The reason is simple, there is as much to be upset about as in 2011 (and perhaps even more), and digital tech will be even more pervasive. A correlated trend will be attempts by governments and copyrights holders to limit how and who can publish information.

Digital identity and the return of status

The more important the internet becomes to ordinary people in their daily lives, the more pressure will be put on people to use identifiable online identities. Expect more comment apps, forums and other authorisation systems to use Facebook, Twitter or Google sign-ins to combat anti-social and undesirable behaviour.

Status gets status

The web as originally conceived was supposed to be peer to peer and egalitarian. No wonder there's been a backlash against influence measuring systems like Klout of late. Unfortunately they won't go away. We'll see the social stratifying of online users and the importance of status gathering pace in the coming year.

Clash of the Gatekeepers

There's a huge battle going on for the entry point to digital content. Google has been pushing for its Chrome Browser to become an operating system for several years; for apps and more to run inside it. It's been a hard slog, and take up is good, if not stellar. Apple is turning the desktop into a native app environment, similar to the one we have learned to love on mobile. This has lead people like Forresters to say that the web is indeed dead. Hedging their bets, Google has launched services like Google Currents, that allow publishers to easily get onto Tablets and Smartphones via a Google interface. Similarly Facebook's new Open Graph Social News apps will allow publishers another way into users' worlds. The Guardian already claims that it has been a huge success for them.

Better UX and usability

The former trend will be driven to a great extent by a simpler and more intuitive user experience. Services like Jux is just one example. The question however, is if this better experience will come at a loss of freedom to access the weird and wonderful information that the open web provided.

Journalists and creatives in vogue

The past year saw many companies dip their toes into social and content marketing. They found it surprisingly hard. We predict a trend this year where companies, instead of hiring marketing grads, will look for journalist students and film makers. Luckily for companies these will be in abundance as more traditional media outlets close.

Predictions for platforms

Last year we predicted that Facebook could reach as many as 800 million users, which they did. This year we predict they will slow down and even slightly decline in developed markets, but Brazil and India and the growth of smartphones could see them reach 950 million by year end.

Last year we guessed that Twitter could reach 400 million registered users. In September Twitter claimed it had 380,000 million. We think we guessed that about right. What about 2012 then? With Twitter continuing to simplify its techie UX, we think it can reach 600 million registered accounts quite easily, but what really matters is active user count. This year it was 100 million. We think by the end 2012 it will have 200 million active users.

Last year, we thought that Foursquare, with a few clever tweaks, could reach 50 million registered users by the end of this year. We were wrong. The last time they reported numbers (this past summer), they only had 14 million, that's only 4 million up from the beginning of the year. Nobody knows what number they ended the year with, but we'd be surprised if it was 18 million. That's just not good enough. We think Foursquare will get bought for its infrastructure – for example: Instagram's locations run on top of it.

Instagram came from nowhere and ended the year on 14 million users. We're going to stick our necks out and say that with the launch of the long awaited Android version and continued stellar growth of smartphones and tablets it could accelerate to as much as 80 million registered users by the end of 2012.

And what about Google Plus? Stats for the service is hard to come by, but if Google releases good enough API's and leverage existing services like YouTube well, they can grow their registrations dramatically. They could even exceed 100 million registrations by year end.

Its ads Jim but not as we know it

When brands realise social media is difficult to do well, many of them will turn to more familiar ground – ads. But not display of banner ads, they will buy ads on social platforms. Expect a lot more advertising on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter this year.

Creative of the Year: Intel Museum of Me

We've featured so many brilliant creative projects this year, but the Intel Museum of Me was on a level of its own. Its social integration is so complete, that they manage to cross the gap from intellectual amazement to raw emotional bliss. This is truly inspiring.

On that note, this is us for the year. Have yourselves a lovely holiday, and we look forward to bringing you the best of social in 2012! Thanks for reading!

In a wide ranging article Fast Company takes a look at the intricate tactical dance the four big companies vying to conquer the world - Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Google –  are so very busy with. The variables in this giant game of chess and the number of the fronts are so complex that we get dizzy at the possible permutations of it all. Never-mind figuring out their strategies. But two points struck us in particular: Payment systems is one of the big new territories these companies would love to colonise and that telecoms companies are a big pain in the ass for all of them.



