Webnomena

Here are some numbers I gathered from the web for 2011 and also some predictions for the near future.

• World population reached seven billion in 2011 – 1.3 in China – In 2000, the middle class in China stood at 120 million. In 2009, it almost doubled to 230 million. In 2010, the number of urban employees reached 320 million.
• In 2011, the first members of the Baby Boomers reached age 65. And the Baby Boomers decreased to 25 percent of the total population. The last of the Baby-Boomers population will reach age 65 in the year 2029. By that time, the Baby-Boomers population is projected to be only about 16 percent of the total population.
• Worldwide mobile connections will reach 5.6 billion in 2011
• Online ad spending 52 Billion in 2011
• Social Network Ad Spend will Reach $6 billion worldwide in 2011 ($5.54 billion in other source) – $10 billion by 2013
• Social CRM Market will reach $1B in revenue by 2012 – up from approximately $625 million in 2010. Worldwide social CRM is projected to total $820 million in 2011.
• Facebook Inc. will generate $4.27 billion in revenue this year, more than double the $2 billion made in 2010
• Twitter Ad Revenue to Reach $139.5M in 2011 – really?
• Virtual Goods Market will reach $2.9 billion by 2012. This is an increase from 2011’s $2.2 billion and 2010’s $1.6 billion.
• Mobile commerce sales will reach a total of $6.7 billion this year
• 2011 global market size of LED lights will reach 1.2 billion U.S. dollars
• The online game market size in China – $5.8 billion for 2011
• The number of TV sets connected to the Internet will reach 551 million by 2016, up from 124 million at end-2010.
• Apple – App Store(mid year data)
  
• 425,000 apps
• 15 billion downloads
• $2.5 billion paid out to developers

Happy new year!

I’m not responsible for any of the predictions in this post.

I’m going to the DMA2011 conference in Boston next week, and this year the focus is on Real-Time marketing. What could be more relevant than that?

Learning about the different marketing methods that are leveraging mobile, social, and real-time data will be one goal of this event and networking is yet another (not a side effect).

VivaStream is a startup that is building a real-time mobile app and web-site that aims to take networking during business events like DMA11 to the next level.

Before the event starts: you setup your profile, select the conference, browse the schedule, and press the Attend button for the sessions that you plan to go to. Any of your actions is broadcasted to the VivaStream stream telling others about you. VivaStream also offers a reach lists of relevant topics and you can select from one of the two following options: I’m Interested or I Can Help. VivaStream uses this information among other factors to suggest people that you should connect with. There are more useful features and details, but this is the basic.

During the event: Since this is my first event using VivaStream, I’m yet to see the real-time capabilities in action. As you can see in the picture above, VivaStream plans to share some of the statistics based on the information gathered from users’ activities, and to let us know about interesting presentations and spontaneously organized after parties – IN REAL-TIME.

After the event ends: there is a strong possibility to see VivaStream building a new professional social network for networking with a purpose, based on interest and need, and fairly quick.

VivaStream is a very busy start-up, but here are few suggestions for additional features that I would like to see:

• Show me my agenda (calendar view) built based on presentations that I planed to attend to.
• Allow users to enter topics
• Create multiple streams based on different activities (it could get too noisy in a single feed stream)
• Allow users to shout-out (for example: book signing now next to room ###)
• Check-in to a session (and maybe check-out, or leave a comment)
• Number of people interested in a certain topic (next to the topic)
• Number of people attending a presentation (next to the presentation)

VivaStream has the potential to become an important component of any business event. It is fairly easy to see the value to the event organizers that can learn in real-time about activities within the conference rooms as well as outside, the presenting vendors looking for leads, and for the consumers that are looking for relevant help and experience.

Now, I’m looking forward to see how it all plays out in real-time. Go Viva!

News: CNN ( good tech section), WSJ (not so great technology section) YNet (Israeli news), WHDH (local news and weather)
Photography: Adobbe photoshop express, Pro HDR, Instagram
Social: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter (TweetDeck is too slow, how-come? Hadn’t Twitter bought it), and Google+(get the app not the goggle+ website)
Games: Mastersoft Chess
Financial: Bloomberg, WSJ, The Economist Financial Calculator,
Stock trading and recommendation – none. This is the biggest disappointment so far. I tried few of the apps and none are good. This area seems to be the one with the highest potential, but I could not find anything useful.
Utility/Misc.: iBabylon lite- dictionary, Yelp, Bump,
Fun: Songify, Pandora

And WordPress App – cool they also added stats recently.

