Tuesday, December 25, 2012

Top prediction: techno trends 2013


predictions on Quora. In 2013, experts say the service, we will see:

- Mass cheap tablets, which will be the standard for the education market;
- IPhones with NFC - that finally Made market for this type of mobile payments mass;
- Flexible screens smarfonov from Asian manufacturers;
- Hypermedia, aggregating content multiformat media and social networks and automatically compress the stream into an information product

Deloitte Tech Trends 2013 preview

1. Mobile should be top of mind for organizations. But don’t limit your ideas to Mobile First. Think Mobile Only, imagining an untethered, connected enterprise. The next wave of mobile may fundamentally reshape operations, businesses and marketplaces – delivering information and services to where decisions are made and transactions occur. And the potential goes far beyond smartphones and tablets to include voice, gesture and location-based interactions; device convergence; digital identity in your pocket; and pervasive mobile computing. The very definition of mobile is changing


2. Businesses are no longer building technologies just to enable interaction – they are now engineering social platforms for specific context. These platforms can relieve, rather than serve traditional organizational constraints such as deep hierarchies, command-and-control cultures, physical proximity and resource concentration. Social Reengineering can fundamentally transform how work gets done, but it isn’t just a “project.” It’s a strategy.


3. 

Gamification Goes to Work

Driving engagement by embedding gaming in day-to-day business processes

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Mobile video viewing appears to be additive


  • Mobile offers new opportunities for video viewing, as smartphones and tablets offer options in terms of both when and where content can be viewed. This plays perfectly into the increasing trend of consumers accessing more and more content on the go and on demand.  
  • Device design also helps: Smartphones are now integrating larger screens and speedier processors. And the increasingly popular mini tablet format is perfect for on-the-go video. 
  • But, carriers may have a lot to say: Mobile video already accounted for more than 50% of global mobile data traffic for the first time in 2011 and will demand more and more bandwidth as consumers embrace it. The big question is how carriers will respond to the resulting data demands. If carriers limit data with tiered plans and high prices, mobile video's potential could be stifled. 


  • Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/bii-report-why-mobile-video-is-set-to-explode-2012-10#ixzz2AFTSzEss

    Gartner's top technology trends for 2013


    Personal clouds will also play into the mobility theme for enterprises. Why? Bring your own device will yield to bring your own service as employees bring services like Dropbox to work. "The personal cloud will replace the personal computer," said Cearley.
    In other areas, the Internet of things will digitize all businesses. The challenge will be making sense of all the data from image recognition, embedded sensors and other information related by physical objects. Cearley said that by 2015, 70 percent of companies will have one executive in charge of overseeing Internet-connected devices and objects. The payoff will be in the supply chain, control and information services. "The Internet of things has applications across multiple industries," said Cearley.
    Cloud computing is a no brainer and Gartner has pitched for years that brokers would emerge to manage services. So far, these predictions haven't panned out completely.
    On the big data and analytics front, Cearley noted that there's a difference between "strategic big data" and a flow of information. Among the key items:
    • Sensor data will become dominant.
    • Hadoop and NoSQL gain momentum.
    • Pilots will move to production. 
    • The social and mobile graphs will be critical.
    • Data warehouses will be revamped into new models. 
    • Analytics will be real time courtesy of a man-machine partnership.
    These analytics tool will be enabled by mainstream in-memory computing. "In-memory will be in your world across multiple applications," said Cearley. "This will open new opportunities."

    Tuesday, October 23, 2012

    Mobility is new form of reality

    Mobile phones and tablets are becoming the remote controls of our daily lives. 
    Mobile web use is exploding: A majority of U.S. mobile users now access browsers and apps. According to Nielsen, the minutes spent per month on apps more than doubled from March 2011 to March 2012. 
    http://znacomstva.blogspot.com/2012/10/mobile-web-use-is-exploding.html

    Smartphones are the new digital hub for a growing percentage of consumers, while tablets are starting to rule the personal computing landscape at home and at work.
     Moving forward, new mobile form factors will emerge and wearable computing will gain traction.

     The definition of mobility is likely to evolve, but what’s certain is that increasingly connected devices will enable us to interact with the world around us by leveraging a host of new technologies packaged into smarter devices (QR codes, NFC, image recognition, Bluetooth 4.0, new sensors).