A sobering thought: Of these four only Apple competes (and only recently) with the worlds largest telcos in revenue levels (100 billion dollar + ). Yes, the industry that gets people to fork out cash for connecting, talking is several times the size of the advertising industry. Says Fast Company:

"Facebook is reported to have made $1.6 billion during the first half of 2011 (about double what it made in the first half of 2010), but Apple makes that much in nine days."
 

It's not about the dosh

The Fast Company article does point out that for these four companies its not all about money. It's about reshaping the world in their image. But money talks and Apple announced its results this week. What's remarkable about it is what Apple says will happen next:

"They’re actually forecasting a $37 billion quarter, which would be the company’s biggest quarter by almost $10 billion."

In case you wondered, Google is set to make about that same amount this year. Their best yet. Amazon might get close to topping 50 billion for the year for the first time.
 

Do my Watts look big in this?

In the wake of criticism against Facebook for using Coal and Nuclear power to power their data centres, Facebook has kicked off an initiative to improve their reputation on the energy front. The latest step in this initiative is a partnership with the National Resources Defence Council and Opower, to build an app that runs on the Facebook, and compare users' home energy usage to that of their friends and the national average.

Over and above the green initiative behind this planned app, it has the added benefit of saving users money by making them aware of their energy consumption.

Policy wonks, you lover's of Nudges and Big Society, eat your heart out.


 

For publishers, it's a jungle out there

Talking of war. Amazon is not only providing a platform for authors to self publish. It's actively courting prominent authors with publisher type deals. A 122 of them to be exact. In the words of the New York Times Amazon is "gnawing away" at the services publishers, agents and critics used to provide.
 

Come over to the DARC side

The Guided agency we often work with was founded by a non marketing person. None of us RAAKonteurs come from a marketing background. So we might be biased but we concur with an article in the Wall blog. With social media becoming so influential and spreading throughout all the different business functions and applications, companies will require more and more people with deep social media understanding. And what are those people like? They want DARC (Digital Analytical Reach Content Creator) people. No traditional marketing skills and background are required, instead “hire people who speak digital without an accent. Hire people that blog, have twitter followers and are on G+.”
 

Twitter's got no need for speed?

While the big four are slugging it out, the people in the streets are concerned about Twitter. #OccuppyWallStreet Tweets have been building for weeks, yet have failed to feature in Twitter trending topics. Thats because Twitter favours acceleration over volume (speed) in its trending topics. Social Flow has a great post on how this works. A slow rising tide, although much bigger, might not trend like a sudden wave of Tweets will. An important lesson we learned as well. A day before our campaign for Alan Sugar's book #TheWayIseeIt we got it trending with 350,000 Tweets. But on the day of the event, when we got about the same number, we failed to get into trends. So hold your fire, or use another gun.


 

Talking of acceleration – iOS5 is a Twitter booster rocket

Last week we wrote about Apple's iOS5 tightly integrating Twitter. The results are in (already!!), and they're simply very good indeed. Since iOS5 launched, Twitter's signups have tripled.

Away from iOS5 the numbers are not half bad either. If you analyse Twitter's active users, the ones that log in more than once a month, it gets even more interesting. At the beginning of the year, 30% of these users logged in every day. That number has now surged to more than 50%. This is a much more interesting number than the amount of signups, because it reflects actual usage, and a product that's becoming a core part of people's communication lives.

Another interesting number, daily average tweet volume, now sits at just under 3000 tweets per second. Back in May, when we did a comparison between Twitter and typical mobile operators, this number was 1794 tweets per second. It means they have almost double in volume, in five months! Which means Twitter now deals with about 20 times the number of Tweets per second compared to the average telco with its SMS. That's major.
 

Creative of the Week – Rihanna

Once again the music industry is using Facebook to promote their wares in a creative way. Rather than purely relying on the traditional promotional channels, Rihanna is using her own Facebook Page to create a buzz around her new album. The more people engage with the Unlocked app and the more tasks they complete, the more exclusive preview content is made available.

Simple, but efficient. So far it's resulted in more than 700,000 new Facebook fans, and, perhaps more surprising, more than a million new Twitter followers.

