Bradley Howard's Blog

Views of digital media, innovation, loyalty and business in the real world

Review of my 2011 predictions

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Back in January I made 12 predictions for digital media for 2011. I did the same for 2010 - i.e. I made the predictions and then analysed them in December, and faired well. How did I do this year?

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 

Facebook_popularity1

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
December 2011

Cost in
December 2012

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


 

Silently updating

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One of the best features about Google Chrome is how it updates itself to provide new features.

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.

 


 

Google's new shops

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So Google have announced they will be opening retail stores, or at the very least, concessions inside IT shops.

I’ve talked about the concept of brand showrooms in the past, and Google are reconfirming this prediction.

Why are Chromebooks so expensive? The specs of a Chromebook doesn’t need to be particularly high, and the Operating System and software is available for free on Windows laptops.

Google are trying to compete with Apple on a mobile phone (iPhone v Android) and tablet (iPad v Android) level, where the competing products are becoming ever closer aligned as both sets of products mature. However on a laptop basis, the products are completely different.

Google are purely cloud focussed, with all applications HTML/ browser based and Apple users are still more than happy using downloadable native applications (think iWork/ Office and photo/ video editing applications). Even Google’s answer to photo editing, Picasa, is still a downloadable application – which raises the question of whether it will work on a Chromebook.

 

It’s interesting how the likes of successful Internet retailers such as Amazon and ASOS have steered away from physical outlets, and whether they are watching technology consumer brands such as Apple and now Google (not sure they have ever been classed as that before) to see how long before whether they shut down their super trendy stores in the near future.

Photo courtesy of ping ping on Flickr.


 

What’s good and not so good about Google+?

Google
On Friday I received an invite to Google's new social networking platform, Google+. This spread through the Endava office like wildfire, and previously planned productivity nosedived whilst we all played with the latest website phenomena.

As a general rule, I try not to write about mainstream topics on this blog. There are plenty of other websites out there which cover these mainstream areas better than I can. I try to review the latest happenings, or to record opinions that I have been asked during the day which have caused some debate with a client or colleague, or both. In fact if you've never experienced our corporate culture of having debates in front of clients, I would highly recommend it. However three days on, a lifetime in Digital Media, the reviews of Google+ on the web are appalling, and focus on the wrong areas. So I’m breaking my own rule and covering Google+ as a record.

What is Google+?

Firstly, what is Google+? Most people in the press and blogosphere over the last few days have been touting Google+ as Google’s answer to Facebook. Google have tried launching social networks before. Orkut was a fully-fledged social network; OpenID was Facebook Connect – a single sign in across the web; Google Friend Connect was a bunch of widgets for website owners to use which was ‘convert’ their own sites into a social network; Buzz was as close to Twitter as you could possibly get; and there are probably a few more initiatives out there.

So it’s clear that Google have wanted to build a social network for a while – and I’ll come back to this point later.

Google+ is a giant sharing platform. On Google+, you can share pretty much anything from your Search results, webpages, photos and videos, thoughts and so on.

The key difference with Google+ and Facebook though, is that Google have realised that the one major problem with Facebook is that most users don’t want to share the same thing with their friends as they do with work colleagues. And you probably want to separate your friends into friends, acquaintances and the people you go to Church with. Think of the times that you’ve said to someone “I share this with people on Facebook and that with people on LinkedIn”. Google calls these different groups ‘Circles’ – and you can setup any number of these Circles very easily.

What’s good about Google+?

The first thing that hits users on Google+ is the speed. It’s as fast as using an installed application (e.g. Word) on my computer. There are some new types of interactivity on the user interface – lots of dragging and dropping – so the iPad gets a very standard mobile interface. And it’s all very, very fast at loading and using.

Talking of the interface, it’s nice. It’s also identical to Facebook. Absolutely identical. Toolbar along the top, chat on the left, recommendations on the right, activity in the middle. Lots of white space. A rigid template. Lightboxes for images and video. Well done to Facebook for the usability – it’s so good no one can improve it.

The whole Google+ experience is about sharing. On Facebook, when you update your status, it’s like making a quick diary entry and that’s it. You don’t consciously or even sub-consciously think “my friend Fred is going to see this” or “my boss is going to see that”. You write the status and move on. The same happens when you comment on someone else’s photo or status. On Google+ though, everything you do needs to be proactively shared with a someone/ a group of people. If you don’t actively say who you want to share it with, you can’t update your status.

Google+ is also setting a new level of functionality for Internet video. You can now make group video calls using Google+. You can do this in Skype, as a premium (paid for) function. On Google+, it works inside the browser for free. It’s very clever technology, and this will be a key function for signing up new users to the platform.