     The physical world will be a catalyst for spontaneous interactions and for commerce via mobile devices.

    Tuesday, October 16, 2012

    Economic singularity


    An economic bubble of any type, but especially a debt bubble, can be thought of as an incipient black hole. When the bubble collapses in upon itself, it creates its own black hole with an event horizon beyond which all traditional economic modeling breaks down. Any economic theory that does not attempt to transcend the event horizon associated with excessive debt will be incapable of offering a viable solution to an economic crisis. Even worse, it is likely that any proposed solution will make the crisis more severe.

    The Minsky Moment

    Debt (leverage) can be a very good thing when used properly. For instance, if debt is used to purchase an income-producing asset, whether a new machine tool for a factory or a bridge to increase commerce, then debt can be net-productive.

    Hyman Minsky, one of the greatest economists of the last century, saw debt in three forms: hedge, speculative, and Ponzi. Roughly speaking, to Minsky, hedge financing occurred when the profits from purchased assets were used to pay back the loan, speculative finance occurred when profits from the asset simply maintained the debt service and the loan had to be rolled over, and Ponzi finance required the selling of the asset at an ever higher price in order to make a profit.

    Minsky maintained that if hedge financing dominated, then the economy might well be an equilibrium-seeking, well-contained system. On the other hand, the greater the weight of speculative and Ponzi finance, the greater the likelihood that the economy would be what he called a deviation-amplifying system. Thus, Minsky's Financial Instability Hypothesis suggests that over periods of prolonged prosperity, capitalist economies tend to move from a financial structure dominated by (stable) hedge finance to a structure that increasingly emphasizes (unstable) speculative and Ponzi finance.

    Minsky proposed theories linking financial market fragility, in the normal life cycle of an economy, with speculative investment bubbles endogenous to financial markets. He claimed that in prosperous times, when corporate cash flow rises beyond what is needed to pay off debt, a speculative euphoria develops; and soon thereafter debts exceed what borrowers can pay off from their incoming revenues, which in turn produces a financial crisis. As the climax of such a speculative borrowing bubble nears, banks and other lenders tighten credit availability, even to companies that can afford loans, and the economy then contracts.

    "A fundamental characteristic of our economy," Minsky wrote in 1974, "is that the financial system swings between robustness and fragility and these swings are an integral part of the process that generates business cycles." (Wikipedia)

    But a business-cycle recession is a fundamentally different thing than the end of a Debt Supercycle, such as much of Europe is tangling with, Japan will soon face, and the US can only avoid with concerted action in the first part of the next year.

    A business-cycle recession can respond to monetary and fiscal policy in a more or less normal fashion; but if you are at the event horizon of a collapsing debt black hole, monetary and fiscal policy will no longer work the way they have in the past or in a manner that the models would predict.

    There are two contradictory forces battling in a debt black hole: expanding debt and collapsing growth. Without treading again on ground covered in many past letters, let's take it as a given that if you either cut government spending or raise taxes you are going to reduce GDP over the short run (academic studies suggest the short run is 4-5 quarters). To argue that raising taxes or cutting spending has no immediate effect on the economy flies in the face of mathematical reality. Note that I'm not arguing for one approach or the other, just simply stating that there will be consequences, either way. The country might be better off with higher taxes and/or more spending, or the opposite. But those choices are going to have consequences in both the short and long term.

    Second, there is a limit to how much money a government can borrow. That limit clearly varies from country to country, but to suggest there is no limit puts you clearly in the camp of the delusional.

    The Event Horizon

    In our analogy, the event horizon is relatively easy to pinpoint. It is what Rogoff and Reinhart call the "Bang!" moment, when a country loses the confidence of the bond market. For Russia it came at 12% of debt-to-GDP in 1998. Japan is at 230% of debt-to-GDP and rising, even as its population falls – the Bang! moment approaches. Obviously, Greece had its moment several years ago. Spain lost effective access to the bond market last year, minus European Central Bank intervention. Other countries will follow.