What else should I add? Ones that really matter. I have a lot more but I rarely use them.

Guest post: This is a guest post by my son Johnathan, he loves computer games.

You should play Tap Zoo the game for iPhone, iPad, iPod because it is a lot of fun. You have rankings, you buy animals, you can breed animals, you can visit neighbors zoo, you can cross breed and you can cure sick animals. You try to get three things: coins, stars, and experience.

You are able to get coins and experience from revenue. You need animals to get revenue. Let’s say that you have two monkeys and each monkey gives you 25 coins and 2 experience points every 5 minutes, so you end up with 50 coins and 4 experience every 5 minutes. The way to get to the next level is by getting amount of experience. for example, the way to get from  level 7 to 8 is by getting from 10,000 to 13,000 experience points.

It also has ranking. The way to see your rank is to tap the bottom right square and then find “Other”, tap it, then you’ll see the word rank, tap on it and you can see your ranking. If you want to know ho to make your rank better, the way to do it is by looking at the bottom left and read what to do.

Note from Dad: I looked at this game and am very impressed by its level of complexity and sophistication. It enables the player to make many different decisions for improving the zoo quality, visitor experience,  and business. Kudos to the team at Pocket Gems, Inc.

Here we go again – the full adoption cycle – just a little quicker this time.

Instagram has now a new self registration directory – not ran by Instagram.

Go: Follogram

And here is mine: @kerendg

Update: 12/30/2010 Instagram asked the Followgram team “to remove the access to the users photos and refrain from using their API”. Now we need to wait till the Instagram team will officially release a public API before we could see more cool services like Followgram. I hope that we don’t have to wait long.

Instagram – if you haven’t heard this name before then you are in a similar situation as most people were 3 or 4 years ago when only few of us heard the name Twitter. Yet, Instagram marked the one million users milestone  today! A fairly amazing accomplishment, showing a massive growth in record time, consider that the app debut date was October 6th this year.

This social network may not become the next Facebook killer, but it is definitely as viral as Twitter and may even threaten the later.

So what is Instagram? It is an iPhone app for sharing photos. The application consists of 5 tabs. Share, Popular, Feed, News and yours.

Share – you can choose either to take a new photo or to pick one from your photo library. The kick is that you can select from several built-in filters to process your photo giving it a little more color, ambient, anachronism touch, and more. You can also add short text to go along with the picture.

Popular – people can Like your picture (vote for it) or add comments. If enough people likes it your picture can appear in the popular tab. This is also a way to find people to follow and to vote on more pictures.

Feed – this is a feed stream of pictures from the people that you chose to follow.

Yours – your picture stream along with the likes and comments.

News – a trace of recent information about who liked or commented on your picture

Sounds simple? Well yes, very, exactly as simple as Twitter. If on Twitter people with interesting feed stream (links, celeb, insights – thought leader) attract lots of followers, Instagram users attract lost of followers in similar ways.

Means of communication on Instagram:

• Like and comments – Like is both a signal of appreciation to one of the the pictures and a call for attention to your newly posted picture.
• Screen shot – see here how to take a screenshot using your Iphone. People write a short message in Notes, the built-in iPhone app for writing text, take a screen-shot of the note, and post it as a picture.
• @instagram-user-name -  you can reference other users using the @ symbol in the same way as you do on Twitter. Doing so will generate a small pop-up message on his/her phone and will add an entry to the News tab.

So how Instagram users lure new followers?

Method #1 – after few hours using the application you’ll notice that beautiful girls has a lot of followers. Some, significantly more than others. I will allow you to come up with your own explanation for this phenomenon.

Method #2 – artistic creativity. In Instagram I found many users with great picture streams. Some due to the places that they travel to, other due to great digital photography skills, and others thanks to the numerous iPhone photography applications that comes with photo enhancing techniques and creative filters. Some due to all of these elements.