It's an oft heard refrain: people active on social media neglect 'real world' relationships. The outgoing editor of the New York Times, Bill Keller, once again joined the chorus in an interview with Reuters:

"The time you spend keeping up with your 200 Facebook friends is time you are not getting to know someone really well in person."

There is of course copious amounts of research on this topic. And one person that knows it back to front is sociology professor Zeynep Tufekci – we have mentioned before you should watch out for her. Via Twitter she told Keller he was wrong. Keller responded: "Um, did you plan on linking to the research?" And boy, did she! Five tweets, linking to 5 different studies.

Bottom line? After many factors like race, gender and education were statistically equalized, people who used more social media like Facebook had more very close ties in real life. Read the Storify here.
 

Some Social Media users are more equal than others

Forget the Like-gate on Facebook, here's the Influence-gate. Audi has teamed up with marketing platform Involver to create a widget on their Facebook page that unlocks content based on your Klout score, i.e. online influence.

In this particular case, the execution is very limited (you only get an Audi wallpaper), but there is definitely potential in using these scores as the equivalent of the VIP Golden Ticket. For example: we once reserved front row seats at an event for people with a certain Peerindex score. 

Speaking of which: also this week, Peerindex, the UK version of Klout, announced that it's now tracking 45 million accounts.

Subway Shopping

In the second hardest-working country in the world, it's understandable that you don't have time to go to the supermarket. So why not bring the supermarket to you. That's what Tesco did in South Korea.

They used the advertising space in subway stations to create a virtual shop and turn waiting time into shopping time. They put up posters that looked like product shelves and people could add the products to their shopping cart through QR codes.

Size doesn't matter

This week research again confirmed that all the Facebook action is in the newsfeed and not on your Facebook page. Figures show that having an engaged following is as crucial as how many people like your page. Why? Because as the size of your follower count goes up, the less likely they are to see your updates in their stream: as little as 2.5%.

What does that mean? That brands shouldn't just focus on getting many Likes. But rather target the right group and keep them engaged with content that's carefully crafted and highly engaging (fun). It also means that Facebook is  possibly not for all brands.

OK, size does matter, but growth matters more

This week Foursquare reached 10 million users. But is that growth fast enough? At this rate they won't reach 100 million until 2020.

Compare that to Instagram, who now have 5 million users after 9 months. On iPhone alone. And as this Washington Post article points out: by now they should have hit the 100 million photo mark, a milestone that took Flickr 2 years to achieve.

And what about Soundcloud? The German-based music sharing site has gone from 1 to 5 million users in a year!

Another service that's set to break through is social DJ-ing site Turntable.fm. Despite them phasing their growth – you can only sign in if you have a Facebook friend who's already a member – they still racked up 140,000 users in its first month.  

It's a kind of publishing magic

JK Rowling announced this week she's doing an e-move and word is that the Guardian is adopting a digital-first approach. But over in the US the Bangor Daily News has put their money where their mouth is by creating a fantastic workflow for digitally-enhanced publishing.

They have made the transition to WordPress, while seamlessly integrating it with Google Docs as well as InDesign. Which means the paper now has one content management system for both its web and print operations. What's more, they have open-sourced it all, so you can do it too! More on that here.
 

It's photography, but not as you know it

A new startup has appeared on the horizon, and they promise to completely revolutionize the entire camera industry.

Lytro has developed a technology that allows you to focus on specific objects in images after they have been taken. They do this by capturing not only the light that falls onto a flat surface, like normal cameras do, but all the light passing through the camera lens, as well as its directional information.

With the ability to focus on a specified depth of field, comes the ability to get depth information about every pixel on a photograph. In other words, if applied a bit differently, this technology might provide the same spatial information that a Microsoft Kinect does, in a single lens setup.

The self starting Groupon

OK, so pedicures are not your thing. But how do you get a group buying discount for what you want? Loopt has just launched a self-starting Groupon-style product.

Get a few friends together and tell Loopt what it is you want to buy together. They make it happen. Read more here.
 

Creative of the Week – Hannes Harms

Hannes Harms is a German product designer who lives in London. He's made a funky cardboard-and-foam chair called Scum Chair. So far, so semi-interesting.

But now the RCA student has sparked people's imagination with NutriSmart, a framework for nutritional information that is based on what is effectively an edible RFID tag. The tags, which are inserted directly into the food, would allow you to track the whole supply chain of your food, as well as provide dietary information, tell your fridge when to order extra cupcakes or anything else you can image. 

