All posts in Trendspotting

12 Posts
September 7, 2012 · Trendspotting

Cab Drivers Are Adopting Square in Boston

This happened to me again last night:

I’m getting out of a cab and, as I pull out my debit card and reach for the clunky card swipe attached to the cab divider, the cabbie turns around and says “oh no, I use Square”. Then he takes my card, pulls out his iPhone, and rings me up with a smile. Five seconds later, I get a text message saying that I’ve paid.

“Saves me a ton of money,” he says. With this, I pay 2.75%. With that thing (points to the card swipe in his car), they take me for a ride.

I first got my square account when the company was first announced. Back then, you couldn’t charge less than $100 bucks, so it wasn’t useful for most of the transactions an individual would want to use it for. I’m glad Square has overcome that hurdle. They are really solving a problem that needed to be solved, and they’re creating so much opportunity for individuals and small businesses that didn’t previously exist. Hat tip to Jack Dorsey and the Square team. They’re making a difference, and it’s awesome to see the smiles on people’s faces that they’re helping.

 

April 27, 2010 · Technology, Trendspotting

The Rise of DSLR Filmmakers & The Next Wave Of Web Content

For the past few weeks I’ve been tooling around the web doing research on DSLR cameras, many of which now shoot shockingly crisp, professional-grade HD video. I know that I just can’t ignore the trend towards video content anymore, and I’ve decided to start investing some time building that skill-set (with a long-term view). Don’t get me wrong, I love to write and still think blogging as a great way to reach audiences. It’s just becoming clear that staying relevant and succeeding on the social web requires injecting video production creatively and cheaply into the mix – and that goes for companies as well as individuals. When you strip it down to its core, the social web is fundamentally about people and story-telling, and in just about any side-by-side comparison, when it comes to story telling, video done well beats text almost every single time, and the barriers to entry (cost, learning curve etc) for amateur filmmakers has never been lower. That’s why you’re only going to see more pro-grade video on the web in the coming years. Huge numbers of amateurs are suddenly getting access to a new world.

January 30, 2010 · Social Media, Technology, Trendspotting

Google Search Is Getting More Social

You knew this was coming. Google about to start surfacing public web content from your friends and online contacts.

January 13, 2010 · Social Media, Trendspotting

Shifting To A “People Driven” Economy

Erik Qualman has produced a few good videos like this in tandem with the release of his book Socialnomics. This one focuses on interesting facts and figures that show how human behavior on the web is shifting (which is the whole point, right?). I particularly appreciated (A.) the insight that: “Successful companies in social media act more like planners, aggregators and content providers than traditional advertising companies,” and (B.) the fact that Erik quoted himself in the video. Brassy move, Erik. :)

December 17, 2009 · Design, Trendspotting

The Future Of Magazines?

I came across this video demo of a digital magazine prototype on Popular Science and was ultra impressed. Hat tip to the developers in Bonnier’s R&D group and BERG Design for their work on this. This year we’ve seen escalating hype around ebook readers like Amazon’s Kindle, as well as a lot of speculation about the looming death of print media, so it’s great to get a sneak peak at what designers are coming up with in the digital realm. The team responsible for this prototype has obviously put a lot of thought into what creates successful digital reading experiences and the demo of what they’ve produced clearly shows that converting a magazine to a screen won’t necessarily rob us of what we love most about magazines. Most importantly, perhaps, is that you can see how much space for innovation and creativity there is in the magazine space.  This should give magazine lovers an industrial strength shot of optimism in the arm…

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

December 11, 2009 · Business & Entrepreneurship, Social Media, Trendspotting

The Critical Shift

Five years ago, if someone from your marketing department said “Let’s market to our existing customers!” they would have risked losing their job. Why would any organization spend time or effort on customers who’ve already bought the product? Backwards you say? Not anymore. This is a winning strategy on the social web.

Social media changes the game by giving brands and organizations an unprecedented ability to target and energize their existing fans. 5 to 10 years ago, brands didn’t know who their biggest fans were or where to find and engage them. Now individuals come to you and they bring their entire social graph of trusted relationships with them. When the stars align and they start to come in droves, it’s word of mouth on fire – that’s the real power of the social web. Recognizing that, smart organizations that have a connected fan base shift their spending away from recruiting and start focusing on their existing community’s happiness and let the fans do the marketing for them.

BMW has had amazing success with it’s strategy of targeting existing Mini Cooper Owners because they understand how critical their passionate customers are for spreading ideas that promote the brand. Mini Ownership for many isn’t just about the car – it’s about being part of a subculture that has it’s own fashion, events and lifestyle. BMW made a smart move by focusing on treating their best customers as special insiders who love to be in the know and talk about the product. There’s a key lesson here for any brand with an existing community. People haven’t fundamentally changed, but the technology does change their ability to market for you so significantly that it changes where the dollars should be spent.

October 19, 2009 · Cyberculture, Social Media, Trendspotting

Hitwise Data Shows That We’re All Twittered Out

Some fresh Hitwise data posted by Bill Tancer just a few weeks ago indicates that Twitter might have hit a wall and is now on the decline. Just as Twitter secured an additional $100 million in financing, which would place the company’s valuation in the $1 billion range, Bill dug into the data to take a quick look at Twitter’s market share of visits to see if the hype is matched by site traffic. I’ve included 2 of the key graphs here – Marketshare of Visits (U.S.) to Twitter.com and search volume for “Twitter”. In both visits and searches, Twitter appears to have hit a resistance point as of April 2009, which validates the feeling expressed by many heavy users that engagement seems to be falling off of late.