    As an aside, it makes no difference how the debt was accumulated. The black holes of debt in Greece and in Argentina had completely different origins from those of Spain or Sweden or Canada (the latter two in the early '90s). The Spanish problem did not originate because of too much government spending; it developed because of a housing bubble of epic proportions. 17% of the working population was employed in the housing industry when it collapsed. Is it any wonder that unemployment is now 25%? If unemployment is 25%, that both raises the cost of government services and reduces revenues by proportionate amounts.

    The policy problem is, how do you counteract the negative pull of a black hole of debt before it's too late? How do you muster the "escape velocity" to get back to a growing economy and a falling deficit – or, dare we say, even a surplus to pay down the old debt? How do you reconcile the competing forces of insufficient growth and too much debt?

    The problem is not merely one of insufficient spending: the key problem is insufficient income. By definition, income has to come before spending. You can take money from one source and give it to another, but that is not organic growth. We typically think of organic growth as only having to do with individual companies, but I think the concept also applies to countries. The organic growth of a country can come from natural circumstances like energy resources or an equable climate or land conducive to agricultural production, or it can come from developing an educated populace. There are many sources of potential organic growth: energy, tourism, technology, manufacturing, agriculture, trade, banking, etc.

    While deficit spending can help bridge a national economy through a recession, normal business growth must eventually take over if the country is to prosper. Keynesian theory prescribed deficit spending during times of business recessions and the accumulation of surpluses during good times, in order to be able to pay down debts that would inevitably accrue down the road. The problem is that the model developed by Keynesian theory begins to break down as we near the event horizon of a black hole of debt.

    Wednesday, October 10, 2012

    Facebook Deceivers preparing a new round of mobile revenues trick


    While Wall Street has hammered Facebook's stock because of its "mobile problem" - it hasn't been making money on its fast-growing mobile user base - Sandberg calls mobile "a huge opportunity."
    And Sandberg revealed that the new mobile app is "boosting engagement" more than the desktop service, saying that mobile users are 20% more likely to come back to Facebook on a given day.
    Why it is bullshit?
    SEC officer Jacobs wrote on March 22: “Please explain to us how you determined that your metrics are not overstated.”
    Only eight days before the IPO, on May 9, did Facebook make clear in a filing that that daily mobile customers were increasing faster than advertising growth, potentially hurting revenue and profits. It was the strongest public signal that the IPO could fall short of its high expectations.
    Read Facebook's May 9 amendment here.
    The issue of mobile users is even more relevant today as Facebook, based in Menlo Park, California, announced on Oct. 4 it now counted one billion users worldwide, up from 845 million at the year’s start. More than half of them, or 600 million, access Facebook through a mobile device, a number that grew 41 percent this year.
    In its initial filing, known as an S-1, the company said mobile usage of Facebook increased around the world and numbered 425 million “monthly active users” in December 2011. It acknowledged that it hadn’t proven it could “monetize” people using only mobile devices, where the absence of ads may “negatively affect our revenue and financial results.”

    One concern, raised by several analysts, has to do with the rate at which Facebook will introduce sponsored stories to the newsfeed – both in the web and mobile channels. Right now the volume is low.

    ‘Excessive Expenses’

    Jacobs responded on Feb. 28 by asking for a “more detailed” discussion of these key challenges. If the company’s attempts to monetize those mobile users fail, she wrote, then “ensure” that your disclosure addresses the potential consequences to revenue, “rather than just stating that they ‘may be negatively affected.’”
    Vetter filed a revised prospectus on March 7, disclosing that Facebook’s monetization strategy could run up “excessive expenses.” Last year the agency pressed Groupon Inc. (GRPN) to abandon an accounting method that made the then-unprofitable daily coupon business look profitable by hiding certain marketing costs, a person familiar with the matter said at the time.

    Her letters were addressed to Ebersman, who joined Facebook as chief financial officer in 2009 after holding the same title at drugmaker Genentech Inc. from 2005 until early 2009. A graduate of Brown University with a degree in economics and international relations, Ebersman replaced Gideon Yu, who left after Facebook said it wanted a successor with experience in running a public company.


    Monday, August 20, 2012

    Global Daisy expert vebinars and Direct Democracy


    What is Global DAISY expert system?

    DAISY is an Internet platform for organization of activities and interaction with well-known international experts and persons with high social level, which possess exclusive knowledge and information; the platform has a paying system for participation in a webinar and further commercialization of video content for wider auditorium.

