In 2014, Amazon made several moves to get directly to consumers through products like the Fire Phone, Fire TV, and Echo, entering competition with Apple, Google, and Facebook. Wearable technology also expanded with many everyday items becoming connected. Virtual reality started to become realized as a new communication platform with Facebook's purchase of Oculus Rift. Smartphones surpassed computers in ownership and websites had to fully adapt to mobile formats. Native digital journalism from sites like Buzzfeed and Vice grew while search traffic and importance declined due to social media. China also emerged as a dominant force in the digital world.

1. Evangelos Papathanassiou Technology is our friend
THIS YEAR I LEARNED...
2014

2. AMAZON PLAYS
HARDBALL
In the years before, many people speculated
about what Amazon could do with its huge user
base and stronghold in media.
In 2014, they started: Amazon Fire Phone,
Amazon Fire TV, Amazon Echo, Amazon Dash –
no matter what you think of the products, stop
worrying about drone delivery and see that
Amazon gets in the race about “the last mile“ to
the consumer, enabling them to participate in
any digital advertising and commerce business.
If it needs own hardware to get there, then so be
it. Welcome Amazon in Google‘s, Apple‘s and
Facebook‘s competition to be your primary
interface to the digital world.
Image: http://www.amazon.com/oc/echo
1

3. EVERY DAY WILL BE
WEARABLE WEDNESDAY
Everything will be connected, dumb products will
get smart, and if you thought we already have a
hype around this, wait for the years to come.
In 2014, we could observe that today‘s
technology allows to connect pretty much
anything – a suitcase, a baseball cap, of course
a watch, a t-shirt, a handbag, jewelry, whatever.
IT- and data driven competition will get into
markets that have not seen significant
disruptions in the past years, new markets and
product categories will emerge, and this year we
could see with how much speed and traction this
development will come.
Image: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hellobragi/the-dash-wireless-smart-in-ear-
headphones
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4. THE NEXT COMPUTING
PLATFORM IS ALREADY
THERE
In March 2014, Facebook bought Oculus Rift for
approximately 2 billion dollars. We heard from
this and similar devices before, but the
acquisition may have been a milesstone. In his
post from March 25, Zuckerberg says:
„This is really a new communication platform. By
feeling truly present, you can share unbounded
spaces and experiences with the people in your
life. […] Virtual reality was once the dream of
science fiction. But the internet was also once a
dream, and so were computers and
smartphones.“
Like computers and smartphones, it won‘t be a
year until all of us own one. But 2014 may have
been the year where we saw it coming, this time
for real.
Image: http://vandrico.com/device/oculus-rift
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5. SMARTPHONES RULE
THE WORLD
The mobile shift was already in my “This year I
learned“ reviews for 2013 and 2012. In 2014, it
seems to be completed. More people own
smartphones than computers. Many digital
businesses see not only their share of mobile
traffic over 50%, sometimes mobile exclusive (!)
reaches that number.
We cannot think of responsive websites
anymore, but 2014 is the year where we finally
realized that our task is to design systems that
publish content to impatient audiences on small
screens.
Image: http://uk.businessinsider.com/the-future-of-digital-2014-slide-deck-2014-
12?op=1?r=US
4

6. BUT TV IS STILL
RESILIENT
Year after year after year we expect either a
hardware innovation or a massive move of
advertising money away from TV to disrupt the
existing television business.
In 2014 we learned that this did not happen
again. There is the massive rise of Netflix, a
great number of connected TVs are being sold,
Chromecast, Apple TV and many other devices
are bringing digital content to the big screen –
and still, most TV stations are far away from
struggling the way newspapers did a few years
ago.
Image: http://uk.businessinsider.com/the-future-of-digital-2014-slide-deck-2014-
12?op=1?r=US
5

7. NATIVE DIGITAL
JOURNALISM ON THE
RISE
While traditional TV seems to maintain its
strength, digital extensions of traditional media
struggle to write success stories. Native digital
journalism is on the rise, focusing on social,
mobile and video.
The likes of BuzzFeed, BleacherReport,
Business Insider, Upworthy and Vice have
extremely high valuations and gained
remarkable traction in 2014 – with the Vice
documentary about Islamic state maybe marking
a point where traditional news outlets ultimately
understood how serious the competition from
these players can get. They work with a native
digital newsroom and a native digital cost
structure within a native digital business model,
following a philosophy that digital publishing is
as different from TV and Print as the two are
different from each other.
Image: https://news.vice.com/video/the-islamic-state-full-length
6

8. MOBILE AND SOCIAL
MAY SERIOUSLY
HURT SEARCH
When we first observed signs for a mobile shift,
and tried to think through what that meant, we
came to the conclusion that search, esp.
Google, would probably suffer. But that seemed
too far fetched.
In 2014, we saw first signs of such a develop-
ment on a larger scale. Search still grows, but at
the slowest rate in the last six years. Sites like
BuzzFeed get 5 times the traffic from social
compared to search (up from 3.5 times in
February).
Let‘s not start with “search is dead“ and all that,
but in 2014 I learned that it is not unimaginable
anymore that search may lose a lot of its
significance.
Image: http://epicpresence.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Mobile.jpg
7

9. ARTICLE PAGES ARE
THE NEW STARS
In May 2014, the New York Times Innovation
report was leaked, and once Newspapers are
dead, this will be a historical document. Among
a million other interesting things, the report
stated the decline of the share of homepage
traffic. When you get your traffic more and more
from social newsfeeds, timelines and from
sharing among visitors, not only search suffers,
but also direct traffic. Therefore, the homepage
loses in significance, the navigation becomes
less important, each article lives on its own and
intelligent, contextual recommendations for what
to consume next are the best way to keep
someone in your destination. Publishers need to
optimize article/player pages not only in
appearance, but also for advertising. “Home-
page takeovers“ won‘t be a premium product
anymore.
Report: http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1160077-nyt-innovation-report-
2014.html#document/p3
8

10. THERE WON‘T BE A
SECOND MYSPACE
Every few months, someone predicts
Facebook‘s death or Google‘s oncoming
downfall. This may (although in 99% of the
cases is not) come true with regards to the
services that these brands stand for, but we
should keep in mind that besides those, these
companies are using their cash to build huge
corporations that are very unlikely to be wiped
off the landscape anytime soon.
Wikipedia lists 34 acquisitions for Google in
2014 (of 173 in total), and that does not include
their ventures program that focuses over one
third of its money on health. Facebook and
Apple both bought 8 companies, Microsoft 9,
Twitter 4 and Yahoo! 18. And there‘s still a lot of
cash left.
Report: http://www.gv.com/2014/
9

11. CHINA WILL BE THE
CENTER OF THE WORLD
We knew this one way earlier, but in September
2014, the biggest digital (and overall) IPO in the
history of mankind came from China, raising
25 billion dollars. The times where Western
companies (in this case Yahoo! with 9.5 billion)
continue to participate in this success may soon
be over – at least in the digital world.
While we talk about Twitter and Snapchat,
Tencent accumulates 824 million monthly active
users, WeChat (Weixin in China) 468 million
MAUs, both bigger than the two mentioned
before combined.
Image: http://fifthperson.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Alibaba.jpg
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12. Thank you
Technology is our friend – www.papathanassiou.de