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1: Facebook replaces personal email Question: Google has it, Hoover has it (in the UK anyway), TiVo had it, lost it and has somewhat got it back. Xerox had it, but nobody really cares anymore. So what is it? It’s when a brand name becomes the verb associated with its use. So rather than searching, you Google, or TiVo when digital recording a television show.

Arguably an even more powerful synonym is when a brand becomes a noun, such as Polaroid, for instant developed photograph, although that didn’t end so well. The newest one would seem to Facebook, although it has too meanings. ‘I Facebooked you’ could mean that you the person has added you as a Facebook friend or they sent you a private message though Facebook. The latter would seem to be of more interest as no-one has really owned this type of communication before. No brand ever became synonymous with email. To Hotmail or Gmail someone just never happened.

So the interesting and overlooked disruption of Facebook is its displacement of personal email as a communication tool. Completely permission based, no SPAM (yet), and no address book required - your friends are already on Facebook.

 

2: Open source software starts making proper money, thanks to the cloud There’s something starting to happen within the open source software world. Projects that were typically for the purview of programmers, or at least technophiles, are now available to the masses. An example is Beanstalk www.beanstalkapp.com a fully hosted, version controlled code repository that uses the Subversion open source project. The big deal is that to set up and maintain a Subversion repository can be a pain - plus you need a server if you want to give access to anyone. Beanstalk has created a subscription based service that, for a small fee, removes the hassle.

Services like this can only really exist with cloud computing infrastructure - so companies such as Beanstalk don’t have the huge upfront capital outlay for servers, they only pay for what their customers use. With the right skills any open source project can be commercialized in this manner.

 

3: Mobile Commerce - the promise that has never delivered, yet. As annoyingly tantalizing yet esoteric as the word ‘convergence’ has been over the last 10 years, mobile commerce has promised much but never delivered.

Mobile phones have delivered real benefits to societies world wide and in developing nations are used commonplace as devices for the transfer of money. However, until only very recently in the nations that invented and first adopted mobile technologies, has use of your most precious device been extended to payment for goods and services.

With the advanced browsers of iPhone and the Android platforms one could pay for goods through full e-commerce sites, but who really wants to fiddle around with a phone in one hand and a credit card in another? The game changer is the iPhone / iTunes platform. In-app purchases on the iPhone can tempt users to buy small items, upgrades, updates, etc, while iTunes holds their precious credit card information.

All, of course, is done in seamless fashion, enough to promote impulse purchases. Would seem like an easy task for this to be extended to other platforms with PayPal or Google Checkout. But we have been here before haven’t we?

 

4: Fewer registrations - one sign-in fits all I use a great application on the Mac platform that securely holds my login details for upwards of 50 different sites. It means that I don’t have to use the same password for each site and that I don’t have to search around for post-it notes (my 1998 method) to log into the site I joined a week ago. However, I’m starting to resent having to register for anything ever again. I don’t see why, to leave a particularly pithy comment on a blog or news site, I have to register all over again. I’m sure I’m not the only one and that’s why services like Facebook Connect and OpenID are particularly useful and will continue to be adopted at great speed through 2010.

Who knows where these might go? Perhaps next year I’ll be able to pay for something using my Facebook login.

 

5: Disruption vs. Continuity - Alternatives to the “Big Idea” As the significance of social networks continues to grow, businesses are investing more in community building as a marketing driver. According to the recent Tribalization of Business study released by Deloitte, 94% of businesses will continue or increase their investment in online communities and social media and, for the majority of these companies, their marketing function will drive this investment.

At the same time, as evidenced by Google’s recent release of “free floating” social tools, such as Google Waves and Sidewiki, there is an increasing shift towards online identity and social activity being an integrated part of the network as a whole, rather than concentrated within discrete platforms such as Facebook.

With the increasing emphasis on marketing and advertising through social networks and the increasing pervasiveness of social tools, marketing objectives come into conflict with advertising techniques.

While advertising has often sought to distinguish itself and stop the consumer in their tracks with a disruptive “big idea,” the emphasis is shifting toward persuasion through fitting organically into the consumer’s social sphere. It will always be the objective of marketing to provide creativity and novelty, but the way in will increasingly be one of persistence and continuity.

