Innovating in an Age of Personalization

This week marks the 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web, an important milestone as we look at how far we’ve come and how the Internet of Everything (IoE) is shaping our future.

Developed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher at CERN, the Web was borne from the need to keep track of complex, large-scale projects without the loss of important information. We’ve come a long ways since March 1989, when Berners-Lee published his idea of “linked information systems.”

Today, IoE is driving connections beyond just data. The convergence of connecting people, things, data and processes is transforming organizations, industries and our lives. The growth of mobility and cloud computing is further driving innovation and an increase in the number and kinds of connections.

To illustrate this transformation, let’s take a quick look at life just two decades ago. According to a new national survey to mark the 25 anniversary of the Web, Pew Research revealed that in 1995, 42 percent of U.S. adults had never heard of the Internet and an additional 21 percent were vague on the concept—they knew it had something to do with computers and that was about it. In addition, 20 years ago, only 14 percent had access to the Internet.

Life today looks dramatically different than it did in the mid-1990s. The World Wide Web has transformed into an Internet of Everything world, where virtually everything is or will be connected to the Internet. From smart cars to Internet-enabled eyeglasses and even trees that tweet, the IoE is not only connecting the unconnected, it is driving unprecedented value from these connections.

Today we celebrate the 25th anniversary of one of the greatest innovations in the history of mankind, but the future looks just as transformational. Here are just a few ways the Internet of Everything will evolve in the next 25 years:

IoE will contribute to a rise in economic opportunity. We estimate that the Internet of Everything is a $19 trillion global opportunity over the next decade. This number is sure to increase dramatically over the next quarter of a century as more organizations and governments deploy Internet-enabled technology across various industries.

The Internet of Everything will be more personal and predictive. As more connected people, things, data and processes collide, the Internet of Everything will drive the growth of what Gartner describes as “personal worlds.” With the help of mobility and cloud technology, the Internet of Everything will merge the physical world and the virtual world to create a highly personalized and often predictive connected experience.

The Internet of Everything will drive an intersection of technology and humanity.The idea for the Web began as a way to better share complex information and the future of the Internet will expound on this idea. The Internet of Everything will be driven by increased connectedness that puts powerful information at our fingertips. This capability will have tremendous impact on our world. Over the next 25 years, the Internet of Everything will help us scale and manage our precious resources and ultimately improve our quality of life. How we shape this transformation is up to us.

Whereas most companies are drowning in data, while thirsting for insights, an increasing number are effectively leveraging the data assets that are erupting from wells all over the world. We have firmly entered a world in which data is a key driver of success.

In fact, data is the new gold and analytics tools are the new gold pans that help us find the golden nuggets.

Those companies that can turn data into valuable insights are the ones that will thrive. The others that continue to scratch the surface of data and analytics will be left behind. And those that ignore data will wither away.

Companies have more data than ever before entering their systems. Due to an increasing digitization of our work place, data is recording our conversations (e.g. emails), our behaviors (e.g. access cards and sensors), and many other elements for work. Within most medium to large enterprises the amount of data being exchanged and stored on a daily basis is almost incalculable: as too is its potential value. In addition, the world around them is generating vast repositories of data. We call this phenomena ‘Big Data’ and I have put together some slides to explain what big data means and how it is used today to add real value:

While in the past only large companies with big IT budgets and technology infrastructure were able to collect and analyze data, today anyone can. Even the smallest companies are now able to access and analyze data using public and cloud-based solutions. There are so many new ways companies can find and analyze data, either for free or at very low costs, using software as a service (SAAS) solutions which basically ‘rent out’ data analytics capabilities. This, to some extent, democratizes data and data analytics.

I find that most businesses are overwhelmed by the amount of data they already have, let alone all the data they could potentially use. Big data makes it harder to find the relevant information nuggets that help you make better decisions. In a defeatist move, many companies end up simply hoarding as much data as possible with the hope that one day they might be able to use it, or ignoring the big data and analytics movement altogether.

Despite the buzz about big data and fact-based decision-making, a look at the working practices of most organizations and their managers confirms that the “gold prospector” analogy is more true today than it ever was. The fact that companies hoard data, in the mistaken belief that simply having the data available is in and of itself value adding, actually destroys value. It floods individual decision-makers with a tsunami of data, reports, dashboards and databases and leaves it to them to pan for those golden nuggets. It simply gives them more dirt and silt to pan through and buries the gold deeper into the ground.

In the end it is not data, but the relevant data that is the core material required for forming those “golden nuggets” of insights that enable the enterprise leaders to make better decisions. The challenge for most leaders today is to find those “golden nuggets” that are hidden in the massive downpour of the data stream. The way to do this is to take a step back and think about the real information needs you have. Start with you strategic objectives and define the 10 most important, unanswered questions in your business. Then think about the data you might be able to use to help you answer those critical business questions.