One of the main things I like about Google+ is how it links together all your activities on Google’s products – from +1 to PicasaWeb into one interface.

Other fringe points – the entire application uses SSL (HTTPS), to head off major security concerns from the start.

What’s not so good about Google+?

For a start, it looks and feels identical to Facebook. I showed Google+ to my nephew, who like all 15 year olds is a Facebook Power User. He asked why he’d want to use Google+. He didn’t see anything obvious jump out at him that Facebook doesn’t do.

Google have so many products, that some of them that you would expect to integrate with Google+ have been left behind. I use Google Docs quite a lot with friends and work because of the collaboration/ sharing functionality. But Google Docs’ sharing functionality hasn’t changed, i.e. sharing a document doesn’t offer you the same Circles you setup in Google+.

Whilst Circles is a key function of Google+, and it makes sense to choose who to share your latest status with, it doesn’t feel right. Anyone who runs an e-commerce business knows that for every additional step you ask the user to do, it reduces the goal completion by x%. So site owners reduce the number of steps and increase the conversion rate. Google+ does the opposite – it requires an additional step – “Who will I share this with?” for everything, and you start thinking twice about making the update.

Summary

Firstly, if I was a competitor, I’d be more worried if I owned Delicious than Facebook. I can’t see people lowering their use of Facebook, where over 400 million people are already part of a huge network. I still see new friends from the past appearing because they’ve tagged me on one of those embarrassing school photos, and we have a quick chat on Facebook.

I don’t think I’ll be using Delicious for much longer though. It’s just so easy to save a web page by +1’ing it (much easier than saving a bookmark to Delicious) and then sharing it with a few people.

I find it interesting watching Google’s roadmap unfold. Every year we look at Google and the description of the company changes. First it was only a (bloody good) search engine; Gmail made it one of the web’s preferred email applications; by releasing Google Docs it became a personal IT organisation which backed up all your files for you; YouTube made it the number one video website; Google Chrome made it the preferred browser for millions of people – quickly knocking out Firefox; Google Maps is the defacto mapping application for millions of people, and has even replaced paper maps in many households; Google AdWords and AdSense is still the ultimate advertising platform – brings advertising opportunities to the masses, whether you want to spend a pound a day promoting your song, or millions of pounds a day advertising on the YouTube homepage for your latest video game. And I still haven’t covered Google’s other products such as phones, cars, checkout, groups, sites, news and a couple of dozen more!

Google+ is the 2011 release to demonstrate Google can produce pretty much anything.

I think Google+ will be a major hit with users because of how it will bring together so many of Google’s products. I think it’s a natural progression from Google’s search engine – to share the places on the web that you visit after using the search engine. And with Google still owning such a massive market share of search, even a small percentage of search users that adopt Google+ will make Google+ a hit.


 

Why your web traffic is going to increase this summer

The next version of the Google Chrome browser will help speed up users' web experiences by preloading the first result in the background.

If you are able to construct good Google search terms and often find you click on the first result, the new experience is going to save you several seconds per result.

If you manage a website which usually appears as the first result on Google searches, your traffic is about to substantially increase, because each of those pre-fetches is going to register a visit and a page impression. Google will offset this by offering a plugin to Google Analytics - great if you use Google, and it will be interesting to see how the other analytics providers will handle this.


 

Windows 8 review

So, the covers have started to be lifted from Windows 8. Take 5 minutes to watch the video to see a glimpse of Microsoft's new operating system.

Some immediate feedback:

  1. "We're watching Google". Google believe the [Chrome] browser is the future, so Microsoft are looking to pull as many Internet services out of the browser into small apps.
  2. "Touch my screen". I hate fingermarks on my screen. Walk up to someone else's screen at work today and touch their screen - you'll get a reaction as if you invaded their privacy! No one likes fingermarks on their screen. Windows 8 will be all about touch screens though. We recently bought a new PC at home and I decided not to get a touch screen because I was concerned the kids would have wrecked it within weeks. And a keyboard on the screen? A vertical keyboard? No thanks.
  3. "It looks so beautiful until you want to do anything productive". All the screens in the video look really nice - it's like 'Windows 7 mobile meets XBox'. And then the video shows Excel and Word, which are straight back to square one.
  4. "Multiple windows - hmmmm". I get the slider to show multiple windows, but the sad thing is that this is a world away from how people really multi-task with many smaller windows. Have a vertical slider is very inefficient with wasted space.
  5. "Files haven't changed". Whilst Microsoft should be commended from abstracting the C: hierarchy to users folders (it started in Windows Vista and Windows 7 makes it even easier), the abstraction should continue. Why do we still care about files? The only point of a file it to email it to someone else, and Google Docs has solved this already (by sharing it from a central place).
  6. "Why no Kinnect?". After using Kinnect over the weekend with the family, you start wondering why objects in the rest of the world need you to touch them! Kinnect (aka waving at things) is the future and a smaller one to one style interface would be much better than touch (see #2).

