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ocial Networking Sites are experiencing a rapid growth; there seems to be no limit to their size. Many Social Networking Sites boast with millions of members using their networks on regular basis to communicate, share, create, and collaborate with others. Popular examples of these Social Networking Sites are Facebook, LinkedIn and Bebo. Although most of these sites lack decent business models, they are valued at millions of pounds. Google paid 1.5 billion dollar for YouTube when it wasn’t even earning a single penny. The primary service offered by Social Networking Sites is the possibil4 | FuturisTech: Clever Together
ity to connect to people and create, share and collaborate. The extensive use of Social Networking Sites by individuals has allowed organisations to use it effectively for other activities. The reason successful Social Networking Sites have become so valuable is due to the amount of people that are using it; and people are exactly what organisations are after. The growth of Social Networking Sites has not gone unnoticed; within a few years, they have entirely changed the landscape of internet. The media is constantly reporting the growth and the use of SocialNetworking Sites, while investors are willing to invest millions of
pounds in companies that lack event the most basic principles of business models. Companies are willing to pay a lot of money to advertise on these websites and access the information made available by its users. Other organisations are using these websites to extend their marketing efforts and create loyalty among their customers.
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ocial media changes from month to month. Trends come and go quicker than the seasons change. The latest trendy site could be next year’s facebook and the hottest new site probably hasn’t even been conceived yet or is at the couple of guys in a garage stage. Having said that there are some trends that I think will continue over the coming year
Social Commerce: Social who? In short, you can now
sell on Facebook by letting your customers buy, but also letting them tell their friends. And letting their friends tell their friends. Even if you don’t offer ecommerce on your website, it’s now possible to provide that service through the social network. And it’s overly simple to set up.
Group Buying:
You’ve heard of sites, such as Groupon, that sell for discounts if you get your friends to “group” together to buy a product or service? Based on the $1 billion price tag Groupon received earlier this year, expect them and like-minded sites (such as LivingSocial, YouSwoop, and ScoutMom) to continue to grow, offering you a new way to reach different audiences.
Mobile:
It’s no surprise our phones are becoming like third hands for most of us or that we’re eons behind Asian countries on how we use them. But we’re beginning to catch on and move toward abandoning our laptops for phones. Watch for movement toward mobile payments and begin thinking about how to accept payments via an application on the phone.
Q&A sites:
It may seem crazy if you’re not a high user of the social platforms, but people are beginning to make real decisions based on recommendations from their virtual friends. Sites such as JustAnswer will begin to pop up, allowing people to ask a question and get real answers, from real people. The marketing possibilities become endless because you’ll begin to collect data from groups of people instead of one customer at a time.
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SocialNetwork
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comScore:
“MEN TAKE A BACK SEAT, FROM FACEBOOK TO PHOTO SHARING” It’s not just Facebook or Twitter that holds the global appeal. In South Korea, it’s CyWorld. In Russia, it’s Vkontakte. In Germany, StudiVZ. In Japan, Mixi. In all, women spend 30% more time on social networking sites than men, averaging 5.5 hours a month on them compared to 4 hours for men. The findings, in a report on “Women on the Web: How Women are Shaping the Internet,” run “counter to expectations,” said comScore analyst Andrew Lipsman. “That women now drive a solid majority of Internet usage represents a significant change in behavior from the early days of the Internet.” Social networking sites need to be considered more seriously by advertisers, comScore suggested. In the United States, many advertisers “still believe that women’s magazines, celebrity gossip and baby sites are the best places to reach women online. While these sites are effective in reaching women, they are by no means the only game in town. Women are actually more engaged than men on the Internet, and they chart their own course. You just have to know where to look.” Not only do women spend more time on social networking sites across the globe, but the statistic holds true in specific regions as well, as shown below: - Latin America: women 94.1%; men 91.9% - North America: women 91.0%; men 87.5% - Europe: women 85.6%; men 80.6% - Asia Pacific: women 54.9%; men 50.7% Furthermore, women spend more time online overall then men do globally. In fact, women spend a full 8% more time online than month with an average of 25 hours per month (this includes all Web use, not just social networks use). Women also spend 20% more time on retail sites than men, and women spend more time on comparison shopping and review sites.
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SocialNetwork
WHO RULES THE SOCIAL WEB? Gender balance on social networking websites based in monthly rate.
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1. Privacy expectations will change: There will be a cultural shift, whereby people will begin to find it increasingly more acceptable to expose more and more of their personal details on different forms of social media. Sharing your likes, dislikes, opinions, photos, videos and other forms of personal information will be the norm and people will become more accepting of personalized experiences, both corporate and personal, that are reacting to this dearth of personal information.
2. Social media augmented reality: Openly accessible information from the social-media space will be used to enhance everyday experiences. For example: the contacts book in your phone links to Facebook and Twitter to show real-time updates on what the contact is doing before you put in the call, real-time reviews from friends and associates will appear in GPS-based mapping services as a standard feature, and socially enabled CRM will change the way companies manage business relationships forever.
3. Our interaction with search engines will be different: Real-time information in Google search, e.g. from Twitter, blog results and user reviews, will be more prominent. Google’s Social Search will change the way we interact with search engines by pushing relevant content from our personal networks to the front of search results, making them more personalized. The importance of digital-influencer marketing will increase significantly.
