1. TYIL
Technology is our friend
2012
2012: This year I learned…
2. 1: “Mobile“ isn‘t only mobile,
but the future of (personal)
computing
I took this photo at an airport, December 11,
2012. These guys probably combine to 150+
years of age, but none of them use their
laptops anymore. This was the year of
mobile‘s final breakthrough. Not necessarily
on the go, but also at home. More people use
smartphones and tablets to access the internet
than ever before, and they prefer them over
laptops and desktop PC‘s. Traffic from mobile
operating systems goes through the roof. User
behaviour changes. Websites relaunch with
“tablet first“ versions and derive their PC-
versions from there. More tablets are sold than
laptops. And this is just the beginning.
More: http://bit.ly/RNoN7r
Technology is our friend
3. 2: No one will protect the
Internet if we don‘t
This year, we had many attacks on the open
and free internet – ACTA, SOPA, PIPA,
SCHMIPA. And according to Julian Assange,
even the internet we‘re trying to protect so
desperately is not so free and open as we
would like it to be. The fact that lobbyists
influence politics – check the German
„Leistungsschutzrecht“ – and that users form
their own kind of lobby by protesting and
organizing on- and offline activism shows how
fragile the internet still is, and that major
values will continue to be contested. We need
to protect the “independence of cyberspace“.
https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html
Technology is our friend
4. 3: The TV code hasn‘t been
hacked - again
Most of us have at least 4+ screens that we
frequently use. I have nine. But the biggest,
baddest, best screens we have are still not
properly connected: our TVs. We do not have a
breakthrough, connected-TV mass market yet.
Although all of us know that it will happen
eventually, no company was able to deliver an
easy and convincing solution yet.
Just imagine a 47“ Android powered Samsung
Galaxy in your living room, with some exciting
TV apps on it. Maybe it will happen in 2013: A
new app market will emerge, new forms of
digital advertising will be created, new kinds of
corporate homepages and e-commerce
platforms will arise. And the TV business will
be disrupted fundamentally.
Image: Wikimedia Technology is our friend
5. 4: Twitter is the second screen
Since no one could hack the TV code yet,
everybody aimed for the second screen.
Multiple studies show that more than half of
us, the audience, can‘t watch TV without yfrog / Twitter
simultaneously using internet access - at least
every once in a while. Social media as such
and especially Twitter is a better second TV
screen than any dedicated app up to now. And
TV does not lose usage minutes to the
Internet. They complement each other. The
most iconic picture for this year‘s second
screen efforts could be found during the
EURO 2012 final, breaking both TV rating and
internet usage records. Traditional TV and
social media must cooperate, not compete.
More: http://bit.ly/NT4HBM
Technology is our friend
6. 5: There‘s no escape from
digitization
Actually, I learned this many years ago. But
one striking thing about 2012 was the amount
of people who hoped that by some miracle
they would be able to avoid change,
technology and progress. That their industry
would somehow not have to adjust to new
business mechanics. The editorial staff of the
Financial Times (Deutschland) apologized in
their last issue, among other things, for being
too critical about companies that were
advertising clients, too. Yeah, that must have
been it.
More: http://bit.ly/112tnBk
Technology is our friend
7. 6: API & Data Businesses will
become serious markets
I wouldn‘t say unnoticed, but at least
underestimated: the development of platform
businesses where information and data
become real economic goods, and new
business mechanics are applied – not only in
software. More and more connected products
based on smartphones and “mobile“ operating
systems are launched, and who would have
thought a decade ago that Nike would be a
company that is offering data APIs? More and
more traditional products will end up being a
source or an output channel for data – and by
this will become more valuable.
More: http://bit.ly/SnrG17
Technology is our friend
8. 7: The Facebook glass is half
empty now
Facebook used to be any marketer‘s dream
come true. Compared to any other possibility
of analog or digital marketing communication,
a fanpage and Facebook ads were
uncontested in cost/value. Signs may have
been there before, but at the latest during 2012
these times ended. It still makes a lot of sense
to use Facebook for marketing purposes, but
with a reach of less than 20% per post in your
fanbase the return on your invest became
lower and lower. And Facebook must have
noticed that this didn‘t lead to more seriously
engaging content, but to more and more “like
for world peace, share for more love“ posts.
More: http://bit.ly/S1qiiJ
Image: Wikimedia Technology is our friend
9. 8: The Cloud isn‘t that horrible
Dropbox, Box, iCloud, Microsoft Skydrive,
Amazon Cloud Storage, Google Drive – and
many more. Cloud services pop up like
mushrooms and the big scandals and privacy
disasters did not happen yet. Sometimes it
takes a little getting used to, for example to
shoot a photo with your mobile and find it on
several other devices seconds later, but
overall, the cloud had a major end consumer
breakthrough in 2012 and will continue to
conquer personal computing. We will share
streams instead of files, access will replace
posession in many areas and content
providers will have to offer device-independent
experiences. Buying a movie and having to
watch it on a dedicated device will soon be
over.
Image: Wikimedia Technology is our friend
10. 9: The Visual Web is coming
Just a little bit more than a decade ago, I got
my first DSL subscriber line. In the agency I
was working, we were brainstorming about
what you could do with all this broadband
speed, and how that would develop in future.
We imagined a highly visual web, full of
photos and videos, and a user interface that
would need a DVD- or Joystick-like control
with up/down/left/right and one or two buttons.
We‘re getting there: Instagram, Tumblr,
Pinterest, touch-devices, gesture controls like
Kinect, LTE, rising broadband penetrations –
we just need to put the pieces together.
Image: Instagram Socialmatic Camera Technology is our friend
11. 10: Things aren‘t going that fast
When we look back in 5- and 10-year brackets,
we must be under the impression that
technology is developing at an unbelievable
pace. Be that as it may, looking at single years,
we have to acknowledge that mass markets
don‘t develop that fast. Last year, I would have
easily placed bets on more acceleration of the
Internet of Things, HTML 5 vs. native apps, big
data as such and more data portability as a
web trend, on TV as a connected screen and
on more impact by Siri and similar services on
voice and gesture controls. For example in
cars. All these things are developing, but they
don‘t impact the normal consumer‘s life in a
way we may have assumed a year ago.
Image: Wikimedia Technology is our friend