But how fast exactly is “like a weed”? Back in March, Twitter mentioned the fact that they had an average of 140 million tweets submitted per day. That number has since risen to a billion tweets every six days, or 167 million tweets per day. That is a growth of 19.3% in just two months! Twitter might just outperform our growth predictions.

And in the week that Facebook is adding member number 700 million, a survey done by the Bank of America said that 96 percent of Americans under 50 is on Facebook. A similar survey found that 13 percent of online adult Americans are on Twitter. All quite mindblowing stats.
 

Intel's Museum of Me

Intel keeps on developing its brand personality with great content. Back in January they launched Visual Life with a film by fashion blogger The Sartorialist; this week they hit us with Museum Of Me, a rather amazing piece of brandvertising.

Museum of Me is an app that makes a personalised film based on your Facebook data; it creates a walk through your museum incorporating your status updates, images,…. It managed to get 70,000 Likes after day 1, 222,000 after day 2 and there's a reason why: it's an incredible piece of content.

Bombtweet

What makes a Tweet resonate? A few weeks ago we saw how one Twitter user with a 1000 followers caused a global storm: that Osama bin Laden had been killed. This week Urban Outfitters found themselves at the wrong end of a social media storm. And the Twitter user that initiated it all once again only had about 1000 followers.

A combination of factors conspired to make Amber Karnes' Tweet have this devastating impact. Urban Outfitters' reputation for ripping off other's design and the fact that they did it in such a egregious way to a young independent designer set the context. The fact that the instigator was very much part of a close knit small scale design Etsy Community, provided for the network effects and the authenticity. And the call to do something collectively provided the spark. See this great analysis by Amber herself.

It also makes us wonder. There are a whole raft of brands whose whole discounted business model is predicated on the copying of the design of others. Can this model service our new age where even small producers can cry foul and the global village pays mind?

Twitter is what makes TV Social

We've said it before: Twitter really is the killer app for Social TV. Just look at how Alan Sugar uses it to make snide comments during the Apprentice.

At the end of last week American network HBO launched HBO Connect, a platform that enables people to augment the social conversation around some of its shows. Early days and Mashable called it a 'soft launch', but for now it seems heavily focused on accumulating & visualising Tweets, as a second screen experience. One to watch; and it looks very nice.

And here's an ingenious little social tv app. Snappy TV lets you 'snap' the last 20 seconds from a tv show and share that clip on Twitter or Facebook. What caught our eye: after the show it defines highlights based on what people 'snapped' most. Cool, but what if you could define the most relevant parts of a tv show purely based on Twitter spikes?

The earth moved for me

More Twitter-related predictions. Scientists say tests show that Twitter outpaces traditional seismometer networks for determining earth quakes. Not only that, but patterns of Tweets can determine where the epicenter of the quakes are.
 

Help me publish

A crowdfunding platform has been launched in the UK. It's called Unbound and its for authors looking to fund their books only. At this stage they are only allowing previously published authors and newbies with agents. Perhaps not a bad way to start. Kickstarter, the service that defines this genre is going from strength to strength, with it's VC's claiming it the most disruptive investment of late. Quite a claim.

Your place or mine?

One other contender in the disruption stakes is AirBnB – the peer-to-peer apartment rental site just got funding to the tune of $100 million. The company is on track for sales of in excess of $500 million this year. And it's already the single biggest provider of accommodation in New York.
 

Creative of the Week – Moby

You can say about the music industry what you want, but when it comes to individual spikes of creativity, it does rate rather high. This week we were inspired by Moby's Destroyed project.

To promote his new album of the same name, he created a mash-up of Polymaps and Instagram. Because the album is conceived as a soundtrack to empty cities at night, Moby asked his fans to take Instagram images of their cities at 2AM and tag them as #destroyed. The images then get shown on the Destroyed-map, together with some eerie tour shots from Moby himself.

Tech Insight of the week – Buttons, buttons, everywhere!

This week is international button week. At least, it seems to be the case if you look at the big guns of social.

First off, Twitter released a follow button. It allows any Twitter user on your site to, without leaving your site, follow you. Very nice! Head over to our blog to see it in action.

