Source: Silicon Valley Insider
Firefox is also struggling to make any headway against Chrome. So unlike Google+ which is being cast aside by many, Google's browser seems to be grabbing increasing Market share.
Showing posts with label Google Chrome. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Google Chrome. Show all posts
Tuesday, 22 May 2012
Hate To Say I Told You So, But I Told You So
Late in 2011 I predicted the steady decline of Internet Explorer as the browser of choice. Confirmation this month based on StatCounter global statistics that this has now happened. And it should be noted, unlike IE which comes pre-installed on 90% of the world's computers changing to Chrome is purely a personal choice.
Friday, 30 December 2011
2012 Predictions - A Year to Digitally Disengage and Plant Vegetables?
Bricks and mortar establishments will continue to struggle in shaky economic times and these trends will impact on employment and consumer purchasing patterns. Money will be tight and a lack of resources will make it difficult for many companies to fully assess and capitalise on digital and social opportunities.
Election year in the USA will see political compromise to garner support from the electorate, which may result in the Stop Online Piracy Act becoming law. If it does, it will have a dramatic effect on any form of content creation.
Control
Authoritarian governments will have the ability to monitor all electronic communications in the near future as it becomes increasingly cheaper to do so; "every phone conversation, electronic message, social media interaction, the movements of nearly every person and vehicle, and video from every street corner" says a report from the The Brookings Institution.
"Plummeting digital storage costs will soon make it possible for authoritarian regimes to not only monitor known dissidents, but to also store the complete set of digital data associated with everyone within their borders. These enormous databases of captured information will create what amounts to a surveillance time machine, enabling state security services to retroactively eavesdrop on people in the months and years before they were designated as surveillance targets. This will fundamentally change the dynamics of dissent, insurgency and revolution. "
eCommerce
2012 will be a year of continuing financial uncertainty which will affect business confidence and reinvestment. Paradoxically these conditions also present opportunistic for those willing to take a calculated gamble and we will see more mergers and the ongoing growth in eCommerce.
Crowdsourcing
These platforms will show strong growth and provide opportunities for micro-economies to circumvent the challenges of the global macro economy. Examples include Quirky, which takes submitted product ideas, filters through community engagement and produces them, letting the idea creator 'cash in' at the end of the manufacturing and sales process. Kickstarter which is a funding platform focused on a broad spectrum of creative projects is such another example.
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| Ideas to Revenue using Crowdsourcing |
MicroPayments
Sites that promote 'design to product' will increase. Examples such as Zazzle and RedBubble allow the creative amongst us to upload a digital file while they take care of all manufacture, shipping and customer service.
Browsers
Google's Chrome browser will continue its rise and surpass IE as the #1 ranked browser
Gamification
The design and interaction lessons learnt in online gaming will become increasingly mainstream appearing as social apps in your mobile device and browser.
Influence
Converting digital influence into business value will remain a challenge but platforms such as Klout and the new kid on the block, Kred, will be there to provide some guidance. However, the focus for the year ahead will be less on the measurement and more on how to achieve greater online influence with a variety of techniques and tools.
Social
Taste Graphs (things a consumer is actually interested in) rather than a person's social connections will provide better insight for marketers engaged in social commerce. This will give rise to the use of 'tastemakers' - experts who are recommended to a consumer.
Twitter's growth and revenue will continue rapidly in 2012. This will mean more Twitter 'Promoted' ads appearing with some experts predicating an 80%+ revenue growth as a result. The proviso is that Twitter doesn't fall prey to an acquisition takeover and that Google+ does not perform better than expectations.
Social Burnout - Facebook growth is slowing and people are already starting to question their own social existence and activity. It could be a question of too much of a good thing when it comes to social and digital activity in 2012. Users will be re-evaluating their social lives with issues of privacy being top of mind.
Quantifying the true value a business creates for online clients will remain one of the biggest challenges for companies in 2012.
Media
Trans-media campaigns such as the Jello Pudding / Twitter / billboard will increase in 2012 further expanding the definition of the term "social".
Sharing
Social sharing capitalises on the fact that social networks have 'turned people into bragging machines' (as David Armano has so eloquently expressed it). The integration of social sharing opportunities on corporate and brand web sites will gather pace in 2012 as more businesses seek personal endorsements of their products and services across personal networks. Adding sharing options to content ensures better status in search results and a greater number of page views.
Television
Social TV will take off in 2012 predicts the Harvard Business Review. Socially integrated shows such as the X-Factor, where people voted using Twitter, point the way to what will be happening more frequently. The TV's themselves are more likely to be of the 3D variety particularly if you are in Asia, although those in the USA still prefer the cheaper, lower spec'ed models.