Focus on the few things that matter the most, rather than getting overwhelmed by big data. Stop collecting, analyzing and reporting all the data you can and instead, focus on a small amount of really critical insights. A CEO of one of the world’s largest retailers recently told his data team to stop building the biggest database in the world and instead create the smallest database that helps the company to answer their most important questions. That’s a great way to approach big data and will stop people drowning with their gold pans, while thirsting for the golden nuggets of insights.

Recently I’ve been hearing a lot that there is a new bubble in Silicon Valley. People are worried that it will burst and we will feel the effects over here. They generally cite one off events like Snapchat turning down a $3bn acquisition or Google’s $3.2bn acquisition of Nest as evidence. This sort of debate seems to come round every year or two and my view today is that there are localised incidents of frothy behaviour but nothing widespread enough that we should call it a bubble.

If your content commands attention and stirs your audience to think or act a certain way, congratulations, you’ve got the “kicking butt” part of content marketing down. Now for the taking names portion — here are four LinkedIn lead generation tips to help you get a bigger return from your power-packing content.

Lead Generation Tip #1: Include a Compelling Call-to-Action That Proposes a Logical Next Step

Each click is an opportunity. When members of your target audience engage with your content then leave without taking an additional action, opportunity is lost.

What do you want your audience to do next? Do you want them to connect with you on social media? Do you want them to subscribe to your blog? Download a whitepaper? Request a demo?

Creating content with a goal in mind ensures you’re not creating content just for the sake of creating it. Goal-oriented content puts a “why” behind each piece of content you create, and allows you to get better at guiding your audience to the next step.

To do this effectively, you need to map content to the appropriate buying stage. Consider the following fictional blog post titles:

The Novice’s Guide to Marketing Automation

4 Things You Must Include In Your Marketing Automation RFP

Potential readers of each post will likely be at different stages of the buying cycle. For the second post, it might make sense to include a CTA for a competitive analysis report or a demo that leads to a lead generation form. Readers of your “novice” post will be less likely to fill out a lead generation form at this point (unless you have a free piece of content or a tool that novices find desirable), however they may be interested in subscribing to your blog or following you on social channels.

Lead Generation Tip #2: Make Your Gated Content “Worth It”

Be careful here. On one hand, you want a headline and a teaser description that convinces your prospect to give up personal information in exchange for your content. If you’re successful, you’ve got a new lead in the funnel. But what happens when your content doesn’t live up to expectations?

According to a Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs 2012 report on B2B content marketing, less than half of all digital vendor content is found useful, and buyers feel that 22% of the buying process is wasted with ineffective content. Vendors who produce low-value content are 27% less likely to be considered an option, 40% less likely to win the sale. Your audience expects valuable content when they give up their personal information to get it. Don’t let them down.

Lead Generation Tip #3: Use SlideShare

Not only is SlideShare super sharable and SEO-friendly, it’s also a great way to generate leads. You can offer SlideShare viewers a teaser of your presentation and then gate the rest of your content with a lead generation form. Give it a shot with your next SlideShare presentation and test lead-generation form placement within your presentation to see where it’s most effective.

Lead Generation Tip #4: Always Be Testing

Optimization isn’t just a marketing buzzword. It’s how successful marketers ensure they are getting the best possible results.

Think about it this way: What would a one percent conversion rate improvement mean for your company? For even a mid-market business, a one percent uptick in new leads can mean millions of dollars in additional revenue. At the very least, you should be testing the big stuff (i.e. offers, headlines, major design elements and CTAs) and go from there. Of course there are some general dos and don’ts you’ll want to adhere to when testing.

As new technologies go, 3D printing is a bit of an attention hog. In recent years, we’ve seen printers with increasingly amazing capabilities: from ones that extrude plastic to create small objects to machines with lasers that melt metal powder into amazingly intricate jet engine parts.



But the cool factor of 3D printing sometimes obscures a movement in manufacturing that could have an even bigger impact: platforms that help us share ideas, suppliers and marketplaces. That emerging network is why I’m optimistic that 2014 marks the rise of the hardware startup.



Anyone who toured the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas would understand that optimism. The booths for hardware startups dotted the floor and competed for attention with the big manufacturers. As former Wired Editor Chris Anderson, who is now a hardware startup guy himself, noted, “‘Three guys with laptops used to describe a Web startup. Now it describes a hardware company, too.”



Several years after Anderson made this prediction, a number of factors are converging to make it come true. First, low-cost cloud computing is helping hardware teams, as it becomes embedded in the making process. Even more profound is the impact of small manufacturing operations that allow startups to do rapid prototyping at a fraction of what it used to cost, thanks to globalization and digital markets.

Maker spaces ranging from TechShop to NYC Resistor provide space for people to hone their making skills with access to manufacturing equipment at a fraction of the costs. Adafruit and Seeed Studio will build you a circuit board and ship them, along with DIY parts for more customization; Kickstarter and Indiegogo have made the fundraising process much easier.

Companies like Dragon Innovation help well-funded concepts get from prototype to manufacturing; Quirky makes invention accessible to anyone with a good idea and community support. Incubators like Lemnos Labs are making the hardware garage accessible to a range of entrepreneurs looking to take on well-established manufacturing OEMs in retail, logistics and health.



