I don't necessarily agree with all these predictions, but they are certainly make you stop and think about what real world objects will be replaced in the near future.
For the record, I think there it's not a case of making these object extinct, it's a case of killing off the majority of them.
In summary, SOPA is a proposed anti-piracy law in the US which would help prohibit illegal content on websites by imposing harsh penalties on sites that host it.
Protests were held by some of the highest traffic websites on the Internet including Google and Wikipedia and were reported by the TV news.
Remember that Google own YouTube, which allegedly hosts many videos of illegal TV broadcasts (broadcasters and content owners can upload it to YouTube if they wish).
That’s one aspect of SOPA. Another aspect is that many websites that show illegal content use advertising as a source of revenue. SOPA wants networks which provide this advertising to become liable for where they are used.
If you took the Google search algorithm and posted it online, Google would take you to court and try to shut down any sites that host the illegal content. Yet Google refuses to be held accountable for the thousands of allegedly illegal videos it hosts on YouTube. These videos are illegal because they are TV recordings and violate copyright. Either Google does, or does not respect copyright.
Google are rumoured to be bidding for the Premier League rights. It will be interesting to see if Google win the rights and then watch their lawyers report websites which contain illegal footage. Will Google remove these websites from the search results? Will Google remove their adsense and adwords accounts?
And the same applies to Wikipedia. Whilst I’m not suggesting that you actually do this, if you set up a website tomorrow and wrote a script to copy all of Wikipedia’s comments to your site, would you expect a legal letter from Wikipedia? Of course you would, because we understand copying content without permission is illegal from our school years onwards.
The value of content has been steadily fallen and the Internet has accelerated this. I don’t want people to copy my content illegally, and I respect the US for trying to help protect content.
Photo courtesy of KierDuros on Flickr
As has become custom - well, I did it last year so I'll do it again, here are some of the traffic stats.
Before I begin, thank you and all the visitors who have been coming to the site.
This is a comparison between the year up to 17 January 2010 and 2011:
| 18 Jan 2011 to 17 Jan 2012 |
18 Jan 2010 to 17 Jan 2011 |
|
| Posts |
100 |
133 |
| Visitors |
5,065 |
2,556 |
| Page Views |
7,675 |
3,723 |
So, whilst I apologise for not writing as many posts as last year, the ones I did write seem to be more interesting!
These figures don't include the RSS feed readers or search engines which keep crawling the site.
I said last year that my aims for 2011/2 were to double the traffic and have more people commenting. The table above shows the first objective was achieved. As for the number of comments, this is measure using the blog tool (Posterous).
My aims for next year is to keep growing the traffic by the same amount - here’s to over 7,500 visitors in the next year.
Once again, if you have any recommendations or articles you'd like to see, please let me know by adding a comment below or contacting me directly. As soon as I get requests I usually act upon them within a couple of days.
It’s wrong to compare these two companies against modern day technology companies who are so good at innovation, because technology companies are so young by comparison, and companies change rapidly once several ‘generations’ of employees leave the company.
Saab haven’t released a brand new model for several years, so whilst I feel sorry for the thousands of employees worldwide, its a case of lack of innovation leads to staleness. Even the most loyal customers eventually grow bored, such as my next door neighbour who bought a new Saab (in the same colour) every three years for the last few years, bought a beautiful Jaguar XF last October.
In 2010, Saab’s revenue was £2.3bn and Jaguar Land Rover’s was £6.5bn. Jaguar has since released several completely new models and gone from strength to strength. In Q2 2011, it’s revenue was £2.9bn - and that’s during a recession.
It’s easy to look at Kodak as an innovative company though. They invented the first hand held camera, the Brownie, in 1900, and they invented the first digital camera way back in 1975. Unfortunately these landmark inventions weren’t enough.
Companies needs to keep on innovating again and again, literally ad infinitum.
And innovation isn’t enough by itself. It's merely an ingredient amongst good timing and marketing.
Photo courtesy of liftarn on Flickr
1. The Olympics summer of proof-of-concepts
A huge amount of corporate investments will go into the Olympics, so we’ll see them spend their money on sponsorship and advertising more than product development. This will mean we’ll see a lot more cutting edge, proof of concepts (in adverts) rather than market-ready new product launches.
2. Social to level off, but will become a central hub for our activities.
Just like you currently open your browser to look at a number of websites, I expect your homepage will be a Facebook, Google+ or LinkedIn page which will then keep you within the ‘walled garden’. Expect to see a close tie up between the social networks and a search engine (Google or Bing).