    The study conducted by international experts Edward Mushinsky and Artur Arakelyan (Daisy founder) found that the source of all the world's major crisis, is the fall in aggregate demand. 
    Arising from this social dynamics led to the amplification of global currency, financial and political crisis. But at the heart of the changes are social information processes, the presence of a growing number of unemployed people. 
    This lots of people in need of retraining, additional knowledge. They has not yet had its global opinion leaders. Therefore, Daisy founders has create a platform for experts with actual knowledge. Daisy project was based around the idea of ​​a new form of interaction between people around the world.
     For this, Artur Arakelyan has create a site signmanifesto.org 
    The project "Sign the Manifesto" is a non-profit and does not represent any political party. It aims at the development of the principles of direct democracy and creating conditions for every citizen to realize his or her constitutional right to participate directly in the State governance. 
    This Online resource provides the possibilities to create a new social mechanism of popular referenda and votes on key issues of society life. Due to the Internet, there are created ideal conditions for the integration, communication and cooperation between people. This will allow us to express our will in a more organized, integrated and secure way. This mechanism will allow public institutions to interact directly and clearly see what issues and problems are the most severe in the society. 
     The people’s signatures and their participation in the development of Manifesto can create the necessary "critical" mass and then the document would be impossible to ignore. Then it will be easy to find legitimate, legal status for compulsory execution at international and local level.

    Sunday, August 19, 2012

    Artur Arakelyan and expert video communication on globaldaisy.com


    Project:
    Expert community and video-communication platform globaldaisy.com
    Project owners:
    Trans Personal Association and Artur Arakelean
    Business-model:
    revenue sharing .
    All expert  must  be recommended according to their veracity.
    The business-concept represents a huge possibilities for the cooperation and interactions between expert networks, educational organizations and others whose interests are focused on the a personal services like educational, psychological therapy etc.
    Global Daisy is  new way for synergetic cooperation of independent expert, forming pension fund Daisy.
    The Daisy Fund is the center and the basic core of social network, which sustain, develop and co-ordinate the whole network.

    Thursday, August 16, 2012

    Facebook future is global currency, Artur Arakelyan opinion

    According to an opinion of Global Daisy CEO Artur Arakelyan 
    Facebook must accelerate expansion on payment systems market. In order to to restore the confidence of investors, Zuckerberg have to focus on mobile payments.

    The latest Forrester Research report released Tuesday pointed out that 46% of all U.S. bank account holders will be using mobile banking to keep track of their funds.


    Mobile payment future
    Since so many people are talking about mobile payments, many are also expecting banks to grow their signature apps to include mobile payment options as well, but since there are so many of these individual apps, it will take some API adoption on the part of the banking app developers.
    Cash is going to be a thing of the past if mobile and Web payments continue to work their way up the ladder in commerce. 
    Research out this summer from Gartner says that this year will see more than $171.5 billion in mobile payment transactions. That's a whopping 60% increase on 2011′s $105.9 billion.  This means that 212.2 million people (up 32% from 160.5 million in 2011) are using some form of mobile payment service. 
    And while the technology is out there to offer near-field-communication between smartphones and POS systems, it is Web transactions and SMS services that are making up the bulk of these digital transactions. 
    Banks obviously want to be cut in on this rather than out.
    Gartner sees digital mobile transactions reaching $617 billion by 2016 — but these factors in a slight slowing-down in growth to 42%.
    SMS, Gartner research director Sandy Shen notes, is still the primary method used in making payments in developing markets, while in more developed markets, most transactions are made via mobile Internet portals. 
    One API provider, WePay, just announced today that it is working to gain more adoption but not only lowering the fee it charges per transaction but also boosting its API so that retailers can accept payments more easily without building the infrastructure from the ground up. It seems like banks may be the next investors in mobile banking tech. In fact, I predict some banks will start snapping up promising mobile payment companies any month now. Just you watch

    Read more at http://vator.tv/news/2012-08-14-mobile-banking-will-impact-46-of-bank-account-holders?utm_content=futureeurope%40gmail.com&utm_source=VerticalResponse&utm_medium=Email&utm_term=Mobile%20banking%20will%20impact%2046%25%20of%20bank%20account%20holders%20%20&utm_campaign=VatorNews%20-%20Facebook%20director%20Peter%20Thiel%20ready%20to%20sell%20shares%3F%20Is%20Groupon%27s%20mainstay%20product%20fizzling%20out%3F%20Resetting%20Education%3A%20Tapping%20into%20the%20classroomcontent#HxPpmbei2gPx6zdF.99

    An foresight manifest by Peter Thiel colleague



    WHAT HAPPENED TO THE FUTURE?