What I love about hardware startups is their willingness to take on and transform dauntingly complicated industries. Until recently, manufacturing had been almost exclusively the domain of big companies that can afford to build at scale. Now, these makers are turning the tables and showing the value of being both adaptable and close to your customers.

At GE, we’re emboldened by the marriage of the physical and the digital; the industrial and the analytical. We’re seeking out the new generation of inventors who are transforming making as we know it. It’s exciting to think how many burgeoning Thomas Edisons could be liberated to invent something world-changing.

In 2014, as the hype and newness die down, social media is increasingly something we take for granted in our daily lives. There’s a big battle going on to keep our social attention: which of these two companies will prove dominant and win?

Last week, Facebook founder & CEO Mark Zuckerberg used an earnings conference call to reaffirm Facebook’s grand vision, saying it was about “connecting everyone & improving the world through sharing”.

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo also talks a lot about how he sees Twitter as “the global town square”. On Twitter’s website, it states that its mission is “To give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.”

Both visions overlap – they cater for “everyone” and are about opening up the world through sharing. However, a subtle difference in emphasis accounts for a lot of the differences in the role they play in our lives – Facebook talks about “connecting” whereas Twitter talks about“ideas and information”. I think this is ultimately what makes Facebook a true social network whereas Twitter is more of an information network.

Both connection and information play valuable roles, but over time, depending on the focus of our lives, we will ultimately favor one over the other in deciding where to focus our social attention.

In the below diagram, I’ve looked at the areas where Facebook and Twitter connect and inform us, where they overlap and fulfill similar roles, and also the areas where, segment-by-segment, new competitors are challenging them both.

So what are the key battlegrounds for Facebook and Twitter? I’m going to look at six of them and then declare an overall winner.

This is quite an easy one to call today – Facebook has 1.23bn active users compared to Twitter’s 232 million – over five times more. Further ahead, a challenge for both is what happens as user growth starts to slow down and settle, particularly in mature markets.

Once the preserve of millennials and college students, the fastest growing demographic on Facebook is now the 55-64 year age range. For young people, the prospect that their mum can see everything that they are posting and talking about with their friends is a serious risk to Facebook’s cool factor. In last quarter’s earnings call, CFO David Ebersman let slip that Facebook was “close to fully penetrated among teens” in North America, sending Facebook’s shares plunging. Many teens have flocked instead to instant photo-sharing app Snapchat, which Facebook recently tried (and failed) to acquire for a reported $3.5bn.

In January, a research study by Princeton University predicted that Facebook will lose 80% of its users by 2017, comparing its growth curve to that of an infectious disease.

Teens were not mentioned directly in last week’s conference call. Mark Zuckerberg did however say that, “Connecting everyone also means giving people the power to share different kinds of content with different groups of people. This is something we’ve focused on by building separate mobile apps beyond the main Facebook app. Messenger and Instagram are examples of this.”

WINNER: FACEBOOK

Facebook’s huge critical mass means that it wins on overall user volume, but this comes with a health warning… Facebook’s size is also a problem for teenagers, who want a cool and exclusive social network where they can hang out with their mates. Facebook may have failed to acquire Snapchat, but it did acquire Instagram, and the teenagers who flick through it don’t necessarily realize they’re using a Facebook property. So for now, the combination of Instagram and new standalone apps keeps Facebook in the game.

This is where Twitter excels. The reason that its status updates or ‘tweets’ are restricted to just 140 characters is that it was originally conceived to add a social layer to SMS text messaging, before smartphones became widespread. While 140 characters might not be enough for long-form blog content, it does force users to be concise, and they can still link out to external websites and articles. ‘Hashtags’, like #Election, #Oscars, or #JustinBieber, help to categorize the information, determine what’s trending, and enables a dense and rapid-fire information flow.

Twitter is widely thought to have come of age during the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street movements of 2011, when protestors in the Middle East used it to share their movements and organize mass demonstrations. Even when the internet was restricted, they could tweet via SMS or even ‘call to tweet’. It puts regular citizens on the front-line of journalism. My colleagues at the BBC have told me that they now use Twitter as the primary source of breaking news stories, rather than more traditional news wire services such as Reuters or AFP. As Jayson Demers wrote in The Huffington Post: “Facebook’s most common use is to keep people informed of what's happening. It's become a scrapbooking site, where people archive important moments in their lives. Twitter focuses on speeding things up, often becoming a source in and of itself.”

Facebook has struggled by comparison. Due to its huge user numbers, if there’s a big event on, like the Oscars or the Super Bowl, you’re likely to hear what your friends and perhaps their friends are saying about it on Facebook, but you’re less likely to get the full range of views from across the whole of the world. Facebook tried to introduce hashtags last year to its status updates, but so far they have caught on to the same extent as in Twitter. It will be interesting to see if its Facebook’s ‘Paper’ app, launched today, can do a better job of delivering a personalized newspaper experience.