3. A big tech failure
Expect one of the big websites to collapse which has been too dependent on more and more VC funding rather than its own revenues. We’ll witness the collapse and realise that our own data has gone with it, and then we’ll realise how important that data really is.
4. Mobile payments
It’s been a long time coming, but 2012 will be the start of mobile payments. I don’t think consumers will be paying via our phone in 2012, but you’ll see the banks start the education process using advertising and proof of concepts to enable consumers to see that by the end of 2013 we won’t need a credit card any longer (except when the battery runs out).
5. 3D printers after the Olympics
If it weren’t for the Olympics, I think 2012 would have been the year of the 3D printer. You can already buy them from under £2,000 and that printer will fall as demand increases. 3D printers will compete with Windows 8 for Christmas presents next year.
6. Akamai stock to rocket around EURO 2012 and the Olympics.
The Content Delivery Network Akamai will be covering the two biggest sports tournaments of the summer for most broadcasters around the world. With encoding bitrates (quality) constantly increasing to end viewers, they will be handling record levels of traffic during the summer. More traffic will mean significantly increased revenues.
7. More toolbars
In a bid to keep their logos on the screen in ever more engaging user interfaces, expect to see JavaScript toolbars being used more regularly, sitting like a taskbar inside your browser. This is not to be confused with browser toolbars - I don't think you'll be proactively installing anything.
8. Home automation to make a comeback
Its been possible to connect your household appliances to a computer for many years. The problem has been selling it as a technology rather than a function - and this made it marketable to geeks and no one else. With apps such as Sky Anywhere, people will want to turn their heating up, or switch the oven on while they are commuting home from work.
Photo courtesy of FL08 on Flickr
Last year I wrote about my 2010 favourites and it was one of my most viewed posts of the year. So I thought I’d repeat it for 2011 too - and there's a clear theme running through these favourites!
Favourite new gadget
One of the things I’ve really got involved with in 2011 has been cycling. It started in February when I was out of breath going up a local (yet very long and steep) hill, then got to June where a group of friends rode the BHF London to Brighton. I then started riding into work (13 miles, from North West London to the City).
Three rear wheels later, thanks to the Holloway Road, I decided to go for a new bike. My £27 eBay investment (see below) had had its day after almost 1,800 miles between May and December.
However my favourite gadget wasn’t the new bike, it was the base layer clothing. Base layers have been around for a few years and despite some literally freezing motorcycle journeys, I hadn’t used one until cycling this winter. They are fantastic and if you get cold easily, try wearing them under your clothes. There you go, a favourite gadget that doesn’t run out of batteries!
Favourite book
Without a doubt, it was Lance Armstrong’s autobiography. It’s a very easy read that is very emotional about someone’s battle with cancer, from denial through to winning the Tour de France afterwards. Thoroughly recommended.
In second place was Alan Sugar’s autobiography which was several times longer than Armstrong’s, but just as enjoyable.
Favourite iPhone app
I’ve started using Barclays Boris bikes to travel around the City if the meeting is only one or two tube stops from the office. So the BarclaysBikes app is really handy, showing how many bikes and spaces are at a specific location. The AR (Augmented Reality) view is genuinely useful to find the nearest bike.
A close second is the updated LinkedIn app. The previous version never seemed to work without wifi. The latest app is excellent for looking up contacts after a meeting or even in the middle of a meeting when we’re discussing a mutual ex-colleague.
For outside work, the Geocaching app is excellent. It shows the three nearest geocaches and makes a spare hour disappear quicker than you can say “Where on earth would someone have hidden it around here?”
Favourite award
Without a doubt, I was extremely proud of the team to receive to a Sitecore Site of the Year award this year for our work with Cadbury.
1. Rapid demise of Flash
Bang on here. We're witnessing HTML5 rapidly overtaking Flash, mainly because users want to view sites on their iOS devices, which don't support Flash. Flash for mobiles has been dropped in favour of Adobe Air - the problem with Air (an irony in the product name) is that it's too heavy for downloading over mobile: Adobe Air apps are very large. HTML5 is both very powerful and not linked to a specific vendor, which is exactly the type of technology web developers embrace quickly.
Prediction rating: 10/10
2. Local local local
The use of Google on mobile devices is increasingly rapidly, and one of Google's most powerful functions is to provide local results on mobile devices. Facebook Check In and FourSquare will continue competing in the future, providing more relevant functionality which is only good for end consumers.