Then Google released the +1 button. This mirrors functionality they've had on search results on google.com for quite a while now, but implemented right on your site. If you would like to recommend a web page to your Google friends, you can “+1” it on the page itself. This will then show up in searches your friends do on google.com. This, too, can be seen in action on our blog, with a howto on how to add it to your own site.

It's yet another roll of the social dice for Google, especially since Eric Schmidt finally came out and admitted that he screwed up social for Google. Will they hit the Jackpot this time? We're not overly optimistic.

Over in the Influence corner, Klout released a button. It's called +K, and you use it to vouch for someone's influence on a specific topic – basically allowing Klout to crowdsource people's topic influence. It's not portable, and it's well hidden away inside the UI – only available on other people's Klout profiles, but hey – it's there, and we like its purpose.

Facebook has launched a showcase site of Facebook campaigns, which also features Labs – how-tos and tips. Here you can see what BMW did to support their US Superbowl effort or that great idea by Flair magazine, called Fashion Tag.




 

The fascination continues

A new report makes a valuable contribution to the debate over who uses social media:

Despite the plateau reached during the last two quarters, Facebook gained 100 million unique visitors per month over the same time last year and now stands at 590 million unique visitors per month. Twitter is the runner-up at 97 million unique visitors. To put Facebook’s Internet presence in perspective, the combineddaily circulation of the Wall Street Journal, USAToday, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, the New York Daily News, and the New York Post equals only 36% of the average daily unique visitors (19 million) of Facebook. LinkedIn remains stagnant with no growth over the last five quarters and MySpace can claim the most significant trend as it continues its death spiral.

A word of warning from us. These figures don’t include mobile app usage, which is likely to be significant for both Facebook and Twitter. Furthermore it only includes consumers of their website content, not people producing content (active users). A recent report speculated that there are only 20 million Twitter users actually Tweeting regularly. Other points of note, on both Facebook and Twitter, women outnumber men.
 

Trouble at Twitter

Not a good week for Twitter the last was. Fortune lead with a front page story about operational issues, relatively small user base, boardroom squabbles and more. Biz Stone countered with a personal blog post that did not say much, except for invoking Rocky, and then Silicon Alley Insider chimed in to set the record straight. According to it Twitter was not so much reorganising but organising for the first time. Read all these articles, they are very insightful, but here is just one quote:



It is a firmly held belief inside Twitter’s new regime that its product is too hard to use and far too geared toward people who want to write tweets instead of people who want to read them.
 

Ebooks are sexy

There are yet more signs of the spectacular growth of ebooks – triple digit in fact – and a big dip in the sales of physical books.
 

The camera in your pocket that remembers everywhere you’ve been

Techcrunch reports that the iPhone 4 is going to be the most popular camera on Flickr. This, less than a year after its launch, is remarkable.



Researchers have found a very dodgy iPhone log file with records of your exact position and time stamps, reports the Guardian. To add insult to injury it copies this information to your computer and other iOS devices. Suspicious spouses everywhere will rejoice. The researchers have created an app that allows you to view the data on the file.




 

Hip to be Square

Jack Dorsey, the guy who came up with the concept of Twitter, has another venture. It’s called Square and it allows anybody with an iPhone or iPad to collect electronic payments via credit and debit cards. Now Apple has done a deal with Square and will be featuring their product in their Stores and Online. One other neat feature about Square is that, like with Paypal, you do not need a Merchant Bank account.
 

Groupon goes for the checkin

We have it on good authority that Groupon is absolutely terrified of Facebook Places. They see it as a way through which Facebook could undermine their group buying service. So it should not come as a surprise that Groupon this week bought Pelago – a company that has built location checkin apps in the past. RWW reckons the marriage of Groupon and Pelago could be a Foursquare killer. We doubt it.
 

Have the best engineers of a generation wasted their time?

A great article asks whether our greatest minds are spending their time trying to figure out how to make more people click on ads. Great reading matter for your contemplation over the weekend.
 

Tech Insight of the week

Data visualisation is all the rage. This week’s tech post is a fun experiment we did with Instagram and the jQuery Subway Maps plugin. We plotted some Instagram users’ checkins in the Silicon Roundabout as Subway Lines.

An iPhone app with $41 million in venture funding has caused a storm. Its interface is obtuse to the extreme and it has inspired one of the best App Site reviews ever.