By contrast, Twitter’s news feed can be rather raw and unfiltered, but that has actually proved an attraction for people wanting to follow celebrities and get an insight into their daily lives. Again, Facebook belatedly introduced fan pages that you could ‘like’, but whereas updates from musicians and film stars on Facebook can sometimes seem a bit scripted and the work of the PR department, on Twitter, there’s a direct interaction between celebrities that intrigues users, as well as a chance that a fan’s comments or @replies might get read directly and ‘retweeted’ by the celebrity.

“How many followers do you have on Twitter?” is still a question with social currency, and it’s telling that, with 49 million followers, both @KatyPerry and @JustinBieber have 8 million more followers than @Barack Obama.

WINNER: TWITTER

Twitter wins here, as Facebook has been too slow to catch it up on real-time news.

Here Facebook has the edge – reflecting the emphasis of connection over information in its mission statement. Whereas you can follow anyone you like on Twitter – which results in a lot of one-way connections if they don’t follow you back – Facebook friend requests require mutual consent. This usually means that you end up with more ‘real’ connections of people you actually know.

As Diffen.com puts it:

Facebook is for connecting with the people you went to school with and Twitter is for people you wished you had gone to school with.”

All those people you went to school with, however, don’t always make for the most exciting reading if you no longer actively keep in touch with them. Which brings me to one of Facebook’s biggest bugbears or virtues – depending on your point of view – the role of ‘passive communication’. The idea being that, once somebody’s accepted your friend request, you forevermore have a window on their life, broadcasted to you in daily chunks. Authors Ed Keller and Brad Fay argued an opinion piece in USA Today that “Facebook can’t replace face-to-face conversation… the richest social gold mine is literally right under our noses: in the word-of-mouth conversations that happen in our kitchens and living rooms, next to the office water cooler, and on the sidelines of youth sporting events. These are the places where we actually live our lives.”

With its News Feed defaulting to your ‘Top Stories’, what Facebook has got much better at doing is filtering out the noise from those so-called ‘friends’ it has calculated you’re less interested in, and giving you more from closer friends. Brands and people that you have ‘liked’ are also now added to the mix and competing for your attention: many of them were up in arms last year when Facebook changed the rules so that (without paying to advertise), individual updates would only be broadcast to a small portion of their ‘fans’.

By contrast, Twitter default setting is ‘Most Recent’, and if you follow a lot of people, your News Feed can quickly degenerate into an unmanageable and unintelligible mess. You can organize users into lists of interest or topic area, but this feature has unfortunately been buried in recent updates to the site.

WINNER: FACEBOOK

Given its ‘connection’ mission, it’s not surprising that Facebook has the edge when it comes to keeping in touch with friends and family, and filtering and curating what it thinks we want to see.

Our profile page on our favored social network is a statement of who we are, what we’re about, and who we want to project to the outside world.

Both networks have similar tools to enable us to customize our page with profile pics, cover images and headline statements, which to a certain extent allow us to create carefully crafted and idealized versions of ourselves.

Facebook pushes us to use our real-world name and identity, and its controversial ‘Timeline’ feature is quite literally a lifelong history of your every move on its network. On Twitter, less information is required to register, and we can be more anonymous if we so choose.

If Facebook is a bit like a digital scrapbook for our lives, where we share both the big and the small things with friends, Twitter is more like a digital soapbox, where we share our big and small views and ideas with the whole world.

Here, Twitter fills an interesting middle ground between Facebook and LinkedIn, which is more for purely professional talk. On Twitter, many professionals tweet on work-related topics and contribute to the relevant hashtags – hoping that they will build a following over time – whereas on Facebook such shop-talk might risk boring or alienating friends and family. Those wanting to craft such a professional or public identity on Facebook are forced to set up separate ‘pages’.

However, as we switch from sharing words, to sharing photos and increasingly video, Facebook is better positioned. With the 140-character limit and text focus, photo-sharing is still something of a niche activity on Twitter. Many photography enthusiasts now flock to Facebook’s Instagram. Yet here, as the below graphic shows, this is where Facebook is now under attack from Snapchat, which in August 2013, equalled Facebook’s 46% share of daily photo uploads.

So we spend a lot of time creating our digital profiles and identities on these sites, and fleshing them out with shared updates. This links into another increasing trend – using our social networking account as a ‘digital passport’, that enables us to sign in to sites and applications across the net (rather than registering with an email address and password).

This is creating a growing ecosystem. At Le Web conference in 2012, Facebook's Developer Network Director Ethan Beard said that 2 million sites had integrated ‘Facebook Connect’ since its 2010 launch, with 250 million people using Facebook Connect on third-party sites every month. He said: “Facebook is the number one referrer of traffic to Spotify… What's going on at Facebook right now is really, really exciting. We're at the center of shaping and defining what the web and what the Internet is going to look like over the course of the next number of years ... it's a fun place to work.”

You can increasingly ‘Sign In With Twitter’ on various websites (or indeed with your Google+ or LinkedIn account), although in terms of integration with other services, Facebook still has an edge.

