2012: This year I learned…

Technology is our friend

2012 TYIL

Technology is our friend

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

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 Image: Wikimedia

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.

Technology is our friend

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

simultaneously using internet access - at least

every once in a while. Social media as such

and especially Twitter is a better second

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

TV

yfrog / Twitter

Technology is our friend

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

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

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

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

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

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