And it only does one thing, really. Take a picture, and it will be added to a photo album with any other photos taken by anybody in about 150 meters from yours. No friending required. Besides the fact that it's a boon for voyeurs and exhibitionists everywhere, we're a bit unsure whether it deserves 41 million in funding, although some on Quora beg to differ.

We Like +1

Google has announced +1 – a way for users to 'Like' (sorry Google) ads and links in Google search. Soon you will be be able +1 pages and other stuff as well. So what happens if you Like, oops +1 something? Techcrunch explains:

"While a big aspect of +1 is sharing results with your social graph (which is still sort of confusing given that Google isn’t an actual social network, so it’s Gmail chat contacts, Reader and Buzz friends, etc) , it is also about using that data in aggregate to highlight better results for everyone. For example, on a result that has been +1′d, you’ll see if any of your friends have +1′d it (in a similar way to the current Social Search look with people’s tiny profile icons under the result itself). But you’ll also see that X number of other people that aren’t in your social circle +1′d it as well."

There's been a lot of cynical comments about +1 online already. We think it's too early to tell, but clearly it is only the first building block in a whole system that Google will roll out.

Interested in trying out +1? Go switch it on here, and remember it's Google.com only.

Little fluffy clouds

A few years ago utopian dreams of a life in cyberspace were replaced by the less prosaic but more practical concept of computing in the cloud. But it's been more talk than do. Until now.

Amazon has just launched Cloud Drive, making it affordable to store your digital life in the Cloud. Nothing new, we hear you early adopters say, we've been using Dropbox for ages. But Cloud Drive has a sexy sibling, called Cloud Player. CNET explains:

"Aside from Amazon's handy cross-platform uploader and downloader utilities and its browser-based tools for viewing, downloading, and streaming your stuff, Amazon is also throwing in a Cloud Player feature within the Amazon MP3 application for Android. Using the free app, you can stream all the music you have stored in the cloud, or download your tracks on the fly for offline playback."

The significance of all this?

"…the introduction of Cloud Drive and its ties into the Amazon MP3 store amount to a big competitive advantage over other music download stores, most notably Apple's iTunes store. Amazon is effectively guaranteeing a backup of your MP3 purchases at no cost, which is a big incentive to go with Amazon over Apple."

If, like us, making stuff gets you even more excited than consuming stuff, then check out this little music revolution in the cloud.
 

Check In! Snack Out!

Here's a clever campaign that will make it into lots of presentations about location and interactivity.

German dog food brand GranataPet created a simple, but innovative campaign, making the most of the act of checking-in. They set up a billboard advertising their product as a Foursquare venue and when people checked into the ad, it dispensed a bowl of dog food. We like.

Intention Economy

Here at RAAK we regularly quote or link to Tweets. But neither quotes nor links can be favourited, retweeted or followed. So Twitter has launched Web Intents, which will allow you to directly interact with tweets in the context from your webpage. Wouldn't it be even better if you could embed a tweet?

Since email clients can't read Javascript we can't show its full power in our lovely newsletter. But if you step over here, all will become clear.

Etail Economy

If Gail Rebuck, chair and chief executive of The Random House Group in the UK, had tweeted the following qoute, we could have used Twitter Intents for you to favourite it right now. What did she say?

"Ebook sales continue apace – far out-stripping even the most ambitious industry predictions."

Futurebook.net goes on to note that:

"Meanwhile, Markus Dohle, chief executive of the worldwide group, has reported triple-digit-percentage growth in digital-publishing sales, up 250% on the previous year. According to the company, some US fiction titles now have as much as half of their first-weeks sales in the e-book format."
 

From a Facebook Profile to a Fanpage 

One of the basics of using Facebook for Marketing is setting up a Fanpage rather than a Group or an individual profile. Facebook haven't always been clear about the difference, but have recently made efforts to point businesses into the direction of a Page.

As part of that move, they're now allowing businesses who mistakenly set up an individual page to convert their personal profile to business pages.

But beware: migrating doesn't bring across any of your content and seems to come with quite a few pitfalls.
 

Drop The Beat

We love brands that don't just advertise their product but use them to do cool stuff. This week Adidas launched Megalizer, a breakdancing version of tapdancing.

