Media Megatrends 2012–2018

Posted on December 20, 2011 by Simone Calamai

Charles Darwin once said:

In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.

In an era of unprecedented change in the communications, entertainment, and information technology sectors, it is about Digital Darwinism and our ability to thrive. Our future rests on how well we anticipate, adapt, and capitalize on the exciting changes that lie ahead.

According to the FutureMedia Outlook 2012, a downloadable annual report by Georgia Institute of Technology (see link below) on the future of media and its impact on people, business and society, in the next five to seven years the media landscape will be full of increased personalization, innovation, and flexibility.

Six megatrends will have a pervasive impact:

Smart Data
In an increasingly noisy world, we’ll have to sift, filter and be smarter about what matters.

People Platforms
Beyond “true personalization,” they will be socially driven platforms made of algorithms from personal and associated data that people design and tailor themselves.

Content Integrity
Pervasive mobile devices, sprawling networks, clouds ,and multi-layered platforms have made it more difficult to detect and address our digital vulnerabilities, drawing us to trusted content sources.

Nimble Media
Media is evolving from a set of fixed commodities into an energetic, pervasive medium that allows people to navigate across platforms and through different content narratives.

6th Sense
Extraordinary innovations in mixed reality will change the way we see, hear, taste, touch, smell and make sense of the world — giving us a new and powerful 6th sense.

Collaboration
We will harness the power of many in an increasingly conversational and participatory world.

The report includes demonstration clips and video interviews with leading Georgia Tech researchers offering real-world examples of how the Institute is innovating in these areas. You can find it here.

Same old saying: KISS!

Posted on December 12, 2011 by Simone Calamai

I was browsing across the ‘new’ Twitter layout features (oh, by the way: did you know that T’s creative director, Doug Bowman, worked for Google? Here is his gentle but tough goodbye message to Big G), when I came across this:

Simplicity meets serendipity

[link here]

Given the title of this blog, you would admit my curiosity on the subject… It was then that I remembered the video of an interview with Jack Dorsey (creator and executive chairman of Twitter) about the existence of a business model founded on serendipity. How would I define it? Well, in a few words online serendipity is a phenomenon where users encounter something they like that they were not expecting (read my previous blog post on the same subject).

As Dorsey himself admits, Google AdWords has been the first application of this groundbreaking online marketing model. As with fashion magazines, where ads are so well integrated with the content to be not only pleasant but also useful to the consumer, AdWords has made online advertising reputable and even desirable.

In the same way that people believe that Google ads make the search experience better, Dorsey says that Twitter’s ad products – promoted trends, promoted accounts, and promoted Tweets – get engagement rates between 1 percent and 5 percent. And this is done, in fact, in an unconventional sense:

I don’t necessarily think of it as advertising in the traditional sense. It’s, how do we introduce you to something new? How do we introduce you to something that would otherwise be difficult for you to find, but something that you probably have a deep interest in discovering? It’s really just another algorithm, or it’s just more curation, but it’s something that you would find delight in anyway. [..] The user experience is what matters. If the user experience is bad, then we fail.

Now the key question is: How do you engineer a system that, while not literally random, produces the feeling of serenidipitous discovery, meaning emerging from what seems like meaninglessness? AdWords also works because it’s a natural part of the system. You perform a search in order to get results — some of those results come in the form of advertising.

If Twitter wants to fully rely on this business model, it must be sure that the strategy feels like it is natural part of the network.

Google Plus… Plus What?

Posted on October 17, 2011 by Simone Calamai

Google has announced its earnings for Q3 2011. Impressive numbers, as always: two-digit percentage growth almost everywhere, and a pile of more than 45$B in cash. Everything comes off of search revenue.
The same good ol’ story.

Everyone was expecting a few more insights on the Android business and on the Googlerola affair. Nope. Not a single word.

However, they did confirm that Google+ has over 40 million users. And a lot of surprises still to show. Larry Page has outlined the significant effect he foresees Google+ will have on the company’s business.

Our ultimate ambition is to transform the overall Google experience — making it beautifully simple, almost automagical, because we understand what you want and can deliver it instantly.

This means baking identity and sharing into all of our products so that we build a real relationship with our users. Sharing on the web will be like sharing in real life across all your stuff. You’ll have better, more relevant search results and ads. [ed.: see a previous post on the possible implications of Google's +1]

Of course, now comes the hard part: developing Google+ in a manner that leads it to attain a critical mass of users and makes it a real contender to Facebook.

On this side, IMHO, success is far from certain:

Google+ Has 40 Million Users, But How Many Use It?
Google+ will never beat Zuckerberg on his own turf. There are plenty of reasons, all well summarized in this article on Gizmodo
Data analytics company Chitika recently published results of a study that revealed that Google+ traffic has deflated, following a spike after the social networking service came out of a limited beta on Sept. 20, and fallen back to the usage level it had before becoming publicly available
It also looks like there are some Googlers not sharing the optimism of their CEO. A couple of days ago, a Google engineer named Steve Yegge mistakenly published publicly a post in which he leveled some sharp criticism at Google+, calling it “a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking” in large part because it lacks a strong developer platform.
Until now, the approach of Google to social networks has been, to say the least, controversial. Orkut is used in Brazil only (but Facebook is growing at a light-speed pace), and they have just decided to shut down Buzz.