    A.

    INTRODUCTION

    We invest in smart people solving difficult problems, often difficult scientific or engineering problems. Here’s why:

    The Problem

    We have two primary and related interests:
    1. Finding ways to support technological development (technology is the fundamental driver of growth in the industrialized world).
    2. Earning outstanding returns for our investors. 1
    From the 1960s through the 1990s, venture capital was an excellent way to pursue these twin interests. From 1999 through the present, the industry has posted negative mean and median returns, with only a handful of funds having done very well. What happened?

    Wednesday, July 18, 2012

    Thiel vs Schmidt


    Thiel and Schmidt are on opposite sides of the political spectrum. Thiel is a libertarian; Schmidt, a Democrat. Both men are brilliant and articulate with very different visions of the future and the part tech plays in it. Thiel did most of the smacking.
    Thiel:
    Thiel says VCs since 1999 have failed to create really innovative tech. He quoted a page from his Founders Fund website: "We wanted flying cars. Instead we got 140 characters."
    "You do a fine job as Google's administrator of propaganda," Thiel said to Schmidt. Moderator Adam Lashinsky, a Fortune writer, chided Thiel. "You said you were going to be nice."  Thiel responded, "I said you do a fine job." The audience laughed.
    "Google is not a tech company," Thiel said, arguing that Google does search and people think that no one else will come up with better search. "So investing in Google [is] betting against innovation."
    India, China and other developing nations have "zero need for innovation. All they need to do is copy things."
    Thiel on Google's "world-class monopoly" in search: "It's quite legal to have a monopoly as long as you don't abuse it."
    "We've outlawed everything in the world of stuff and looks like Wall Street-style finance is in the process of getting outlawed. The only thing left is world of computers. If you are a computer, that's good," said Thiel. He added, that's also good for Google, where "they like computers more than people."
    Thiel admitted that Google is doing more than lots of other tech companies like Microsoft on innovation, like self-driving cars. But says Google still has too much cash. "Google has $30 billion to spend and no idea how to spend it on tech."
    As for the Arab Spring, "You can say Facebook and Twitter" caused it, Thiel said. Schmidt interrupted: "I didn't say that!" Thiel continued, "But it was the price of food. People were about to starve. Eric goes around and says .. let them eat iPhones."


    Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-eric-schmidt-fortune-brainstorm-2012-7#ixzz210Rtq4qi

    Sunday, June 3, 2012

    Deflation in 2012, inflation in 2014


    The argument for deflation is rather straightforward. The boom in the US and much of the world from 1982 until 2008 was partially the result of financial innovations and massive leveraging. That process has come to its end, and the private sector is deleveraging and will do so even further as the economy softens and we slip into the next recession. Governments are coming to the end of their ability to borrow money at reasonable rates in Europe, and soon in Japan and eventually in the US (and that time is not as far off as we would like).

    The next big deflationary force is the slowing of the velocity of money. I have written numerous e-letters and devoted a lot of space in the book to the velocity of money and won't go into it again here. It has been falling for five years, pretty much as I wrote it would, back in 2006. (I was writing about the velocity of money at least as far back as 2001, and probably earlier. It is a very important concept to grasp.) We are now close to the historical average velocity of money, but since velocity is mean-reverting it will go well below the historical average. This process takes years; it is not something that is going to end any time soon.
    A slow-growth, Muddle-Through economy is deflationary. High and persistent unemployment is deflationary.
    Absent some new piece of data that I can't see now, we are in for lower bond yields in the US. Rates are going lower and are going to stay low for longer than any of us can imagine.
    I think the Fed will respond to the government acting in a fiscally responsible manner, which is inherently deflationary, by fighting that deflation with the only tool it has left; and that is outright monetization of debt. They will call it something else, of course, but that will be the actual outcome.
    And they will be able to monetize more than you think they can without causing a repeat of the 1970s. Eventually it will catch up to us, as there is no free lunch, but they are betting they will be able to reduce some of the threat of actual inflation by cutting back on the money supply and raising rates. But we are years off from that. So, yes, at some point inflation will be back.
    Anybody who says they know the timing is a lot more confident in his/her crystal ball than I am. Mine is rather cloudy on this topic. But I think I can see out a year or so, and it looks like continued low rates and deflation. By the way, just to appease the gold bugs among my readers, given my deflationary call, I will note in passing that solid gold stocks were up hugely during the deflationary Great Depression of the '30s. Even with the dollar on the gold standard. Just saying. John Mauldin

