due to its size. Thankfully, talented people are putting things into perspective with the use of various comparisons. Here are a few examples published by the gang at Wolber World:
- The combined length of all tweets posted in a day is the rough equivalent of a 10 million page book
- In year 2015, the yearly web traffic is estimated to amount to approximately one zettabyte (which is as much as the all digital data traffic up until 2010)
- In 2010, 107 trillion e-mails were sent
For the entire list, click here. As the list is in Swedish, we suggest that our English speaking readers make use of Google Translate, or hit the “Källa”-button below each post, which then directs you to the original post (usually in english).
Bloggers Wardrobe can be said to be both a site and a fashion initiative, and the idea is quite simple: gather the world’s top fashion bloggers and provide them with a platform on which they’re put in touch with the most exclusive brands. This to both ensure mutually beneficial co-operation and to maintain the integrity and quality of these valuable brand ambassadors.
Bloggers Wardrobe is in our opinion an interesting initiative, sprung out of the realization that top bloggers truly are a force that ought to be harnessed by any and all who wish to make an impact with their products or messages in social media. Although this hardly is news for anyone, the way Bloggers Wardrobe are packaging their offer makes it seem as if though they’re providing more than just a platform for an already existing interaction. Whether this is actually the case or not, time will tell.
thenextweb.com reports that 75% of the UK use a laptop, smartphone or tablet while watching TV. These findings come from The 2011 Social TV Trends Reports, based on a survey of 2 025 UK online consumers.
96% of the questioned 18-24 year-olds said that they stack multiple media, and – more surprisingly – 63% of respondents aged 55+ admitted to doing the same.
With these results in mind, it’s probably only a matter of time before marketers (and others dealing with communication) begin to fully utilize the potential of this media stacking behavior. For example, imagine a TV-ad that’s both an ad and an interactive quiz show, accessed via the internet; instead of muting the TV during the commercial breaks, viewers might actually pay more attention to the screen when such an ad airs, and – after they win or lose – they discuss the outcome online, providing the advertiser with additional exposure and customer engagement.
There may be a paradigm shift in TV-/online marketing awaiting us, in a not too distant future…
Earlier today, Swedish mobile payment service iZettle announced that they have received $11.2 million in investor funding, with the main investor being Index Ventures (who have previously backed Skype, and are currently supporting Soundcloud). This undoubtedly indicates that investors have a strong belief in the company’s potential for success. iZettle, that can be described as a service enabling peer to peer credit card transactions via smartphone (see iZettles own video description of the service below), is often identified as the European counterpart of American mobile payment service Square, and is – here in Sweden – gaining ground steadily.
The question that still remains to be answered is whether mobile credit card solutions will be able to compete with the advent of NFC payment methods; for the sake of the team behind iZettle (as Swedes we’re naturally biased towards the Stockholm based company), we hope so!
We all do it: laugh at a funny clip or go “Oh!” when we read something interesting, and then share it with our friends.
Bookmarking and sharing service AddThis has – with the help of Clearspring Technologies – created an infographic summarizing their findings regarding sharing, over the past five years. It provides some interesting insights on how and when people share content online, as well as some staggering facts and figures. Quite possibly, you’ll check it out (thank you Mashable for hosting) – go “Oh!” – and share it with your friends…
Commscorner.com has listed 30 helpful “vertical search engines” as they’ve chosen to call them; search engines designed to search within specific fields such as “travel”, “music” and “domain names”, providing users with easier and less cluttered searches.
We opened our last Word-of-Mouth newsletter with the reflection that social media can be a jungle to navigate through (you don’t need to tell Social Media Examiner’s khaki-clad mascot that!), so we thought we’d share these 30 resources with you in order to simplify your trek across the Web. Good luck!