Method #3 – teaching. There are few highly skilled photographers out there that are willing to share from their knowledge explaining about different techniques and tips to their avid followers.

Method #4 – challenges. People declares different challenges like the “Sexy Photo Challenge”  (check @markpalmer)challenge that resulted with more than 500 pictures of men and women in different erotic  poses (no porn). People then are encouraged to vote for their favorite picture and those are reposted on the challenge organizer stream. Can you see the business opportunity here? “Nike challenge – picture your most creative shot of your most worn-down Nike pare and win a …”.

Method #5 – increasing web presence – my friend Kathryn Jones (@unsaidtv) who is producing live streamed video plays on Better Left Unsaid TV is using Instagram to share pictures from the back scene or “the making of” the play.

Side note – one of the direct impact of Instagram is the growing demands for new photography iPhone applications.  People are increasingly looking for more and more interesting filters and digital enhancement features to create new stunning images. I found myself buying more and more of those. Some of the users I follow on Instagram were willing to share (via screen-shot) about their most frequently used applications. Some has lots of them. I guess that this is very good for the mobile  applications development market (and Apple).

Tip: There is a new web site (mashup – using Instagr.am unofficial API library) that provides statistics about individual users and their followers – very cool!

Summary – it is too early to tell what direction the Instagram team will choose to take the application at, but it is already apparent that there is a new and exiting platform that brings people to participate and communicate. It is also one of the few communities that exist outside the web and only in the mobile world (I know that implicitly there is a heavy use of the the web and data but there is no Instagram website – yet?!). Whenever there is a new communication platform (in this case Mobile social network) and avid participation, there is a room for influence, branding, and promotion. Bottom line, there is another marketing channel. However, above all, the Instagram team has provided us with a great new way to create, share, and interact with other people, i.e. to have fun!! If you decide to give it a try please stop by my Inst-stream @kerendg (same as my Twitter user name).

Will Apple be able to mitigate the impact of strong competition in the mobile market on future earnings?

The information is taken from Apples 2010 10k (numbers in Millions)

From 0 to 5 Billions in one year – iPad success

iPhone sales almost doubled in each of the past two years (in 2007 when the iPhone was firstly introduce, sales were “only” 630 millions).

Apple also managed to significantly increase laptops sales(Portables), thanks to Apple’s success selling other products and building strong brand name. Yet, not at the same rate as iPhone revenue growth.

iPad sales is going down – it is now inside the iPhone?

Apple’s iPhone become a big source of revenue

Apple’s iPhone share of revenue is growing significantly relative to the other products

Apple is a multi-markets player: mobile, media, b2c hardware, b2b hardware, software and services.

Apple can always surprise us with a new blockbuster product changing another market.

The pros:

• Great tools and documentations
• Shorter learning curve
• Single vendor – not too many moving parts (helps to get things done quickly)

The cons:

• IE < 50%
• Laptop Sales Sapped by Tablet Frenzy- Tablet computers don’t come with Windows -  they come with Google Android or Apple iOS.
• M&A activity – 0 by Microsoft this year- large non Microsoft platform friendly technology companies buys smaller ones.  But there is hope – Adobe deal?
• Mobile:
  • Lots of apps dev activities on Android and Apple phones
  • Most Smartphones don’t come with Windows Mobile

Undetermined: The push to the Cloud – Microsoft is there among others.

I’ve been working on both platforms: Microsoft and J2EE. At some point, it was easier to choose Microsoft over other platform stacks, yet the market as it looks now raises big concerns about the destiny of Windows, IE and .NET.

Is it an end of an era? Your thoughts?

The web is like an onion built from the inside out adding more and more layers in the ever race for web traffic and ad revenue.

• One buys a domain and somebody creates a short link
• One builds a website and somebody adds a dashboard
• One wants to be found and many creates search engines plus ads
• One starts a blog and somebody creates an ad network
• One builds a mobile app and somebody creates an app ad network
• One wants to be presence and connected and many build social networks

The fight over content has many fronts: java script tags, shot links databases, smart devices, apps, search engines, your “friends”. I’m sure that there are some other fronts that we are yet to see, maybe because we are still inside the onion.

Picture credit: Darwin Bell