WINNER: DRAW

Both Twitter and Facebook enable us to craft our digital identity and then turn that identity into our digital passport as we move and login to other apps other sites across the web.

People are using them both differently – who wins the battle for your social attention ultimately depends on whether you want that digital identity to be more of a public or a private one.

Twitter’s simple 140-character message limit and SMS roots meant that, for a long time, it had the edge in mobile. It acquired or replicated the functionality of several early third-party apps that provided an enhanced Twitter experience on a smartphone, such as TweetDeck and Twitterific. It is possible for Twitter users to send each other direct messages or ‘DMs’ when they are both following each other, although this feature has been de-emphasized in recent years, in favor of a public dialog, and is also often subject to spam.

When Twitter filed to go public, in September 2013, it boasted that 65% of its ad revenue was already from mobile, versus 0% from Facebook at the time of its IPO in 2012. Facebook’s mobile efforts have been much slower – its first iPad app was delayed by nearly two years and it struggled to bring over the functionality of its much richer and more complex full-site design. By contrast, on traditional desktop PCs, for many, Facebook is the web – taking the place of old-style homepage portals like Yahoo and MSN, and replacing Google as the gateway to news and information. Its new Facebook ‘Graph Search’ contains 1 trillion pieces of content – more than the index of any web search engine. Facebook also has its own app platform, home of social games such as Farmville.

However, as computing use switches from the desktop web to smartphones and tablets, Facebook is just one app among many in a world controlled by Apple and Google Android. In instant messaging, users have been attracted to cross-platform and cross-network messaging apps such as Viber and WhatsApp, which now has 430m monthly active users. From China, where both Facebook and Twitter are still blocked, Tencent’s WeChat has over 300m users, including over 100m international users.

Facebook is trying to make up the lost ground in mobile, and in last week’s earnings call said that 53% of its ad revenue had come from mobile, which at $1.25bn was nearly as large as the toal ad revenue in Q4 last year. In the latest issue of Bloomberg Businessweek, Mark Zuckerberg admitted that the shift to mobile was “not as quick as it should have been,” but, “one of the things that characterizes our company is that we are pretty strong-willed.”

WINNER: TWITTER

Twitter’s short-messaging roots make it ideal for mobile, whereas Facebook has struggled to embed a ‘mobile-first’ culture. There are signs however that this is changing, and with Messenger, Paper and Instagram, Facebook is rolling out and beefing up a number of apps beyond its main ‘one size fits all’ mobile app.

Facebook’s leadership has been strong and stable – Mark Zuckerberg deserves credit for keeping control of the company he founded, and he still owns 57% of Class B voting shares. In Sheryl Sandberg, he also has a respected and high-profile and COO, who has led some of the commercial efforts while Mark has been able to stay true to his programming roots.

This contrasts with lots of management drama at Twitter. The largest shareholder is Evan Williams, co-founder & former CEO, who owns 12% of the shares. Chairman Jack Dorseyowns 4.9% and current CEO Dick Costolo 1.6%. A former improvisational comic, Dick has been described as an ‘un-CEO’ who’s more focused on user growth than revenue. He has however steered Twitter through a very smooth IPO (in contrast to a rocky IPO for Facebook), and has gained a lot of traction for his “global town hall” vision for Twitter.

As of Jan 28 2014:

FACEBOOK

TWITTER

Market Cap

$132.58bn

$33.05bn

Share price

$54.36

$59.53

Share price growth since initial public offering (IPO)

+42.42% from IPO on May 25 2012

+14.49% since Twitter IPO Nov 8 2013

+32.76% since IPO on Nov 8 2013

Price/earnings ratio

54.36

-134.67 (still making a loss)

Share in global mobile ad market

15.8%

1.85%

As the above financial table shows, Facebook is now profitable. Strong results last week from Facebook’s Q4 earnings saw the company beat analysts’ expectations, causing a 19% share price boost.

Twitter, on the other hand, is still losing money, with doubts about its monetization strategy, and relatively few advertising units on its website/apps. It will be interesting to see how markets react to Twitter’s Q4 financial results on Wednesday – figures from trading firm IG suggest that traders are currently biased 52% to the short side on Twitter stock.

WINNER: FACEBOOK

So for most of us, Facebook is currently winning the battle for our social attention. Its sheer volume of users and the way that our account has become the ‘digital glue’ and login across multiple services mean that it is unlikely to disappear anytime soon. However, a bit like Apple products (endless small enhancements to iPhones, iPads etc.), user excitement with Facebook has dimmed and people just take it for granted as an everyday part of life online. With the shift to smartphone and tablets, it is no longer enough to own the web.

Mark Zuckerberg shares this sense that Facebook is at a crunch point, saying: “we’re really at this point where we can take a step back and think about the next big things that we want to do.”

