Evangelos Papathanassiou Technology is our friend

THIS YEAR I LEARNED...

2014

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

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

2

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

3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10

Thank you

Technology is our friend – www.papathanassiou.de