It should be noted that the chart immediately below indicates visits to Twitter’s website, and does not include application and mobile traffic. That being said, even without application and mobile data, visits to the main Twitter domain should have some correlation to new user adoption. If this interests you, please head over to Bill’s post and start a discussion – perhaps he’ll be nice enough to run the reports again as of this week so that we can get a better idea of whether this is just a temporary setback Twitter is experiencing, or not. My guess is that with the addition of Twitter lists, you’ll see a spike this week back to Twitter.com, but that it’ll be a spike, not necessarily the start of an upward trend.

Marketshare Of Visits (U.S.) to Twitter.com

twitter_hitwise

Search Volume (U.S.) for “Twitter”

twitter-search-vol

September 15, 2009 · Cyberculture, Social Media, Trendspotting

Facebook Maps Their Growth To 250 Million

The Facebook team put this visualization together with their internal data and posted it today. Watch how Facebook has grown to 250 million users around the world starting starting in Boston, MA. If you’re read “Accidental Billionaires: The Founding Of Facebook – A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal”, the visualization of the growth to 50 million puts the second half of the book in pretty sharp perspective.

August 7, 2009 · Community, Cyberculture, Social Media, Technology, Trendspotting

An In-Depth Look at the Most Active Users on Twitter

sysomos-logo150x68When Sysomos published its initial “Inside Twitter” report last month that looked at the people on Twitter and how it was being used, we discovered that 5% of users accounted for 75% of all activity. This finding was based on indexing 11.5 million accounts, and then looking at the top 5% users who accounted for most number of Tweets. Now they’ve taken it a step further and done an in-depth analysis of that top 5%. Here are some of the highlights of the findings…

  • BOTS Tweet The Most: Of the most active Twitter users updating more than 150 times/day, nearly all of them are bots operated by sources such as hotels offering deals, regional and national news services, regional weather services, the top news within Digg, games, anim services, tags within del.icio.us and financial aggregators. These very active bots account for one-quarter of all tweets.
  • 4 Of The Top 5 People That Tweet The Most Are Celebrities: Among the most active Twitter users with more than 50,000 followers, we find singer Tyrese (@tyrese4real), actress Alyssa Milano (@alyssa_milano), celebrity Tila Tequila (@officialtila), tv host Jonathan Ross (@wossy) and evangelist Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki).
  • The Most Active Users Live In the U.S. - 60.6% of the most active Twitter users live in the United States, while 6.9% are located in the U.K, 4.7% in Japan, and 4.3% in Canada.
  • The Top Men Tweet More Than The Top Women: The split between genders among the most active Twitter users is fairly balanced, but the men post more – 54% male, 46% female.
  • They Rarely Miss A Day – 88% of the most active Twitter users have never missed a day without making at least one update, while another 2.1% have only been inactive for one day.
  • Only Half Of Them Have More Than 100 Followers: 48% have more than 100 followers, compared with 6.3% for overall Twitter users.
  • They Follow More People Than The Average User: 44% have more than 100 friends, compared with 7.5% overall.
  • Most Of Them Are Veterans: 33.7% of the most active Twitter users have joined Twitter this year, compared with 72.5% of overall Twitter users who have signed up this year
  • A Higher Percentage Of Their Tweets Get Retweeted: In examining more than 80 million updates made since July 23, ReTweets among the most active users accounted for 5.06% of their activity – about 20% higher than overall users which is 4.02%. Given that some of these people are Tweeting as much as 30-50 times a day, this is quite surprising. It gives some indication that for all the noise they’re adding to the ecosystem, they’re adding more (perceived) value than most.
worldmapsocialnetdominance
August 4, 2009 · Cyberculture, Social Media, Technology, Top Posts, Trendspotting

Interactive World Map Of Social Network Dominance

[tweetmeme]Vincenzo Cosenza has mapped the most popular social networks by country, according to traffic data gathered on Alexa & Google Trends (June 2009). While Facebook’s growing dominance over MySpace in the US and other countries comes as no surprise, it is interesting to see the few smaller networks that most of us have probably never heard of that are country specific. It’s also important to note that that while Facebook is all the rage in the west, QQ (China) is still by far the largest social network in the world (300 million active accounts). As people continue to focus their time and energy on dominant networks, and the successful networks grow and take over, you’ll likely see many of these smaller social networks die out. It’ll be most interesting to see what happens if and when China becomes more open over time. We tend to forget about large networks like QQ and companies like BIDU that dominate the waking giant.

July 30, 2009 · Design, Technology, Top Posts, Trendspotting

5 Unmissable TED Talks On The Future Of Technology And The Web

[tweetmeme]

#1 Tim Berners-Lee On The Next Web of Open, Linked Data

20 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. For his next project, he’s building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: Unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together. (Recorded at TED2009, Feb 2009)

April 17, 2009 · Business & Entrepreneurship, Technology, Trendspotting

Trendspotting At Web 2.0 Expo

Thanks to AdaptiveBlue for the awesome Glue swag!I recently spent a week at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, CA. I had a ball. There’s something (dare I say Worldchanging?) about the O’Reilly events this year. There’s a sense of community, shared responsibility and agency in the air. It’s one thing to be social in the blogosphere and participate in online communities…but it’s quite another to be physically present among this many smart people clustered together, sharing their data, ideas and experiences. Over the course of the week I saw a number of presentations that echoed common ideas about what’s going on right now, and what forces the major players are responding to.  Here are 5 of the most noteworthy trends:

Local Is The New Global

Consumers are increasingly taking a look at their lives through a local-lens and using the web as an information resource to improve their offline experiences and purchasing power. The emergence of mobile phones as computer devices (i.e. GPS-enabled iPhones etc) lines are blurring the lines between online offerings and on-the-go, real-world ones. Geolocation services on mobile devices, as well as off-line meetups organized online, embedded mapping and “find near you” services on the web are hightening people’s awareness about what’s around them and getting them out of the house, building communities in their local areas.