Prediction rating: 10/10
3. LinkedIn to IPO
Yes, LinkedIn IPO'd in the summer at a market capitalisation of around $6bn. At the end of the first day of trading, shares were selling at over $94. They are now worth just under $65. The actual variance has been from $55 to $122. Personally I think the future is very bright for LinkedIn, as long as it sticks to it's core, professional-only values and steers cleer of Facebook.
Prediction rating: 10/10
4. More "paywalls" will increase the expectations of having to pay for content
I predicted that we'd see at least six mainstream publications start charging for online content. What was very difficult to predict was that this was going to be made possible via the iPad. The iPad has been the saviour of global newspapers by offering a simple charging model for content owners. Many newspaper websites are still free, but most apps charge for content. The main point is that user now expect to pay for content, but it took the shift to a new platform to illustrate this.
Prediction rating: 8/10
5. Financial Services move into social networks
Banks have had other things to worry about this year, and whilst many are dipping their toes into the water with Twitter and Facebook, I'm not aware of any doing it particularly well. Searching for the popular high street banks on Facebook returns a rather fragmented list. I expect this to change in the near future.
Prediction rating: 2/10
6. Facebook to follow Compuserve even more
Try and name a brand that isn't on Facebook. In January I said that we should expect a Skype messaging style interface and in July, we got Skype inside Facebook. I predicted we'd have a billion users by the end of the year, although this is unlikely to come true because in September, Facebook announced they'd broken through 800 million users - still an amazing feat.
Prediction rating: 8/10
7. A clear leader will emerge in Interactive TV
Interactive TV is now firmly called Smart TV, and no, a clear leader hasn't emerged yet. The remotes all look different, and operating systems are different, and with the latest XBox release, Microsoft is putting up a decent fight to use your games console as the Interactive device.
Prediction rating: 0/10
8. Rapid rise in CPC
I said that CPC rates would rise, and noted the cost of some terms. Here they are:
| keyword |
Cost in |
Cost in |
| ebook | £0.55 |
£0.74 |
| sandwich | £1.00 |
£1.05 |
| drink | £1.00 |
N/A |
| laptop | £1.25 |
£1.31 |
| paper | £0.75 |
£0.76 |
I estimated costs would increase at least 50% over the next year however they have mostly gone up a much smaller amount, with the exception of the highly competitive ebook market.
Prediction rating: 2/10
9. A $50 A5 eReader
I was $10 out - Walmart are selling an eReader for under $60. Bearing in mind there was nothing available for less than $120 at the start of the year, this demonstrates how mainstream eReaders have become.
Prediction rating: 6/10
10. App stores will decentralise, leading to confused customers (again)
The term app store has become abused. Now everyone has an app store whereas a year ago their product had an 'add-on'. If you go into a car showroom I'd half expect the optional extras to be available from an app-store! Fortunately the market hasn't become decentralised as predicted - to the benefit of end users.
Prediction rating: 0/10
11. The economy will continue to splutter
Obviously this has come true. I predicted that companies would need to start demonstrating clear revenues, including Twitter, and this has materialised as $140million this year.
Prediction rating: 10/10
12. Chrome to far exceed Firefox market share
Perhaps 'far exceed' is an exaggeration, however in early December Chrome overtook Firefox for the first time, and it's here to stay. I'm a big fan of Chrome for a number of reasons (all the settings are stored centrally "in the cloud", it auto updates seamlessly and it's very fast), and hardly use Firefox any longer.
Prediction rating: 8/10
So there we have it. Overall I was reasonably accurate with the predictions. I'm working on 2012 predictions, which feels more difficult at this time. Maybe it's the economy/ general outlook. Any help would be appreciated!
Photo courtesy of lacomj on Flickr
If you look at the user experience of various desktop applications, on one end of the scale would be Google Chrome, and the other end would be Microsoft Windows, which relies on the user to configure that they want updates. In most organisations over 100 people, updates are disabled by system administrators. Other applications such as Spotify sit closer to the “Chrome end” because they automatically update however the user is still prompted during the process.
I'm excluding the stomach-churning "will make data survive this?" iPhone OS upgrades because you can't compare a complete OS upgrade to an application upgrade.
Every so often, Google Chrome checks to see if you are using the latest version. If you aren’t, it automatically downloads the latest version and installs it. The next time you launch Chrome, you’ll be using the latest version – you won’t have clicked on anything to accept it or install it.
Microsoft have cottoned on to this and the next version of Internet Explorer will silently update the browser by default. You can already install an ‘Update blocker’ to prevent automatic updates if you wish.