70% of video is consumed on Internet connected devices so revenue models for television advertising will change.
Tablets and Ultrabooks
Android vendors are continuing to challenge the dominance of iPads and Apple's premium pricing for its products. 2012 will see an increase in tablet computer sales but more likely a dramatic rise in sale of Ultrabooks which are powerful laptops with the advantage of being thinner and lighter than their competition.
And while we are on the subject of Android, I predict that the sale ofAndroid mobile devices will surpass Apple's iPhone in the coming year. Web sites will be optimised for Tablet and Ultrabook use as mobile commerce will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 39% through to 2016 (Forrester Research).
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| The Rise of Ultrabook - Google Trends |
This adds a virtual experience to the real experience of our world and we are about to see exponential growth for Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR) according to Mashable's Lance Ulanoff. Visiongain predicts that the the advent of MAR will have a profound and lasting impact on the way that people use their mobile devices. It will push the telecoms industry towards ubiquitous computing and a technologically converged paradigm.
Big Data will be Big Business for Small Business
At the moment much data is still contained in silos. Storing data in the Cloud and using systems such as Bime will put the necessary tools at the fingertips of SME's (Small to Medium Enterprises). They will be able to get a clear and consistent query model across all of their data.
Marketing departments will be employing analytics experts who can monitor real-time data from web sites, social media and industry-leading news feeds but simply monitoring will not be sufficient. They will be expected to provide accurate data on visitation to web & social media sites, what content people are engaging with and how quickly they get to the product, service or messaging that the company is pitching. Human language interpretation of unstructured conversations will help this process.
"Companies will need to centralize Business Intelligence to feed every aspect of the business – marketing, product, innovation and customer service. Only then will BI help companies transform themselves into true social businesses.” Brian Sollis.
Publish or be Damned
Businesses will increasingly bypass traditional media outlets and go directly to their target audiences themselves by creating branded niche media properties. They will not only publish their own content but also disseminate it themselves predicts Sandra Fathi of AffectStrategies.
Freemium at a Premium
One hopes that in the year ahead other companies will see the value in building business, by offering a free option of their product or service, albeit with less functionality than the paid version. Mailchimp is an example of this digital strategy. People who like the product and embed it in their daily use are more likely to upgrade to the paid version with all the bells and whistles.
Scheduling
This will increasingly be on the Cloud using platforms such as Schedulicity. Founder believes that the traditional pen and paper appointment book is dead in the water. "Over the next two to five years, the physical appointment book will be gone altogether and replaced with online counterparts".
Some companies are already using scheduling options to great effect and dispensing with more traditonal methods. Emerson Salon for example is sourcing up to 75% of its business from Facebook, Twitter and its blog.
Text Messaging
Text messaging is growing quicker than most have predicted and is highly prevalent in 19 of the 21 countries surveyed by Pew Research, with a majority of mobile phone owners regularly sending text messages. Many use their mobiles to record personal videos and this growth trend will continue.
Deal or No Deal
Deal and coupon sites mushroomed in 2010/2011. However, as business realise they cannot manage their offers and cover all the coupon bases, we will see a rationalisation of these platforms with the likely outcome being that the major players such as Groupon will gobble up the smaller fry. Deals by mobile which don't require a pre-purchase are likely to grow at the expense of those that do.
Business Process
Faced with financial challenges and the impact of social business, companies will need to restructure and refocus. Those that don't will whither on the vine.
"Companies of all sizes will need to transform their business and existing infrastructure, and reverse engineer the impact of business objectives and metrics. Businesses will have to embrace all of the disruptive elements, such as mobile and social technology, in a new, cohesive organization that is focused outward and inward." Brian Sollis
Bernie Borges believes that 2012 will be the year that more organisations embrace the convergence of employee personal branding and corporate branding through content marketing strategies.
Web
While the Internet itself remains robust, the World Wide Web will suffer as further as consumers and general users move on to dedicated platforms that deliver their personal preferences better. This trend will accelerate, although the company web site will remain the bedrock brand statement and the place on which many depend; as the definitive source of company information.
Reference:
2012 Social Marketing & New Media Predictions (Awareness)
Sunday, 24 April 2011
Flock Off
Flock's demise is also perhaps not so surprising considering that their staff were bought up by Zynga in January of this year and are now "working to assist Zynga in achieving their goal of building the most fun, social games available to anyone, any time - on any platform".
Zynga is best known as the brains trust behind social gaming sites such as Farmville.
