You've left us really enthused about the whole digital dimension and we're looking forward to developing our plan with your support. Simon Beardow - Deputy Director, British Council, Vietnam
If you think you are going to make your fortune by producing an app and selling it to the multitudes consider this: out of the thousands of apps available, the average mobile user tends to only use between 22 and 28 apps a month.
Research has shown that young users (18-24) spend more time using apps which comes as little surprise, but they use fewer on average than the 25-34 age group.
But if you are thinking of developing an App and want to know what type of app people are interested in, take a look at AppBrian Stats which lists the top Android searches.
Music, hacking and password breaking apps figured prominently when I last looked which speaks volumes (if you'll excuse the pun) for the use of apps in general.
Top Android searches over the last two weeks
Perhaps the final word on Apps and the pervasive nature of their use in society are the recent findings from a Bank of America study.
Apparently mobile phone users would rather give up alcohol, television or chocolate than lose the use of their mobile devices. 47% of U.S. consumers are so wedded to their smartphones that they couldn't last a day without them.
The bank also found that there folk use their mobile banking apps to "perform more sophisticated transactions, such as mobile check deposit" while the younger set would rather forgo using deodorant or toothbrushes than lose the use of their smartphone.
Perhaps it would be wise never to mingle in a crowd of young smartphone users if you are fastidious about personal hygiene!
Sometimes convergence of these technologies can come together in the most unexpected of ways leaving the user wondering why more robust user testing wasn't in place before release. And in the context of this article I use the term "release" advisedly!
Those of you who have ever stayed in a Japanese hotel will know that the toilets are high tech with a series of buttons designed for an internal car wash, post purge.
The Satis Smart Design boasts the most sophisticated of toilet innovation according to its manufacturers Laxil, one of Japan's biggest toilet companies. It's mouth-like lid opens automatically to greet you as you draw nigh and when you step away the toilet flushes automatically.
There is now even a free Android app with a hard-wired Bluetooth code available which means you can operate the Satis remotely, all of which sounds fine in theory. There is however one fatal flaw that the manufacturers have failed to realise in their rush for innovation - their high tech toilet can be hacked.
IT security firm Trustwave has issued a Bluetooth security vulnerability warning that the app could be hacked. Trustwave issued an advisory that a pin for the Bluetooth app is set at '0000' and can therefore be used by anyone - even remotely. In short, anyone with the 'My Satis' app can control any Satis toilet.
While it remains to be see if bidet hacking will become as popular as gangam style dancing, the temptation for pranksters is obvious. Facing a cyber attack in the bathroom from an out of control two-nozzle bidet spray could have dire consequences.
I am as keen on tech gadgets as the next person but I can't help but wonder if the advent of virtual technology actually takes something away from our perception of the world, rather than adding to it.
There is a marked difference between 'looking' and ''seeing. As a person who started my professional career as an art teacher I know that the secret to visual creativity is to train the mind to actually take in and process the visual stimuli that bombard us every day.
To do this one needs to focus on the subject at hand and exclude the other 'visual gunk' that surrounds it. Only then can the creative juices start flowing and creative interpretation follow. Let's face it, the world needs creative people who can dream.
So in our brave new world where a pair of high tech 'specs' provides us you a constant stream of third party data, are we muddying the creative process rather than aiding it. Imagine how little Leonardo would have achieved if he had been constantly bombarded with virtual reality data? Very little I suspect.
Put bluntly, is too much virtual data for tech-delivered sources scrambling our cranial database?
Robert E. Franken in his book Human Motivation suggests that to be creative, one needs to be able to "view things in new ways or from a different perspective". But I don't believe he had in mind a quite literal 'different perspective' delivered through technology. The 'uniqueness of alternatives' cannot be considered and interpreted creatively if they are constantly being prompted by pre-programmed data.
According to Hungarian psychology professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, creative individuals alternate between imagination and fantasy at one end, and a rooted sense of reality at the other.
I would suggest that the problem with tech gadgets such as Google Glass is that they only allow an individual focus on the latter.
While I wouldn't go as far as Brian Merchant in suggesting that "products like Glass may turn daily life into a neurotic consumerist hellscape", I wonder if people have fully thought through how the purchase of a virtual technology device might effect them?
It comes as no surprise to learn that smartphone addiction is a very real thing, albeit a pleasant one for most in the 18-24 year old demographic.
According a new survey conducted by IDC in conjunction with Facebook, our interaction with each other through our smart phones starts almost as soon as our eyes open in the morning. Within the first 15 minutes of waking up 4 out of 5 smartphone owners are checking their phones.