There is a significant risk that Facebook loses the loyalty and attention of the teen and millennial audience, as they move on to the next cool thing. It risks becoming a bit of a ‘social everyman’ – OK at everything, but not best in specialized areas such as real-time news and access to celebrities (Twitter), location-based services (Foursquare, Yelp and Google Maps), photos (Instagram & Pinterest) and messaging (Snapchat, WhatsApp and WeChat).

As Keith Rabois, partner at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Khosla Ventures said: “No one individually has quite yet displaced Facebook. But as more and more people choose another social platform as their primary hub, it’s a real problem. They could be losing one segment at a time.”

For now, what that means is that many of us will probably continue to use a bucket of different apps and social platforms. And as the most promising apps are acquired by the bigger players, that bucket will consolidate over time.

Overall, who gets our social attention comes down to what we value the most – connection or information? The ultimate social network might find a way to be brilliant at both. In the information & ideas bucket, Twitter is better than anyone, and I believe that it will continue to have an important role to play. Yet, as it broadens its role in the social media world, Facebook looks better set to remain our dominant friend.

Image credit: Stuffpoint / punkkej

My top 10 technology trends lists cover trends that I think will be important over the next three years or so. As 2014 is now well underway, it’s time to focus on what’s around the corner so we are ready for massive change and newfound complexity.

1. Data Intensive Applications Will Rule Wireless IP 
   As I predicted a decade ago, IP will eat everything. And I was right. But now, for my next prediction: Wireless data applications will eat IP in less than three years. The size and magnitude of this change is impossible to imagine, but the implications for service providers will hit like a tsunami in 2015.
2. Mobile Data Congestion is Already a Reality
   Service providers must start to off-load to other wireless technologies like WiFi immediately. They also need to create space for new applications like those used in advanced technologies like robotic surgical operation. Data off-loading, like WiFi itself, is an immediate need for all service providers worldwide.
3. Applications Must be the Center
   Networks must be redesigned so that applications are the center of the universe. Networks must adapt and adjust traffic needs of the application such as latency, jitter and packet loss absorption to provide spontaneous and ubiquitous coverage across the world.
4. Data Traffic is Rising 
   By 2015, 91 percent of internet traffic will be video, including HD and 3D video. The current internet is not designed for these needs. We have to design networks, and applications such as CDN, to be able to handle the load effectively and efficiently. Additionally, management of traffic at data centers poses another major challenge for service providers. Data center traffic will exceed five zetabytes in 2015 and 76 percent of that data will stay inside the data center. This demands brand new architectures, much different than the models developed with Layer 4-7 switch in the last decade. In addition, 50 percent of video is for downstream mobile traffic and Over-The-Top (OTT) players like Netflix who make their revenue on the backs of companies like ATT, Verizon and others. These OTT players will command 35 percent of US peak downstream traffic.
5. Rising Data, Declining Revenue
   This trend, already visible, will continue — and accelerate — in 2014 and 2015. Today data revenue and traffic are disassociated in a data-dominant world. Revenues are beginning to plateau so CXOs must be ready to help CEOs create innovative ways to take revenue away from OTT players starting now.
6. Cloud Computing Will Plateau
   Cloud computing implementation will plateau by 2015. Technologies such as quantum computing will take their place at the center of our universe for decades to come, and the traditional Moore’s law computing model will be replaced. 
   
   For example, in 1940, computers processed one CPS (cycle per second) every 150 seconds. As computing has improved, we moved up to common PCs like the IBM PS/2, which ran at 250 CPS. When the Cray computer was needed for massive processing, it had only 86 million CPS. By 2015, early quantum computers will handle 38 TCPS, and we will be able to see to the edge of the universe with massive computing at 14B light years away with computers that can handle 8.6 Quadrillion CPS. Computing will finally surpass Moore’s law.
   
   For you techies: Quadrillion means 10 to the power of 15 CPS performed every second. This number, which blows people’s minds, has profound implications for cloud and other technology. Services will develop that are so massive it is hard to even imagine them. If they are not careful, quantum computing will create real headaches for service providers by 2015.
7. Knowledge Mining Rules!
   Knowledge mining will replace all data mining and information mining; this will have a huge impact on data retention and compression across the entire enterprise.
8. The Advent of LTE-A
   LTE-A will finally become reality, with peak speeds of up to 1 Gbps+; LTE-A will compete with FTTH technologies.
9. New Radio Developments
   New Wireless RAN technologies will use cognitive radios; small sites and femto cells will be history like other technologies.
10. New Technologies to watch for in 2015:

- Thumb Print Scanners

- Large Mobile Storage like SATA in smart phones

- Fuel cells with battery life exceeding 3-10 days on a single charge

- 3-D printing

- IPv6

- 100 Mbps broadband speed for consumers

- Autonomic computing

- Quantum computing in all types of verticals such as security, surgery and mainly, robotics

- 50 billion end points including RFIF- and GPS-based devices

- 10:1 ratio of wireless devices to wire line

- Speech-to-speech translation in real time will finally become a reality with technologies such as quantum computing

- Implantation of “nano computers,” quantum computers which are one hundredth the size of current PCs and one thousandth the weight of the smallest Laptop and PC in the world

- Green technology will finally become real and affordable for consumers and businesses to use, which will lower oil dependency and create jobs beyond what we have ever seen in the past 100 years

- Wearable Networks: networks that, in case of failure, return to their original state with no manual intervention

- Intelligent optical chip will finally become reality. Light can be stored on a chip which will allow massive amounts of optical processing

One final note: The years between 2020-25 will be dominated by machines. Consumers and businesses will live in a robotic world — a scenario eerily reminiscent of the Terminator franchise.