 

6: Self-Sufficiency – The Continuing Evolution of Web-Driven,Open Source DIY Culture Much has been said about the power and potential of collective intelligence. From solving complex problems through crowd-sourcing, to reconfiguring industries to be leaner and more innovative by harnessing the expertise of a network of independent suppliers, many of the breakthrough solutions of tomorrow appear to lie in more effectively pooling the resources and intelligence of our increasingly networked world.

On the other side of the equation, the power of pooled intelligence and networked resources have empowered individuals to take on more and more complex undertakings themselves. From drawing on the collective intelligence of blogs and university open courseware to educate themselves, to services like ponoko, spoonflower and cafe press that facilitate small-scale production, to offline resource pooling like pop-up retail and collective office spaces, individuals are discovering that it has never been easier to try doing it themselves.

While we find new ways to thrive in a still struggling economy, expect to see lasting changes coming from empowering individuals to work together to become more ever more self-sufficient.

 

7: Info-Art Where we once had pop-psychologists and pop-philosophers, we now appear to have pop-statisticians and pop-economists. The growing wealth of data and the access to rich and diverse data sources that are significant byproducts of information networks have made the art of data analysis a defining skill of our time. By the same token, the skill of elegantly visualizing that data has become a defining art of our time. The art of the infographic is becoming increasingly pervasive as people look more and more to the growing amount of data at our disposal for insight, and more refined as the interactions of that data becomes more complex.

With an ever increasing need for real-time analysis of a growing torrent of raw data, expect to see greater innovation spurred by more elegant ways of capturing and visualizing information by a growing number of info-artists.

 

8: Crowd Sourcing Across many industries and organizations, crowd sourcing will become a growing tool as part of elance outsourcing strategies. Organizations will mobilize the passionate special interest groups to not only carry a message but, even more importantly perhaps, to lead and take part in activities on their behalf.

Predictions for 2010 are not as rosy as we all hoped and budgets for just about everything continue to be cut, encouraging ‘creative’ thinking regarding getting things done and done well. From political canvassing to software development, from people journalism to environmental activism, we will see huge growth in crowd sourcing models provoked and led, largely, by digital social media strategies.

 

9: More Flash, Not Less Outside of the obvious brand sites, micro-sites and media sites (video, games, etc.) Flash has often been looked down upon if not completely discounted by techies and search engine optimizers alike. It seemed to face an uncertain future as a viable tool for serious websites and applications such as eCommerce tools and corporate websites.

As it is, Adobe’s rich media tool has enjoyed the grit and determination of its advocates and external development community. Several tricks, authoring tools and server side scripting workarounds have meant that Flash built websites no longer serve up a single, impenetrable page. They offer deep, searchable, indexable sites that will allow acute, detailed traffic and behavioral analytics and search engine optimization. As websites continue to increase in their importance as a company’s storefront, the demand for rich, brand-extending experiences will also increase. Further proliferation of (lightning speed) broadband will reduce download issues while the adoption of Flash on mobile devices will dramatically increase and fuel reach and the desire/need for highly usable, brand transporting, conversion oriented experiences

I like the Honda Helix prototype.

This Pew Internet Personal Networks and Community survey is the first ever that examines the role of the internet and cell phones in the way that people interact with those in their core social network. Our key findings challenge previous research and commonplace fears about the harmful social impact of new technology

Well worth reading. Its just shows that our relationship with technology is often a lot more complex that it first appears.

If you remember a time when telephones had a rotary dial, then you remember the phrase, "Shhh, he's on the phone looong distance!" Long distance was expensive, and precious, and needed to be rationed and treated with care.

That was then.

Today - long distance, short distance, global distance - it's all the same thing: cheap. Because as the network has matured, competition came in and costs came down. And today almost everyone is on a fixed price plan and many folks are using their broadband connections for free audio and video conversations.The simple point is: bandwidth continues to get cheaper and faster, and that means you need to be looking at the cost of video on your Web site in a whole new way. Video should not cost anything. Rather, it should power revenues, pages, engagement and profits. If it isn't, it's time to rethink your bandwidth bill and turn video from a cost center to a profit center. Folks are doing just that.