This puts Microsoft in an interesting situation because they are still clearly focussed on business users rather than consumers. IT organisations aim to standardise programs on user’s computers so that it’s easier to support them en masse. By choosing such a high profile application to start doing automatic updates, it will be a steep learning curve for both IT organisations and Microsoft.
This all paves the way for staff in large organisations to move a step further along the consumerisation journey. As users [supposedly] get more tech-savvy, they don’t need huge IT service desks for application support. In ten years’ time we’ll be choosing our own technology – mobile phone and laptop, and perhaps even our own applications.
We’ll keep the documents centralised (in ‘The Cloud’) and access them via Google Docs, Office 365 or any other newcomers.
The version of the application we are using won’t make any difference whatsoever.
Photo courtesy of warrenski on Flickr.
I often refer to catch up players/ on demand television as TV version 3. Version 1 was standard, or linear television… switch the box on to any channel, sit back and watch it.
Version 2 was the invention of the Personal Video Recorder, or PVR. No tapes were required, yet you could instantly record or pause live television. In the US, PVRs took off with Tivo, and in the UK they took off with Sky+.
TV v3 is very different though – you sit down and then choose which programme you want to watch. There’s absolutely no planning involved. There’s also no monetisation... there are no adverts whatsoever.
For the BBC iPlayer this doesn’t make any difference because if you watch a BBC channel there’s no monetisation in the first place. Though watching any other channel such as ITV, Channel 4 or 5, or Discovery – it’s very strange to watch a 44 minute programme in… 44 minutes, without using a DVD.
If you watch the ITV player online (i.e. on a computer), they ‘hard code’ (you can’t skip them or speed them up) advertising breaks into the programme.
Perhaps the audience using the TV to watch catch up programmes is small – which is a real irony in itself.
I think it’s one of the reason why product placement on TV programmes is becoming so important. For the last few years – since TV version 2, we’ve been skipping through ad breaks, and with version 3 we don’t see them at all, so advertising needs to move inside the programme.
On “I’m a Celebrity…” next year, start getting used to the idea of the contestants wearing branded clothes, drinking specific beers in the evening and seeing low flying jumbo jets overhead!
Photo courtesy of cmun_project on Flickr
Firstly, I have been using a favourite deals site, Quidco, for several years, and this year Mrs H and I have done most of our Holiday shopping using the site, and earned a very nice cashback amount from the site. Quidco has a simple model - it uses the affiliate bounty that is a standard model across the Internet, and gives most of the money back to the end consumer (me) after taking £5 for the year.
There are hundreds, maybe thousands of deals and voucher sites on the Internet. If you type in your favourite retailer followed by the word ‘voucher’ into Google, you’ll find an amazing number. Now click on them and chances are you’ll be presented with tens of expired vouchers. With voucher sites, it’s a case of quantity over quality.
Groupon has just turned three years old. It’s model is to offer a limited number of products and sell them to the first consumers who buy those products. After the ‘inventory’ has been sold, the offer is removed from the site.
Deals discounts are usually in the 50-75% discount range. Its the retailer who offers the deals to Groupon, and Groupon takes a further commission in the product.
One of the issues that Groupon is facing is that not all retailers believe the deals are worth that level of discount. When Groupon started business three years ago, the aim was that buy generating a loss-leading sale, the consumer would like the service/ product so much that they would revisit the retailer later.
There are many flaws to Groupon’s business:
In November, Groupon turned three years old. It is now in 45 countries. It IPOd last month at $19 per share. A fortnight after floating the stock had halved in value, and is now back to $18.
Groupon’s Q3 2011 revenue was an impressive $430m. It hasn’t achieved a financial year in profit, although Q1-Q3 2011 it has made $22m profit.
In Q3 2011 it made $8m - an unimpressive 1.86% profit. Groupon has a market capitalisation of $12bn. It’s actually quite amusing to go to Google Finance and look at other NASDAQ companies that have a capitalisation less than Groupon, yet earn a good profit.
I don’t see how Groupon’s business is sustainable because of the flaws, and I think we’ll see a trend of ‘lower value’ retailers on the site, which will mean less visitors come to the site and destroying its business model.
In summary, if you’re looking for bargains this Christmas, take a look at Groupon for some ideas. If you are looking to simply have some cashback without any fuss, I highly recommend Quidco. And if you're looking for an investment opportunity, you should look a little deeper.
Photo courtesy of 401K on Flickr
Head of Digital Media at Endava, although all the views in this blog are purely mine and not necessarily those of Endava.
