We are at a turning point in history today, moving into the digital era and information society. Many new digital jobs have been created in the past decade & many more will arise in the future. Business and marketing are becoming more complex with the web. I see 10 big trends shaping up the digital world: the web 2.0, video content, mobility, the Cloud, geolocation, big data, analytics, augmented reality, voice command of objects and the web 3.0: all of these create new business opportunities that we cannot imagine today. The changes are developing at a faster rate than ever before. Here are the 10 trends sorted in order of visible presence in today’s mass market landscape:
1. The web 2.0: otherwise called social web, connects individuals. It is the web of collaborative platforms, forums, blogs, wikis and social networks. A trend included within the web 2.0 is social commerce, in other words, e-commerce done with web 2.0 tools: user generated comments such as product ratings, forums, sharing shopping information (social shopping).
2. Video content: is a trend that has been around for a couple of years and continues to grow. In 2015, mobile video will generate 66% of mobile data worldwide . YouTube, the video database platform, is one of the most popular websites in the world, and at the top of the list for video viewers, with 142 million unique visitors . For corporations, the interesting part of videos concerns the branded content or in other words video content for the purpose of advertising. The best videos, whether branded content (=advertising video) or not, benefit from viral marketing and get millions of viewers in minimal time.
3. Mobility: this trend is quite present in our minds as an increasing number of people have a mobile phone connected to the web, otherwise called a Smartphone. Mobility gives access to infinite web information from anywhere around the world. Mobility is often linked to ATAWAD: Anytime, anywhere, any device.
4. The Cloud: having data stored on external servers for one’s business or personal purpose is becoming democratized. Diigo, Google documents, Dropbox, Picassa, all these services are in the Cloud and require minimal disk space on corporate servers or computers. Some big corporations such as Valeo decided to trust the Cloud rather than having to secure their data with their computer engineers from hackers and theft. Having Google or Amazon secure confidential data seems to be a choice more and more widespread as their expertise and business models rely on computer network security. Google already commercialized the Chromebook, a computer that stores all information and software in the Cloud. It has been named the computer for people who hate computers by the Telegraph as there is no need to call a computer expert from the IT department since all is automated. Today, Chromebook is ahead of its time as broadband connections are not universally available. When the connection is down, it’s coffee time or back to paper and pen until the connection goes back up.
5. Geolocation: is the detection of the physical location of a mobile device. The possibilities offered by geolocation are infinite: finding one’s way with Google maps in our hand, walking close to a store and seeing the promotions they have on Foursquare, paying our coffee at Starbucks with our mobile, receiving targeted information from an advertising billboard in the street.
6. Big data: with a consumer’s information coming in from multiple channels such as mobile phones, computers, stores, the data quantity increases greatly and arrives in real time. All that data needs to be analyzed in order to optimize the consumer experience. For example, a consumer looked at the specs of a camera on the web and then went into a store to have a feel for the product. There, she scans a QR code for more information and her mobile app tells her that at the competitor store it is 10€ cheaper. As you can imagine, understanding the consumer journey is much more complex than a decade ago. Today, a loyalty program needs to access information in real time from all the touchpoints to be up to date and communicate the right messages to its loyal customers.
7. Analytics: with big data comes analytics. More and more items will be analyzed to optimize processes. E-learning, video games, marketing & sales data, web site data and all other consumer touchpoint data are creating an unprecedented quantity of items to analyze, organize and then optimize.
8. Augmented reality: it is a type of virtual reality attempting to replicate a specific environment with a computer or mobile device. There exists wide varieties of implementations going from education to tourism to retail. In education, there are programs to virtually visualize the inside of a body and learn what different parts look like and how they interact with each other. In the tourism industry, when pointing towards a specific location with a mobile phone, there is a description of the site and its history will that appears. In the optical industry, people are able to visualize how they would look wearing different frame shapes and colours by virtually overlaying frames on a picture or a webcam image.
9. Voice command of objects: the most famous voice command of objects is Siri, the computerized voice in the latest iPhone 4S that answers to you when you ask what the weather will be like tomorrow. It may not work perfectly with different accents and local sayings but its quite a good start. We are not far away from the time when we will tell our laundry machine to do a cotton wash at 40°C and a fast one. Sooner than we think, computers keyboards might become superfluous.
10. The web 3.0 or M2M (for Machine to Machine) or the Web of Things are different names for the web of connected objects. Since the 60’s, there are movies and documentaries on the home automation. What most people do not realize is that automated fleet management of trucks and their loads is already a reality. On the home automation side, our refrigerator will soon tell us that there is no more butter and may even place an automatic order to our favorite online supermarket.
These innovations are changing our world and shaping it into a new dimension. It is up to us to seize the opportunities and make the most out of them.