However the OS does look lovely. It's like a 'Windows 7 meets XBox' interface (and both are good). I'm just concerned they're fine on a 5" screen or when you sit 5" away from it. Sitting a foot away from it at a desk for 8 hours a day requires a different style of UI.


 

Chromebooks are expensive

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On June 15th, the Google Chromebooks will go on sale.

The price of the new Chromebook is $499. That’s the same as a Windows laptop, only you can’t run Windows applications on a Chromebook, including office apps, games, or use external devices such as video cameras, scanners, etc.

I thought that we’d see a $250 laptop with a Chrome browser. We’ve ended up with an expensive laptop with a Chrome browser. Put another way, it’s cheaper to buy a $450 Dell Windows laptop and install Chrome (plus you get the benefit of a using Internet Explorer for sites that don't support Chrome!).

If the laptop looked as beautiful as a Macbook Air, I could understand a premium, but it doesn’t. To most people the Chromebook looks identical to a Windows laptop.

On another note, Microsoft is required by EU law to ship Windows without Internet Explorer because of its monopolistic position. If Chromebooks [first become cheaper and] become widely used, will Google need to start shipping them without a browser? Or ship them with Windows?

Any thoughts on why it costs so much?

 


 

Screenshot-ing tall web pages

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It's the simple things in life that are often the most difficult.

Recently I needed to take a screenshot of a web page which covered two or three screens in height. Usually I press the 'Print Screen' keyboard button and join them together in Paint or Photoshop, but this is so time consuming I wanted to find a utility that can do it for me.

After several unsuccessful (but all promising) trials, I found the poorly named Fireshot Pro. I'm sure I once owned a joystick on my Commodore 64 with the same name, but I digress...

Fireshot captures 'tall' web pages (and other screenshots) to files, the clipboard, printer, email, pretty much anywhere you want really. Personally I highly recommend installing the Chrome plugin if you like the same browser.

You can download plugins for loads of other browsers too - I'm sure there's one for the Commodore in there somewhere.


 

Twelve Digital Media Predictions for 2011

2011

Well here we are. 2011 predictions below. My 2010 predictions worked out pretty good and I've been asked for the 2011 predictions for the last six weeks.

1. Rapid demise of Flash

Flash has two big problems in 2010: Apple (specifically, the iPhone and iPad) and HTML 5. I don't see Apple relenting on their decision to enable Flash (specifically pre-compiled code), and users will start moving away from Flash sites out of necessity. Developers already like HTML 5, and it looks reasonably flexible to replace a lot of what Flash has historically need to be used for. YouTube is already using HTML 5 to deliver video. If the BBC iPlayer is using HTML 5 next year, let's award 10/10 for this prediction!

2. Local local local

Local businesses will 'never have had it better'. FourSquare, Facebook Pages and Places, and Google Places can all help local businesses. My local sandwich shop at work can now have a digital relationship with consumers for no cost. The rising use of smartphones will continue to provide more local results when searching (for example, type in hospital into Google on your smartphone - even at the moment it produces a list of local results).

3. LinkedIn to IPO

The Facebook for business, the most useful social network of them all if you want to hire staff, track companies, keep in touch with former colleagues, research 'people' will float in 2011. 

4. More "paywalls" will increase the expectations of having to pay for content

Paywalls will undergo new branding, and together with mobile apps charging a subscription fee, the days of free content will start coming to an end. I'm not saying all sites will become pay only within a year, however expect to see at least another half dozen main titles beyond Murdoch's empire start charging for their hard work.

5. Financial Services move into social networks

Financial services are walking around social networks scratching their heads wondering how to approach the biggest B2C of all time. I predict at least one Financial Services organisation will get it right, and everyone else will copy and improve. Expect some big announcements of huge Financial Services brands linking together with the big social networks.

6. Facebook to follow Compuserve even more

I've likened Facebook to the walled garden environment of Compuserve before. Expect to see 'new' features in Facebook like sending files to friends, Facebook wireless access points or even broadband provision (remember - Compuserve started life as an ISP), premium (paid entrance) Facebook Pages, offline browsing or a phone service (think Google Talk or Skype). We'll all think it's brilliant, and then read the Wikipedia Compuserve article and realise we've been here before. I also expect Facebook to break into China and reach 1 billion global users.