So here's a quick five-point checklist as you rethink your cost of bandwidth:

1. Can you tie your costs to revenue?

2. Does your editorial/content creation team consider your current solution a help or a hindrance?

3. As your traffic grows, do you fear that your investment will outstrip your income?

4. Could a 'hit' viral video be a cost containment disaster for you?

5. Are you locked into a "walled garden" eco-system in multi-source world?

Here's a 'cheat sheet' for the checklist:

1. Can you tie your costs to revenue?

This is a tough one, because odds are you can't understand your bandwidth bill. Your eyes glaze over. Megs and Gigs and Encoding and HD and blah blah blah. The bottom line is - like most folks - you probably get your bill and go "ouch." It's never less than you imagined, and it's often more - sometimes much more. That's because bandwidth bills are always backward looking, which means by the time you get the bill there's not a whole lot you can do about it.

Tying cost to revenue is essential - and that means that if you know that you're selling pages at a remnant rate of a $2 CPM and you've got 3 ads on a page, you need to spend less than $6/CPM (cost per thousand pages) in order to have your video costs be at breakeven.

2. Does your editorial /content creation team consider your current solution a help or a hindrance?

This is one of those questions you don't want to know the answer to. But you do. Because the truth is, people don't use tools they don't feel comfortable with. Or if they do, they use them with a level of fear and trepidation that means that content is being deployed slowly, and conservatively, and perhaps in a way that doesn't match your visitors' appetites. Think of it like a word processor. Would your team write well if they had old manual typewriters rather than good quality word processing software with spell check? So ask the questions: Is it easy to get a video encoded? Is it easy to get a video uploaded? Does a video get live on your site in 5 clicks, or 10, or 20? Because every bit of effort that it takes to find, organize and publish content is effort that isn't going into making and curating editorial. You're looking for a clean, easy to implement solution that can be deployed with speed and a bit of joy. Heck, fun even.

3. As your traffic grows, do you fear that your investment will outstrip your income?

One of the challenges of bandwidth billing is that it's often invisible till it's out the door. So you may have a great month of page views, and even a great month of revenue, but if folks watched tons of long videos (or worse yet, downloaded a progressive stream but didn't watch them) you could have a bandwidth bill that will blow your mind. With a CPM billing relationship, you've got control of your costs right out of the box. If there's a 'runaway' video on your site that is costing more than you're going to earn in ad revenue or useful audience engagement, you can simply take it down, or re-direct the traffic. In the fast moving world of Web video, you want to be able to make decisions about traffic and costs in real time, not in hindsight.

4. Could a 'hit' viral video be a cost containment disaster for you?

The good news is that it shouldn't be, not if you have real-time reporting. By having a unique CID (content ID Number) you are able to take incoming link traffic and point it where it needs to go. So, if a video created by you and your team has a pre-roll in front of it, you can drive traffic till the cows come home. If the same video isn't generating income, then why not point traffic to YouTube, or one of the third-party video hosting sites that are willing to cover your traffic? Often providers will 'split' traffic with you, and give you the ability to generate some income, and share some pages - but not have to cover costs.

5. Are you locked in to a "walled garden" eco-system in multi-source world?

Now you're asking yourself, should I bring traffic to my videos on my site, or put my videos out in the world so they can be found and viewed by Web searchers? The answer is "yes." You should do both. Think of it like a clothing brand. Should Levis be in Wal-mart, or only in Levis Stores? Or in the Levis area of Macy's, or in the Discount Outlet shopping center? The answer is clearly, you must go where the customer wants to find you. Sure, you'll get better margins if you bring customers to your store (your home page), but that isn't going to be the only way to reach customers. So, upload, host, share, distribute - but get your videos out there... walled gardens are so 1997.

Times are changing. Bandwidth shouldn't be a cost center, it should be a profit center. The more you invest in making, curating, and publishing content the more your customers will connect with your brand and your message. Video is no longer a 'nice to have' option, it's fast becoming a core offering for marketers and sites -and the good news is it only ads value.