1. Myopia: The sin of only seeing what’s right in front of you
2. Hypocrisy: The sin of failing to practice what you preach
3. Sloth: The sin of being too lazy to commit time and resources to great communication
4. Detachment: The sin of being disconnected and distanced from your team
5. Materialism: The sin of finding more value in counting short-term deliverables than in achieving long term goals
6. Presumption:  The sin of assuming that everyone shares your perspective and understanding
7. Irrelevance:  The sin of failing to provide meaningful context for project and company goals

No country has a monopoly on virtue and in the U.S., where we are justifiably proud of our history of free elections and an untrammelled press, we often fail to appreciate the enormous challenges and accomplishments of China. Chinese political and business leaders are among the first to recognize the scale of their dilemma: 800 million people still living in poverty; complete dependence on imported oil; profound water shortages; a demographic time bomb that will haunt the country in coming years; sprawling state-controlled companies; pollution levels that are a threat to its citizenry (though it’s rarely ever mentioned that New Delhi has far worse pollution than Beijing); corruption in higher places and a hidebound educational system considered way too rigid.

All this makes China’s achievements almost incomprehensible – particularly for people who have never visited the country. No country has ever achieved what the Chinese have been able to do since Deng Xiaoping helped his country emerge from decades of barbarity. In less than three decades around 400M Chinese have entered the middle class and China, or at least its metropolitan areas, have gone from two wheels to four wheels in less than a generation. (In 2000 auto sales in China were 2M. Last year they were 22M – dwarfing the 15.6M sold in the U.S.). Thousands of miles of highways and railways have been built. Dozens of brand new runways have been rolled out. Hundred of millions of square feet of factory capacity have treated the rest of the world to lower prices. And now China’s technology industry is growing stronger by the week. Three of the ten most valuable Internet companies in the world are now Chinese.

LinkedIn’s decision to extend its “economic graph” to China will help bring people closer and eventually make tens of millions of people more productive and successful. The more we talk, confer, collaborate and work together the better we will understand each other. This will extend from the mundane (the Chinese are perplexed, for example, by our habit of drinking iced-water even when we have stomach aches, or calling our bosses by their first names) to deep and broad collaboration between individuals, organizations and countries. We will soon be each other's largest trading partners and the ties furnished by education, science, the arts and commerce should help the peoples of both countries appreciate the others’ finer points. While much about China is flawed, just as the U.S. seems flawed through a Chinese lens, rising prosperity and closer ties are a boon. Today, no company can pretend to serve the world and do good unless it embraces China.

There are some things that are so big that they have implications for everyone's life, whether we want it or not. And Big Data is one of those mega trends that will impact everyone in one way or another. The name (which by the way I don't like) might sound a bit techie or boring but believe me, it is not. With this post I want to explain what's behind this mega buzzword and outline why it will impact everyone.

The basic idea behind the phrase 'Big Data' is that everything we do in our lives is (or will soon) leave a digital trace (or data), which we (and others) can use and analyze. The advances in capturing and analyzing big data allow us to decode human DNA in minutes, find cures for cancer, accurately predict human behavior, foil terrorist attacks, pinpoint marketing efforts, prevent diseases and so much more. And like most things, it can be used for good or evil, but more on that later.

Basically, big data refers to our ability to collect and analyze the vast amounts of data we are now generating in the world. The ability to harness the ever-expanding amounts of data is completely transforming our ability to understand the world and everything within it. You might ask: So what is new here? Haven’t companies and organizations captured and analyzed data for a long time? Yes, but there are two things that are changing at the moment and are making the phenomenon of ‘big data’ real:

• The rate at which we are generating new data is frightening - I call this the ‘datafication’ of our world.
• Our ability to analyze large and complex forms of data has been transformed in recent years.

The Complete Datafication of Our World

All activities (human or otherwise) will soon leave a digital trace (which can be a scary thought):