So, how is Google going to conquer the world with Google+? Is the Big G really going to put Google+ at the center of its existence and rebuild its other products around it? It’s sounds radical, but that’s precisely what Google seems to be willing to do. Page said

We shipped the ‘Plus’, and now we’re going to ship the Google part.

Recommendations are key tools in marketing, and +1 and Google Plus could really become the automated version of word of mouth that is supposed to sit atop search engines. Nonetheless, it’s a gamble to build your core business on a social network that’s a few months old and only has 40 million users. But it will be fascinating to see Google strive to make Google+ the formidable pivot of the ecosystem that Page envisions.

Meanwhile, sit down and relax: we still have to see what the outcomes of Facebook’s “curated search” patent will be…

A Visual History of Twitter

Posted on October 4, 2011 by Simone Calamai

Twitter was launched in the summer of 2006 and became a hit during the 2007 SXSW seminar. Four years onwards, Twitter has become the leader in microblogging and is now more popular than ever. The infographic below details Twitter’s most influential content creators, staggering adoption rates, and struggle to turn a profit. An impressive overview of five exciting years.

Click on the image to open the full infographic (source: Mashable)

Let’s get physical

Posted on October 4, 2011 by Simone Calamai

PayPal To Open A Pop-Up Store In New York To Showcase New Payments Technologies

Google opens a ‘Chrome Zone’ shop in London

Stop And Give Me Your Wallet!

Posted on September 21, 2011 by Simone Calamai

Google has finally launched the Wallet app, although service seems a more appropriate definition. You can pay and save using your mobile phone and near field communication (NFC). The first version of the app is released to Sprint only. That means Google is deploying Wallet to all Sprint Nexus S 4G phones through an over-the-air update.

Matt Buchanan of Gizmodo has already given the service a try. Although it does not look so seamless as “tap’n'pay”, it could really be revolutionary.

As Google states:

Our goal is to make it possible for you to add all of your payment cards to Google Wallet, so you can say goodbye to even the biggest traditional wallets.

Think about all the countries where the usage of plastic money is not so popular, resulting with huge problems of transactions’ traceability. It is an established fact that countries with more electronic transactions have smaller shadow economies and, consequently, lower tax evasion rates. This is one of the key factors behind the current sovereign debt crisis affecting quite a bunch of european developed countries where, in a typical vicious circle scheme, more and more people are inclined to work outside the normal, legal framework as their country’s economy continues to struggle.

Shadow economy as % of GDP, European countries, 2010

From the consumer perspective, the most common excuse for not using debit/credit cards when making little payments is that it is not convenient or fast enough. Besides the fact that today it is more likely to forget at home the wallet rather than your mobile, paying with the smartphone introduces the speed factor in the transaction and, above all, it’s cool (i.e. fashionable = network effect).

Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that NFC will solve the Eurozone crisis: I am a nerd but not that much From that point of view it is going to be just a drop in the bucket, but it surely is a step in the right direction.

In any case, we have some time to think about it: Google Wallet currently works only in the US on Nexus S 4G devices of the Sprint network. In the meantime, check out the official Google Wallet launch video.

Odd Job(s)

Posted on September 13, 2011 by Simone Calamai

Have you read my previous post on the US Postal Service problem aka How to cope with human work replaced by technology? Unless an external source of funding comes in, the USPS will have to scale back its operations drastically, or simply shut down altogether. That’s 600,000 people who would be out of work, and another 480,000 pensioners facing an adjustment in terms. Huge numbers. And these issues are going to multiply as many human jobs/tasks will become obsolete due to technology shifts.

Douglas Rushkoff, a media theorist, in a special to CNN says that it’s not about jobs, it’s about productivity models. In other words, it is not a matter of demand and supply of jobs: actually, employment is abundant but we need

a way of fairly distributing the bounty we have generated through our technologies, and a way of creating meaning in a world that has already produced far too much stuff.

Can we organize the society around something other than employment? That is, can we find a third way NOT in the middle between communism and libertarianism in order to shift

the spirit of enterprise we currently associate with “career” to something entirely more collaborative, purposeful, and even meaningful?

Think about social networks. No, I don’t mean logging to Facebook to brag your last caribbean trip. I mean, networks of people who shares ideas, culture, know-how, time. In a single word, work. Not ego-boosting.

We have this idea that we put all this stuff out there and what we get back are intangible or abstract benefits of reputation. But why could not this be monetized?

Why can’t there be a universal marketplace where people could buy and sell bytes from each other, where information would be paid for? It would be much greater than the sum of parts: a future where people could make a living and earn money from what they did with their hearts and heads in an information system, the Internet.

Is the Information Age really replacing Industrial Age?

It seems so, but, IMHO, none of the so-called Internet giants is genuinely addressing this paradigm shift. Consequently, the question is not only “when”, but “how”.

Any hints?