    Global Top Marketing. TV is dead

    Social media marketing company Global Top Marketing starts video digests http://www.facebook.com/pages/global-top-marketing/177232165736687

    Why TV is dead?

    • "Networks" are completely meaningless. We don't know or care which network owns the rights to a show or where it was broadcast. The only question that's relevant is whether it's available on Netflix, HuluAmazon, or iTunes. This means that one of the key traditional "businesses" of TV--the network--is obsolete.
    • The majority of what we pay our cable company is wasted. We get broadband Internet from our cable company, and we use that constantly. But we also get 500 channels that we almost never watch, along with a couple (HBO, Tennis Channel) that we pay extra for and do watch occasionally.
    • We rarely watch TV ads, and when we do, we're usually doing something else at the same time--like typing. Also, the ads seem startlingly intrusive, because we're not used to them.
    More directly, what this means is this:
    • The vast majority of money TV advertisers spend to reach our household (~$750 a year, ~$60/month) is wasted, because we rarely watch TV content with ads, and, when we do, we rarely watch the ads.
    • The vast majority of money we pay our cable company for live TV (~$1,200 a year / ~$100/month) is wasted, because we almost never watch live TV and we can get most of what we want to watch from iTunes, Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon.
    This user behavior has been changing for a while, and, so far, it has had almost no impact on the TV business. On the contrary, the networks and cable companies are still fat and happy, and they're coining more and more money every year.
    But remember what happened in the newspaper business.
    When the Internet arrived, user behavior started to change. It took a decade for this change in behavior to hit the business. But when it hit the business, it hit it hard--and it destroyed it shockingly quickly.
    And the same thing seems likely to happen to the TV business.


    Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/tv-business-collapse-2012-6#ixzz1wl4Glu3g



    Monday, April 23, 2012

    Mobile is best trend


    In 2011, global spending on mobile media topped $100 billion for the first time, according to a report released by Strategy Analytics.  The total amount spent by consumers on data plans, apps and media content was $121.8 billion, and that number is projected to jump more than 13% to $138.2 billion this year.  
    Of the nearly $139 billion estimated to be spent on mobile media, the lion's share, or 60%, is projected to go toward data plans as data-hungry consumers are estimated to spend $82.8 billion on data plans alone, up 9.5% form last year. This makes mobile operators key beneficiaries of the significant chunks of money being spent on mobile. 
    The amount spent on smartphone apps is anticipated to jump over 30% to $26.1 billion, making apps the second biggest source of revenue in mobile media. 
    More than 23 billion smartphone apps were downloaded last year, and this year could see as many as 32 billion. For this reason, apps are quickly displacing mobile display ads as the place to spend marketing dollars. In the USA and Western Europe alone, $1.7 billion was spent on in-app advertising vs just under $1 billion for display ads on the mobile Web.  
    Video on mobile devices is growing as well, as 280 billion videos are estimated to be viewed this year, almost tripling the 108 billion videos watched in 2011. But even though revenue from video is expected to grow 24% this year, revenue is expected to be $3.6 billion, accounting for 2.4% of total mobile media revenue. 
    Mobile ad growth nearly doubling
    While spending on apps and data plans is significantly higher than the amount of money marketers currently spend to advertise on mobile devices, mobile advertising is growing at a faster clip. 
    The amount advertisers and marketers are projected to spend is $11.6 billion, nearly double the $6.3 billion spent in 2011. This brings total media spending - $139 billion (for apps, data plans) plus $11.6 billion (mobile advertising) - to just below $150 billion this year, up 17% from last year.
    The Strategy Analytics report says that advertising revenue on mobile apps in the U.S. will increase by 118% this year, but there is some question as to whether that money is being spent wisely.
    report by Nielsen in March of this year found that U.S. consumers were actually less likely to make purchases based on mobile ads than those in European countries. That report stated that only 6% of U.S. Smartphone owners went out and bought an item they saw advertised on their phone, compared with 18% in Italy, 15% in Germany and 14% in the UK. When asked if they made a purchase directly from their device based on an ad, only 4% of U.S. Smartphone users answered yes, while 7% of UK respondents, 8% of Germans and 12% of Italians said yes.
    Nielsen also found that only 26% of U.S. consumers trusted mobile ads, while 46% trusted TV advertisements and over 50 % trusted ads on branded websites. 