7. A clear leader will emerge in Interactive TV

Buying a new TV at the moment? Which Internet/Interactive TV standard are you going to buy? There are so many types available, it's really confusing to consumers. By the end of the year (Christmas 2011) there will be one or two clear leaders. And expect to see a wireless keyboard lying on your sofa next year or 2012 instead of a simple remote.

8. Rapid rise in CPC

Ad CPC (Cost Per Click) rates are rapidly rising. Take the biggest network, Google AdWords. The cost per click of the following items as of 29/12 is:

  • ebook - £0.55
  • sandwich - £1.00
  • drink - £1.00
  • laptop - £1.25
  • paper - £0.75

I estimate costs will go up at least 50% over the next year because of the growth of online businesses, and they will all want to advertise their products.

9. A $50 A5 eReader

eReaders will hit a critical mass when the price point is low enough. I estimate this to be around $50 (£35) because this is a reasonable price point where a consumer won't be too upset at losing their eReader. At that point, schools will seriously consider replacing paper books with eReaders. Expect more mainstream books to only be available electronically.

10. App stores will decentralise, leading to confused customers (again)

The beauty of the iPhone's app store is that all apps come through the store tested and vetted. It also provides a full backup solution if you regularly synchronise your iPhone with a computer. The Android Market is the opposite - it's like anarchy! Apple are releasing their own full app store for Apple computers. Amazon will do something similar. You'll have lots of app store logins, and it will all be confusing. In fact it will become so fragmented that it will be similar to how you buy software at the moment - one piece comes from Amazon, another from Apple, another from eBuyer, and so on.

11. The economy will continue to splutter

It doesn't take a brain surgeon to work this one out. However the implications will be that brands will drive their marketing organisations to produce clearer ROI on campaigns (especially Facebook, to pay for the expensive UK based full time Community Managers). This is currently difficult to do, but marketing departments will drive analytics vendors to improve their products beyond just referrer stats. Despite huge funding increases at the end of 2010, Twitter will need to start generating some serious revenues, so expect ads on Twitter similar to the reach blocks on Facebook.

12. Chrome to far exceed Firefox market share

Chrome is here to stay, and will only increase market share when the new Google laptop (and tablet) arrives. Microsoft won't back down on Internet Explorer either. Which leaves Firefox in third place, and will just slide further down because users won't know why they'll want a third browser on their computer.


 

Review of a Facebook browser

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OK, probably one of the oddest names for an application that is supposed to revolutionise social media as we know it, but that's enough about copy writing for the moment.

Rockmelt is a solution to a rumour that has been circulating for a while now - "Will Facebook produce their own browser?" (Note that a number of people think that Facebook will also create their own phone, but that's another article altogether).

Rockmelt is a web browser that is based on Google's Chrome browser, and totally immerses the user into Facebook. 

I've been saying for a while that Facebook is become more and more like Compuserve used to be - a "walled garden" of content and applications, which most users never need to leave.

Rockmelt takes Facebook one leap further into that Compuserve model.

Your contacts who are currently logged into Facebook are listed down one side, and updates (notifications) appear on the opposite side.

There are buttons to Share content, and where the search field appears in most browsers combines Facebook search with search engine results.

You can also update your status quickly, and there are other shortcuts to other Facebook functions.

I've been using the browser for one day now, and it is nothing short of really distracting. Sometimes you just want to do some work in a browser (our timesheets and accounting system are all browser based for example), and seeing all this Facebook activity is very distracting.

Then there's the privacy. Normally, I don't have a major problem with Facebook or Google's privacy policy, mainly because I know that it's a 'payment' for using a no-payment service - I give some data, and get some excellent (social) search results in one way or another.

Rockmelt really brings that down to Earth with a bang. When installing the app, it asks the user whether you are OK for Rockmelt to access your Facebook account settings:

Rocdkmelt_installation

Of course, it needs to access lots of settings as described above, so you get the full list of what the app wants to access, and it is pretty scary. I don't know the app authors from Adam, so how can I trust them will all these details about me?

This is something which Facebook and other API platforms are going to have to tackle soon, before data starts leaking out to unscrupulous developers, if it hasn't already.

In summary, I like Rockmelt for being the first social browser. It's an excellent application for my 14 year old nephew, or my wife who both use Facebook for hours a day for purely social reasons. Anyone who uses a browser for work will find it hugely distracting, especially those users who like browsers such as Chrome for it's no-frills simplicity and lack of clutter.


 

Bradley Howard

Head of Digital Media at Endava, although all the views in this blog are purely mine and not necessarily those of Endava.

 

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