The focus of the study was to understand how smartphone owners use their phones over the course of a day and the week, with an emphasis on social and communication applications and services.
Smartphones have become woven into the fabric of everyday life. In the USA where the study of 7,400 people was conducted, half of the country's total population use a smartphone and this figure is projected to rise to 67.8% of the population by 2017. That's 222.4 million interconnected people.
A sense of being 'connected' was the primary motivation and sentiment experienced by respondents. Talking on the phone (43%), texting/messaging (49%) and direct messaging via Facebook(40%) were the services that drove the highest levels of connectedness across the largest number of people.
Friday to Sunday had the highest levels of engagement and the ease of being able to slip a smartphone into one's pocket was also a major factor.
The average daily time spent communicating on smartphone was 132 minutes and only 16% of that time was actually spent on phone calls. 84% spent their time texting, sending and receiving email and engaging through social media.
Facebook who co-sponsored the survey will no doubt be heartened to learn that 70% of respondents use Facebook on their phone and of this group, 61% use it each day.
82% read their Facebook news feed while 49% responded or posted comments on friends’ updates. Interestingly, playing games on Facebook was not a dominant activity with only 16% showing this preference, while 7% used Facebook to find apps that interest them.
The survey found that Facebook dominates the total time spent on social and communications activities (on a smartphone), making up 1 out of every 4 minutes.
One final word on Smartphone addiction; 63% of smartphone owners keep their phone with them for all but an hour of their waking day. And of course, many also use their phone as their alarm clock the next morning!
Here is a snapshot of the mega-trends and predictions for 2013.
Your personal data locker will become increasingly important to you and, if you haven't got one you already, you should probably consider it.
According to Forrester Research the business of managing personal data, which is already worth billions, will grow substantially in the next two years. Taking the US as an example, more than $2 billion is spent each year collecting data from third parties.
"Dave Siegel, author of Pull: The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform
Your Business, argues these cyber vaults will eventually replace PCs,
tablets, iPhones, and Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows and Apple's (AAPL)
Macintosh operating systems. Yes, Google (GOOG) Android, too."
2. Home Sweet Home:
The Connected Home is a component of the Internet of Things; where devices talk to devices, in many cases without human intervention.
Cloud-based smart home systems allow you to monitor and control your house from your smart phone, tablet, or computer, no matter where in the world you are at the time. An example of this is Lowe's Iris system.
Iris can be installed directly by the home owner and the basic level of monitoring service is free. This includes text alerts to the home owner when alarms are triggered; remote control of connected devices, thermostats and locks; and access to remote video streaming from cameras in the home via smart phone or computer. Lowe has partnered with AlertMe to produce this product.
3. Programmatic buying will get bigger
Programmatic buying allows advertisers to bid, often in real time, on ad space largely based on the value they have assigned to the consumer on the other side of the screen. It uses a range of technologies to achieve this. As this New York Times article notes, "major advertisers and many of the world’s largest ad agencies creating private exchanges to automate the buying and selling of ads."
4. A Sense of Touch and Smell
IBM believes that in the future computer devices will be able to mimic our ability to touch, taste, smell and hear. Sophisticated algorithms will be able to analyse why people like certain tastes and the chemical structure of food.
If you own a cyber security company you could be in the money as many predict that banks and other online transactions sites, who have been seen a surge in cyber attacks, are anticipating that these will get even more sophisticated as time goes by. As a result these entities will increasingly turn cyber security firms to combat these intrusions.
We are still slack about cyber security matters. A recent study found that 35% of all data required data protection in 2010, but despite this, less than 20% of it is actually protected.
Ericka Chickowski, writing for Dark Reading believes that security research firms will turn away from less lucrative vendor contracts in 2013 and instead sell the information they glean about software vulnerabilities on the open market.
"Cyber-mercenaries are becoming more protective of their discoveries as the technology involved becomes more complex and the secrets more valuable".
Now this should be a worry to all as these cyber-mercenaries don't need to reveal who they have sold their research to although some like Vupen are on record as saying that they wouldn't sell their findings to oppressive governments or criminals.
eWEEK has also compiled some 2013 predictions to help organisations prepare to counter increasingly sophisticated hacks and malware.
6. The amount of Data will grow and grow.
By 2020 that amount of data on planet earth will be 40 Zettabytes; one Zettabyte is 2 to the 70th power bytes. According the Computer Weekly that equates to 57 times the number of all the grains of sand on all the beaches on earth. I 'll have to take their word for it as counting grains of sand is simply soporific! Machine generated data is the main contributor to this increase, rising from the current 11% of all data top 40% by 2020.