4. Thinking beyond “nowness”: Looking into the future we’ll need to try and evaluate what’s next and the likely answer is based on the next evolution of the web as we know it: the semantic web. In a semantic web world, search engines, for example, will anticipate the best search results we’re looking for based on what they know about us (such as all our public social networking profiles). What marketing will look like in this next stage of the web and creating new and compelling experiences that we’re only touching the surface of now.
5. Social media everything and the return of digital media: Social functions will become so commonplace in digital experiences that the thought of not having socially-enhanced experiences will seem illogical. Digital media by its very nature is inherently social. I hope we’re not talking about social media in future, and we just refer to everything as digital media again.
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e are at a moment in history that is full of oppprtunity. Technology is poised to transform the lives of millions of people throughout the world, espacially those who had little or no access to the tools that can deliver sustainable improvements for their families and communities. From farmers using mobile phones to buy and sell crops to doctors remotely monitoring and treating influenza outbreaks in rural villages, technology is rapidly becoming more and more integral to the pace and progress of development. For decades, technology has been dramatically changing not just the lives of individuals in developed countries, but increasingly the lives and livelihoods of people throughout the developing world. Whether it is a community mobile
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phone, a solar panel, a new farming practice, or a cuttingedge medical device, technology is altering the landscape of possibility in places where possibilities used to be scarce. And yet looking out to the future, there is no single story to be told about how technology will continue to help shape — or even revolutionize — life in developing countries. There are many possibilities, some good and some less so, some known and some unknowable. Indeed, for everything we think we can anticipate about how technology and international development will interact and intertwine in the next 20 years and beyond, there is so much more that we cannot yet imagine. In other words, what new or existing technologies could be lev-
eraged to improve the capacity of individuals, communities, and systems to respond to major changes, or what technologies could improve the lives of vulnerable populations around the world. Technologies will affect governance, and governance in turn will play a major role in determining what technologies are developed and who those technologies are intended, and able, to benefit.
Future Techonology
able to tell me a name of a font of the type I see, the size, colored, and so on. Mobile Augmented Reality will merge with other technologies like location-based services, visual search, image and facial recognition and barcodes, predicts Forrester. In fact this already started to happen in 2011. We saw an application called Recognizr which combined facial recognition with Augmented Reality to recognize people and pull up profile information. When real-world and computer graphics objects are blended into real footage in real time, you have reached augmented reality (AR). Combining live video imagery with computer-generated graphics, motion-tracking and other data. Layar inc. promises a mobile web where users can walk down a city street and receive real time demographic information, histories of buildings, and block-by-block news. In which, we will be able to do with a mobile device in the NEAR future. A Touch screen, built in camera,
Future Techonology
scanner, WiFi, google earth, google search, image search…etc. All in one device. Like this way, when you can see a building through it, it gives you the image search result right on the spot. Choose a building and touch a floor and it tells you more details of the building. Well, it doesn’t have to be a building, but it can be any object you see. You can use it when you want to know a car model, an insect name, what kind of food is served at a restaurant and how much, who built a bridge, etc. etc. But as a designer myself, I hope it’s
Companies involved in Recognizr were acquired in 2010, facial recognition company Polar Rose by Apple and interface specialists TAT (The Astonishing Tribe) by Blackberry-makers RIM. Metaio combined visual object search with Augmented Reality so you can point your camera at everyday objects and get information about them. More recently, we saw the wonderfully useful WordLens which translates Spanish text to English (and vice versa) in the camera view in real time. In which we will dicuss about it in the next topic.
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ravelling to other countries could be a full-grown headache because of the language barrier. Wouldn’t it be awesome if there were a device to solve this? Whether it is Chinese, German or Spanish or any other language, it will take years of time to learn them. But electronic device maker Samsung is working on the real-time translation device that will resolve the language barrier issues. That means, during a conservation the device would inter-
pret the voice and evaluate what has been said. The translated words then would be displayed on the screen of the device. It will be a very spontaneous mechanism in which the translated words w ould be instantly displayed on the screen. In the coming days we might see a full fledged technology which can be used for intelligent communication between different geographies. Of course, we don’t know how accurate the translation would be, and how fast is it since there are plenty of other variables to consider such as accent, speed of speech, etc, but with Samsung Mobile Display claiming that this product can be mass produced in due time, we look forward to the future with delight.
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Future Techonology
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his language translator will be an advantage to the strangers in a foreign land by letting them know what exactly is happening around them. All a user has to do is to hold the transparent AMOLED Screen facing the subject. By the time, you will start the conservation the device would automatically display the rough translation on the screen. As the device is still in the development stage, it is not clear that with how much precision it would work. From a users point of view there would be some other considerations, like accent, speed of speech, etc. Still, Samsung Mobile
Future Techonology
Display is claiming that the device can be put to use in just matter of months.
language only when you can recognize the letters of that language.
So for the question that, would I be able to communicate with aliens too? We would have to wait for some more time. But still everybody including me is eagerly waiting for this device to come. One of the most significant problems also when traveling in a foreign country is to understand the language of the respective country. ViewTrans is a conceptual digital translator that can let you relaxed regarding this issue. Unlike usual electronic dictionaries where you can translate a foreign
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Steam Translator
Steam Translator
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Steam Translator