    Sunday, April 22, 2012

    Mobile Informational Capital

    Foursquare's last round, a $50 million raise in June 2011, valued the company at $600 million.
    It's starting to look like all that hype was unwarranted.
    Foursquare is no longer the only social network built for the mobile Internet user – now there is Instagram and Path and a few others – and it is definitely not the most exciting new social network since Facebook; that's Pinterest.
    The biggest problem for Foursquare is that, compared with other mobile social networking products, not that many people seem to use it.
    On its about page, Foursquare says it has 15 million registered users. By comparison, Instagram has 35 million users.
    According to AppData, 570,000 people share Foursquare data into Facebook every day, 3 million every month. Pinterest, which only launched in 2010 has 1 million users sharing data with Facebook every day, and 10 million sharing every month. For Instagram, the numbers are 2 million and 11.5 million.
    Apple's iTunes store doesn't expose how many times an app has been downloaded, but one rough measurement of an app's downloads and user engagement are the number of reviews users have written.

    Simply put: not that many people are using Foursquare, certainly not compared to the amount of people using Instagram, Pinterest, or even Yelp.
    The good news for Foursquare is that CEO Dennis Crowley wisely capitalized on the app's early hype to raise a boatload of cash last summer (with minor dilution). Foursquare only has about 100 employees right now, and with $50 million in the bank, it can probably afford to keep them employed for another three or four years.
    The even better news for Foursquare is that investors and executives know the company needs to pivot in some way, and they are trying to figure out how.
    One idea we've heard is being floated around is to turn Foursquare into more of a Web company and less of a mobile-only platform. It could be something like Yelp or MenuPages.com – with a search engine-friendly Web page full of user-reviews and tips for every restaurant on the planet. That's a good idea, especially since Foursquare tips are very useful.
    That kind of pivot would also make Foursquare a more useful product to the majority of users out there who just want to consume data, not create it through a gimmick like "checking-in." (Likewise, most YouTube users don't upload videos; they just view them.)
    The only downside is that Foursquare investors probably were hoping the company would turn into more than another Yelp. Yelp, now a publicly traded company, has a $1.5 billion market cap. Venture investors expect more than a 3X return.  But then again, there are worse fates for startups with lots of early hype and little user-adoption three years in.

     http://www.businessinsider.com/foursquare-may-not-be-toast-yet-but-its-browning-at-the-edges-2012-4?

    Saturday, January 7, 2012

    The most important trends in global economy 2012

    Trend #1 according to foresight expert Edward Musinski - 
    Asian investments around the world.
    Only some examples.

    1.The Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) is a major player in European real estate, whether it is a finished asset or development.  Qatar Holdings LLC has made its first investment in a class-A office project in Poland. http://www.swfinstitute.org/swf-news/qatar-holdings-buys-warsaw-office-development/

    2. The Qatari Diar Real Estate Investment Co, which is a sovereign wealth enterprise of the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), plans to invest €250 million (US$ 337.4) in developing an Adriatic resort in Montenegro.  http://www.swfinstitute.org/swf-news/qatari-diar-montenegro-resort-dev/

    3. China Investment Corporation (CIC) is a sovereign wealth fund. Since then, CIC's assets have grown to $500 billion at the end of 2011.
    China Investment Corp. (CIC), who wrote that China was keen to make equity investments in Western infrastructure, especially in Britain. http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/default.aspx?pageid=438&n=china-eyes-to-buy-european-assets-2011-11-28