Flock positioned itself as the 'social browser' when it first appeared on the scene and was based on the Mozilla platform before switching over to Chromium last year.
Flock grew to more than 10 million users and became the #1 most popular desktop application on Facebook before the talent acquisition by Zynga (the acquisition did not include the technology, service or then CEO so Zynga never owned Flock.com and had nothing to do with today’s shutdown).
Jennifer Van Grove of Mashable, writing in USA Today, says:
Flock is a casualty of the social nature of the Web and Facebook's Open Graph initiative. Web denizens now carry their social graph with them via Facebook and not through the browser. Its shutdown also calls to mind the rise and fall of the once great Flip video camera, which is also being discontinued.
Friday, 31 December 2010
First Past The Post - Facebook As A Newspaper
Tired of the same old user interface? Want a different look for your Facebook page for the New Year?
PostPost is an interesting app. and realtime 'social newspaper' that works well with Google Chrome and Firefox.
The first version of PostPost was created as a weekend project by entrepreneur Peter Yared, VP of Apps at Webtrends and it has since been distributed by TigerLogic.
One of PostPost's main attractions is that it is interactive. The boxes realign themselves based on the size of your screen /browser.
PostPost's aim is to create a real-time dashboard which allows the user to quickly skim relevant passages of text from friends and clump similar content together so it's easier to read.
Watch videos inline, comment, like posts without having to leave the page you are viewing. There is also the ability to moderate what volume of content appears and to cut down noise.
All in all a nice change compared to the regular Facebook design options.
PostPost is an interesting app. and realtime 'social newspaper' that works well with Google Chrome and Firefox.
The first version of PostPost was created as a weekend project by entrepreneur Peter Yared, VP of Apps at Webtrends and it has since been distributed by TigerLogic.
One of PostPost's main attractions is that it is interactive. The boxes realign themselves based on the size of your screen /browser.
PostPost's aim is to create a real-time dashboard which allows the user to quickly skim relevant passages of text from friends and clump similar content together so it's easier to read.
Watch videos inline, comment, like posts without having to leave the page you are viewing. There is also the ability to moderate what volume of content appears and to cut down noise.
All in all a nice change compared to the regular Facebook design options.
Thursday, 16 December 2010
Head In The Cloud/s
"The Cloud" has become an almost repetitive term in the past decade, but the withdrawal of service by Amazon.com for WikiLeaks demonstrates a potential and strategic weakness.If cloud-based services can be influenced in such a way by governmental pressure, will businesses feel comfortable putting all their transactional eggs into this online basket?
With the above in mind consider the implications of the recently launched Google Chrome operating system, which all intents and purposes has turned the Chrome browser into an cloud-based operating system.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt says:
"With Chrome OS, we have in development a viable third choice in desktop operating systems. Before there was no cloud computing alternative—now we have a product which is fast, robust and scalable enough to support powerful platforms. It’s something computer scientists have been dreaming about for a very, very long time. The kind of magic that we could imagine 20 years ago, but couldn’t make real because we lacked the technology".
While ChromeOS does not handle flash very well at this time, such glitches are to be expected during its testing period.
Where Google hopes it will beat its competitors is in speed and security; two business essentials. The four guiding security principles for the product have been:
- The perfect is the enemy of the good.
- Deploy defenses in depth.
- Make it secure by default.
- Don't scapegoat our users.
As Jeremy A. Kaplan of Fox News put it:
"Stop worrying about when the hard drive in your computer will die. Google wants to kill it permanently anyway"
But the nagging question still remains, are users and businesses prepared for a shift to purely cloud-based computing?
Amazon's action may have given them pause for thought.
Monday, 13 December 2010
Social Media Browsers
There's a new kid on the block, or should that be something new about to leave the blocks?RockMelt aims to make browsing and social media networking a seamless activity as the video below explains.
The browser is developed by the same team who produced the first commercial browser Netscape, 16years ago.
The Telegraph reports that "It is majority-funded by major technology investor, and also Netscape’s co-founder, Marc Andreessen, who has also backed the likes of Foursquare and sits on the board of Facebook".
It will need to compete head on with the likes of Flock and Firefox which have been the social media browsers of choice in recent times.
Scobleizer questions whether this browser has what it takes as a start up?
1. Power users may be frustrated by the fact that the browser only has an answer for Windows and Macintosh
2. It requires a download and most people are download adverse.
3. It requires a login and people are not used to having to log on to their browser.
4. It changes search behavior as RockMelt asks you to use two separate boxes again, which clutters UI and asks you to change your expectations of how search should work
5. The Twitter client isn’t full featured. It doesn’t support real time, for instance
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