Big five IT trends

Very good article here. Not that the author is a visionary (he would have been if the article had been published 3 years ago), but he did good job articulating the major IT trends.

If you don't have time here are the big five IT trends:

• Smart Devices and Tablets
• Social Media
• Consumerization of IT
• Cloud Computing
• Big Data

The future of mobile is context

Interesting blog entry from Forrester which supports the recent release of their report: "The Future of Mobile is User Context". User context is nothing new. Back in 2009, I discussed context-aware technologies. Julie Ask gives some examples of context-aware scenarios and recognizes that these are not new, and that companies are already developing them. What I found particularly interesting was her definition of user context: “the sum total of what your customer has told you and is experiencing at his moment of engagement."

This, undoubtedly, centers context-aware services around social networks content and platforms.

Facebook has the world's largest Hadoop cluster

I like it when different themes are beginning to converge. Earlier this year, I wrote the importance of mining enterprise data. But how do you organize, index, and search a large amount of mostly unstructured data (ie emails, blogs, documents, web pages, logs, videos)? Here comes Hadoop. This is a very good video that explains Hadoop as a new data platform.



Another of my key themes is social networking and Facebook just released data about their Hadoop storage cluster. 21 PB of data, that's 1 million gigabytes and you can bet it will double next year or so. That's a lot of data to mine to get value for advertisers.

Context-aware technology

I just read an excellent special report on Business Week about context-aware computing. You can read most of the report here. Context-aware software tracks a person's location, interests, buying habits and other information. Smartphones are the perfect device to collect and aggregate that kind of information.
Early 2000, Location Based Services (LBS) already promised unimaginable smart services to serve coupon to shoppers walking by a store and other innovative applications. Handheld location was determined by triangulation based on signal strength from each base station. That architecture never delivered. Several reasons to this failure: hype cycle, precision was not good, wireless service providers controlled the information and wanted their own applications to use that data (not external applications). It is my opinion that the first incarnation of presence services went the same way for the exact same reasons.
Fast-forward nearly 10 years and we have a completely different environment. Apple (and its developers/partners), and Google are in total control of the user experience. Multiple applications are able to use location information to provide advanced services to the users. Yelp provides a unique example of combined use of location and camera with the Monocle feature (augmented reality).

The more source of data you can integrate (social media, CRM), the more phone features you can leverage (camera, accelerometer), the best experience you can provide and the more information about the user you get to track. Good and bad. Best way to enable this is to open up the phone platform (Android, iOS, RIM, Windows) to as many developers as possible. Java was a great example of a rapid and pervasive adoption.

Facebook Hits 100 Million Users

Facebook, as did MySpace in 2006, just reached 100 million registered users. There are a few things fascinating about this platform. As opposed to MySpace which was mostly focusing on music, Facebook has the potential to develop into a single unifying platform for all services. Another key to their success is the focus on the developer community with their Facebook platform. The establishment of a strong developer community allows Facebook to keep their users on their site and increases the volume of interactions between them.

The importance of Facebook struck me as I was walking in an airport lounge and everyone had a Facebook screen on. It would be interesting to see how they develop their mobile strategy. With so much personal information at stake, security has to be their number one priority if they want to become the fabric of the new internet operating system.

Will Facebook follow in the Apple and Google's footsteps and provide a phone or even become a service provider? They are clearly becoming a key player around the network triangle from a content point of view.

Social Networking Mobile Applications

You might have missed the news two weeks ago, but myspace and facebook released their mobile applications for smartphones. One important thing I noted is that there is no advertising on the facebook mobile application. From the screenshots of the myspace application, it seems that it is the same thing there too. As more people will access and share content and updates through their mobile applications, how will myspace and facebook monetize these interactions?

There's great potential for location based revenue opportunities but they are mostly based on some sort of ads (coupon). If the screen size is a limitation, they have to think about inserting them in another way. The integration of GPS data can certainly make the ads extremely relevant to the user while making sure it is not perceived as a nuisance.

Social Network Benefits to the B2B World

I've just read with great interest this article about B2B and social networking. I'm hearing the same things from friends in the marketing area. This is clearly changing the landscape of outbound marketing. And in turn, this is going to turn the flow of money from traditional web advertising towards more targeted social networking advertising. This is a short article but very much to the point.

Facebook Launches Facebook Platform

I haven't had the time to cover much of the social network phenomenon, but I believe it's part of the ubiquitous network as it allows people to communicate. This announcement probably marks the end of MySpace or any other web property who wanted to capture some big slices of the social media pie. I always believed in finding application innovation outside of the four walls. Trying to innovate and build your own application, like MySpace has done so far. So unless MySpace is already working on such an open platform, they can kiss their leader position good-bye.

Facebook could easily become the most important portal for your internet experience as Yahoo or MySpace were. I would call them the internet operating system.