• We increasingly leave digital records of our conversations: Emails are stored in corporate systems, our social media up-dates are filed and phone conversations are digitalized and stored.
• More and more of our activities are digitally recorded: Most things we do in our digitalized world leave a data trail. For example, our bowser logs what we are searching for and what websites we visit, websites log how we click through them, as well as what and when we buy, share or like something. When we read digital books or listen to digital music the devices will collect (and share) data on what we are reading and listening to and how often we do so. And when we make payments using credit or payment cards the transactions are logged.
• Most photos and videos are now digitally captured and stored. Just think of the millions of hours of CCTV footage captured every day. In addition, we take more videos on our smart 
phones and digital cameras leading to around 100 hours of videos being up-loaded to YouTube every minute and something like 200,000 photos added to Facebook every 60 seconds.
• We generate data using the ever-growing amounts of smart devices and sensors: Our smart phones track the location of where we are and how fast we are moving, there are sensors in our oceans to track temperatures and currents, there are sensors in our cars that monitor our driving, there are sensors on packaging and pallets that track goods as they are shipped along supply chains. Smart watches, Google Glass and pedometers collect data. For example I wear an Up band that tells me how many steps I have taken, the calories I have burnt each day as well as how well I have slept each night, etc. Many devices are now internet-enabled so that they self-generate and share data. Smart TVs and set-top-boxes, for example, are able to track what you are watching, for how long and even detect how many people sit in front of the TV.

I am sure you are getting the point. The volume of data is growing at a freighting rate. Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt brings it to a point: “From the dawn of civilization until 2003, humankind generated five exabytes of data. Now we produce five exabytes every two days…and the pace is accelerating.”

So yes, we are generating unimaginable amounts of data. The other thing that has changed is that are now able to analyse more complex types of data such as digital phone records of conversations, video and photo images and conversation. In the world of ‘Big Data’ we talk about the 4 Vs that characterize big data:

• Volume – the vast amounts of data generated every second
• Velocity – the speed at which new data is generated and moves around (credit card fraud detection is a good example where millions of transactions are checked for unusual patterns in almost real time)
• Variety – the increasingly different types of data (from financial data to social media feeds, from photos to sensor data, from video capture to voice recordings)
• Veracity – the messiness of the data (just think of Twitter posts with hash tags, abbreviations, typos and colloquial speech)

So, we have a lot more data than ever before, in more complex formats, that are often fast moving and of varying quality – why would that change the world? The difference is that we now have tools that allow us to analyze vast amounts of data by breaking the task of processing very large data sets down into smaller tasks that are run in parallel using a large cluster of computers. Here are some real-life examples of how big data is used today:

• The FBI is combining data from social media, CCTV cameras, phone calls and texts to track down criminals and predict the next terrorist attack.
• Supermarkets are combining their loyalty card data with social media information to detect and leverage changing buying patterns. For example, it is easy for retailers to predict that a woman is pregnant simply based on the changing buying patterns. This allows them to target pregnant women with promotions for baby related goods.
• Facebook is using face recognition tools to compare the photos you have up-loaded with those of others to find potential friends of yours (see my post on how Facebook is exploiting your private information using big data tools).
• Politicians are using social media analytics to determine where they have to campaign the hardest to win the next election.
• Video analytics and sensor data of Baseball or Football games is used to improve performance of players and teams. For example, you can now buy a baseball with over 200 sensors in it that will give you detailed feedback on how to improve your game.
• Artists like Lady Gaga are using data of our listening preferences and sequences to determine the most popular playlist for her live gigs.
• Google’s self-driving car is analyzing a gigantic amount of data from sensor and cameras in real time to stay on the road safely.
• The GPS information on where our phone is and how fast it is moving is now used to provide live traffic up-dates.
• Companies are using sentiment analysis of Facebook and Twitter posts to determine and predict sales volume and brand equity.
• A hospital unit that looks after premature and sick babies is generating a live steam of every heartbeat. It then analyses the data to identify patterns. Based on the analysis the system can now detect infections 24hrs before the baby would show any visible symptoms, which allows early intervention and treatment.

Final Thought

Finally, no discussion about Big Data could be complete without mentioning the increasing concerns about privacy. Many concerns have been expressed about how retailers, credit card companies, search engine providers and mail or social media companies use our private information. However, the privacy concerns around big data started to explode with the revelations by Edward Snowden on how the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) collects and analyses big data including the phone records and social media activities of millions of Americans. But because this is another massive issue in its own right I will address this in a future post.

As always, please let me know your thoughts on the topic. Do you find it frightening or exciting? Do you see business opportunities or ‘Big Brother’?

THE DRUG IN DRUGSTORE – It's tough positioning yourself as a healthcare company when you're selling a product the Surgeon General says kills 480,000 people a year in the US alone. That's why CVS Caremark will stop selling tobacco products by Oct 1, CEO Larry Merlo announced this morning. The move will deprive the company of $2 billion in annual revenue (out of $125 billion), but also rebrand the drugstore chain in a lucrative market – health and wellness. "I see my role as insuring that the company is positioned for growth," Merlo told Forbes. "And that is what this decision is about." The announcement already earned the company a gold star from President Obama and is sure to be a crowd pleaser amongmillennial consumers and potential employees, who put a premium on corporate responsibility. A larger marketing campaign capitalizing on the announcement is likely, as CVS already changed its Twitter image to a no-smoking sign. The ball is now in Walgreen's court: will it follow suit... or pick up CVS' disgruntled customers? And a larger philosophical issue looms for CVS: can you be a healthcare company and sell sodas? Chips with partially hydrogenated oil? Magazines with anorexic models?