Predictions from other sources.
Juniper Research predicts the following for wireless in the year ahead:
Big Data to Become Big Business
Smart Glasses & Other Wearables: 2013, the year of ‘announcements’
BYOD trend on the rise, as security issues escalate
Retail to embrace the in-store mobile strategy
Operators to adopt seamless WiFi & LTE connectivity
Mobile Becomes the Connectivity Hub
The Year of Microsoft
The multi-screen, seamless user experience becomes a reality
New mobile and tablet form factors to emerge
Social Gaming is on the Rise
CIO sees an end to offshore outsourcing. IT robots and autonomic systems will be taking over. So you will no longer need to be an engineer to create software or intelligently manage IT infrastructure. An example is Blue Prism; giving companies a software development toolkit and methodology to create their own software robots to automate rules-driven business processes. According to the company there are significant cost savings with its robot full-time equivalents (FTEs) costing a third of offshore FTEs.(video below)
And finally, the digital playing field is levelling out thanks to Cloud computing with developing countries able expand their role in the global economy. The University of California, San Diego's Dean of International Relations and Pacific Studies, Peter F. Cowhey, and Senior Fellow at the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, Michael Kleeman, found that Third World countries can now utilise the cloud in the same way developed countries have in the past. This is due to the lower costs, resulting in higher Internet adoption rates.
Emerging market businesses can now access similar storage, compute, and uses application services as the Global 2000 do.
Every now and then I come across an app that is really useful, engaging and provides an incentive to use it. Perhaps surprisingly, very few on the market fulfill all three of these fundamental requirements.
Lufthansa's Anyawake app is one of the select few. As well as being an alarm clock it quizzes users on which city the alarm sound comes from? Naturally all are Lufthansa destinations. Each day is different so where will you wake up tomorrow?
Anywake is designed as an alarm clock that "takes you places". To take off you choose a standard sound and use Anywake every day. Every other morning you will wake up to the sound of a randomly selected city.
The trick is that to turn off the alarm, you have to guess which city the sound is emanating from? Now this might prove a little irksome if you are in a foreign land suffering from severe jet lag but to sweeten the experience there is an incentive.
If you choose correctly, you get a discount on a plane ticket to that city, flying with the airline. If you snooze you loose.
For those who travel a lot on business or for pleasure this might be just the ticket; make that two tickets! The free app is available from AnyAwake.com.
Google's CEO Larry pageannounced today that the company has made its first significant hardware acquisition; the purchase of Motorola for the sum of $12.5 billion. Naturally they paid cash.
At the time of this purchase Google has more than 150 million Android devices worldwide and each day another 550,000 devices are added through a network of about 39 manufacturers and 231 carriers in 123 countries.
While some may be worried that Google's commitment to running Android as an open platform might waiver, Larry page has reiterated that. Motorola will remain a licensee of Android and Android will remain open.
The purchase price also represents something of a coup for Motorola shareholders who were paid a premium of 63% n the closing price of Motorola Mobility shares last Friday, August 12, 2011. Motorola hasn't been faring so well in recent years with only 3% market share.
One wonders what this purchase means for Google's current partners, HTC and Samsung in the long term?
Motorola's hundreds of patents (24,5000 of them) add additional value as Larry Page acknowledges in his announcement:
"We recently explained how companies including Microsoft and Apple are banding together in anti-competitive patent attacks on Android. The U.S. Department of Justice had to intervene in the results of one recent patent auction to “protect competition and innovation in the open source software community” and it is currently looking into the results of the Nortel auction. Our acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google’s patent portfolio, which will enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies"
What Google Got For Its Money
There is another side to this purchase. Gigacom reports that if Google hadn't made the purchase they would have been in an even greater patent hole.
"Our sources say that Motorola was in acquisition talks with several parties, including Microsoft for quite some time. Microsoft was interested in acquiring Motorola’s patent portfolio that would have allowed it to torpedo Android even further. The possibility of that deal brought Google to the negotiation table, resulting in the blockbuster sale."
Here is an opportunity for the "technically challenged", that is those of us who are not developers, to build apps with ease.
Google has just announced the release of App Inventor for Android. The burning question though is whether this Google Labs Project will remain in the lab or realise its potential and revolutionise the web?
As it has access to a GPS-location sensor, you can build apps that know where you are. It's drag & drop making the app creation process very simple. These are a couple of the pluses, as is the ability to use this tool for educational purposes.
The downside is that the market for Android Apps is now likely to be swamped by inane apps which will make it difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff.
To begin one needs to sign an online form to register interest.