    Now let’s take a look at ten areas where we expect to see trends making a major impact in 2012!
    1. BRIC & beyond rising: Markets, competitors, mindsets and systems
    2. Financial and economic uncertainty explodes:  New roles for power brokers?
    3. Geopolitical tensions: Politics as a barrier to economic and social stability, versus an enabler
    4. Food, water and energy security: Growing challenges
    5. Cybercontrols & cyberwars: The new frontlines of authority and crime
    6. Technology breakthroughs: Are we serious and will we pay the price?
    7. Beyond the Gang of 4:  The fight for controlling the interface
    8. The democratization of everything: Facing the tensions of globalization and fragmentation
    9. Redefining playing fields:  Fighting to own the new consumer
    10. Generations Y and Z moving to the forefront:  Preparing for the digital natives
    http://vsocial.livejournal.com/141290.html

    Friday, January 6, 2012

    10 predictions for Web Trends 2012

    #1: social will go away, but that the next generation of social apps will be about doing things more efficiently and saving time
    http://znacomstva.blogspot.com/2012/01/10-predictions-for-web-trends-2012.html

    Tech M&A trends are positive http://goo.gl/fb/TxDCZ

    Thursday, January 5, 2012

    M&A activity in 2011


    For the entire year, 460 companies were bought for $46.4 billion, down 13% from the activity seen in 2010. But the deals were valued much higher as the total amount spent for the purchases was 30% higher than the $35.6 billion spent in 2010. 
    The median price paid for a company catapulted 77% to $71 million last year, with the median amount raised down 12% to $17 million before reaching an M&A or buyout exit. The drop in funds reflect the lower start-up costs needed to start a company these days. 
    "Acquisitions of companies liquidating their assets were halved in 2011 and companies are benefiting from lower start-up costs by taking capital farther toward a larger acquisition,” said Jessica Canning, global research director for Dow Jones VentureSource, in a release.
    The largest acquisitions in 2011 include Plexxikon bought by Daiichi Sankyo for $805 million, Medtronic's $800 million purchase of Ardian, Shire's $750 million acquisition of Advanced BioHealing and Electronic Arts purchase of PopCap Games for $732 million. 
    As for the largest transactions in the consumer technology space, PopCap was the largest, followed by Quidsi's sale to Amazon for $545 million, Tiny Prints $406 million sale to Shutterfly, Wal-Mart Stores $300 million purchase of Kosmix, and KAR Auction Services' acquisition of Openlane for $250 million. 

    Read more - http://w.po.st/share/entry/redir?publisherKey=vator&url=http%3A%2F%2Fvator.tv

    Monday, January 2, 2012

    The next big ideas: social TV, crowdsoursing

    The next big idea: social TV
    http://content.bitsontherun.com/previews/mzSKMwxm-3qUDsq9e




    In addition to TV networks including hashtags in the aired programs and streaming content encouraging watchers to comment and share what they are viewing, many companies have started capitalizing on the advertisement revenues available when joining forces with major programs.
    GetGlue is a new service that, by April, had already amassed 1 million users





    Saad Khan of CMEA Ventures at Vator Splash on his thoughts on the next billion dollar space, his favorite startups and tips on pitching him. Saad starts off by sharing that he invests in the entrepreneur and not necessarily the idea. To quote him, "I invest almost exclusively in people – really smart people! Regardless of what you are doing if you are one of those people then email me saad@cmea.com"
    Watch the interview for the types of entrepreneurs Saad has invested in, people who are wired a little differently and have been demonstrating that for a while. 
    So what is the next billion dollar space? He shares two areas: Changing of page rank to something else such as "People Rank" or "Like Rank" presents a significant opportunity. How do you establish authority around a person and how does that change Search and Navigation paradigms.
    The other space he's excited about is Crowdsourcing. How do you capture people’s marginal hour to disrupt industries.

    Read more - http://w.po.st/share/entry/redir?publisherKey=vator&url=http%3A%2F%2Fvator.tv%2Fnews%2F2011-03-09-the-next-billion-dollar-idea-part-2-of-5%3Futm_source%3DBlogGlue_network%26utm_medium%3DBlogGlue_Plugin&title=VatorNews%20-%20The%20next%20billion-dollar%20idea%20-%20Part%202%20of%205&sharer=copypaste