The shoe brand has developed trainers fitted with sensors that transmit sounds, each of which can then be controlled through an interface.

If you're interested in the tech part of it, here's  a good article.

It's getting tech hot in here

It's now official: London is becoming a force to be reckoned with when it comes to tech & digital. Exhibit A & B: both Gowalla and Foursquare announced they'll be opening offices here this year.

Exhibit C: in an unparalleled move, ad agency BBH has teamed up with investment group Spark Ventures to create The Black Sheep Fund, a venture capital fund that's looking to invest in mainly UK businesses "that intersect consumers, technology and content".

And last -but quite possibly least- the government launched their StartUp Britain website. Although that last one had a little start-up problem when it suggested budding entrepreneurs create a new logo with US-based crowdsourcing site 99Designs. Ouch!
 

Twitter is tiny

There could be as little as 20 million active users. But they are super active. And it's growing rapidly. This is the main take away from a very good and facinating study (PDF) on Twitter. These numbers don't surprise us. Twitter is not for everybody. Twitter is where the thought leaders hang out.

On that note: this week we heard about Tweriod, a tool that measures when your Twitter followers are online and tells you when is the best time to tweet.

Creatives of the week – Guardian Staff

This week Radiohead released the physicial copy of their latest album and to promote that, they published a newspaper called The Universal Sigh.

Which got a few smart people at the Guardian thinking. If they get on our turf, we'll get on theirs. So they recorded their version of the band's classic anthem 'Creep' with the editor-in-chief on keyboards. Very Web 2.0.

Tech insight of the Week – jQuery Mobile and the Fall of the Native App

Ever since Apple's hugely unpopular announcement that they're going to claim 30 percent of all developers' in-app revenue, alternative platform talk has been more rife than ever before. jQuery Mobile might just provide the right means to and end for such a platform. Read More »

Many were launched, but in 2010 there were only a few new tools that really mattered. Kickstarter was one. Quora is another. Here we explain what it has done for us and how you can use it.
 

Facebook Ads are becoming more Social

You may remember we talked about a Nielsen report saying that Facebook ads that showed friends' interactions were up to 4 times more effective. Either Facebook reads the RAAKonteur or they may know someone at Nielsen, but they're now looking to enhance the Social element of their display ads.

They're calling it 'Sponsored Stories'. According to AdWeek, it's basically the same brand interactions that appear in your News Feed. This will allow brands to display that activity on the right side of the page.
 

Put an RFID tag in your shoe…

Here's a nice project that links digital to real life, created by Swedish interaction design student Hampus Lemhag. He developed a system for shoe brand WeSC where you put RFID tags into shoes. The user then connects that tag (i.e. the shoe) to some of their social networks and you can start programming all kinds of crazy stuff.

Example: you walk onto a reader-enabled surface, it triggers a camera that takes your picture, which gets posted straight to your Flickr account. More madness in Hampus' demo video.

…and an NFC chip in your phone

According to Business Insider, Apple is planning to integrate NFC chips in the next generation of iPhones and iPads. Which means that it may become possible to start making payments with your iPhone by simply touching the device onto a reader.
 

Collective action is easier

Whether it's reacting to rude Tube workers or getting rid of despots, social media has made collective action ever easier. In a very good article by Alex Howard an interesting bit of research is mentioned:

A survey released this week by the Pew Research Center's Internet and Life Project shed light on the social side of the Internet. The results offered insight into the differences between the connected and the disconnected, revealing that Internet users are more likely to be active participants, with some 80 percent of Internet users participating in groups, compared with 56 percent of non-Internet users.
 

The future of DIY digital publishing

Jeff Jarvis tweeted this week that Paulo Coelho didn't do any interviews to promote his new book, but instead only used Facebook and Twitter. With great success.

Going one step further is journalist and sci-fi author Cory Doctorow. In this talk at the Picnic conference in Amsterdam, he explains how he's published his new collection of short stories independently.

A nice teaser quote: As hard as it is to monetize fame, it's harder to monetize obscurity. 

Kinect – virtual identity not as a login

Our favourite games guy, Tom Chatfield, has unwrapped a Kinect. What struck him is the impact on digital identity and how the Kinect gives us a glimpse of our virtual selfs in quite a new sense.

It’s impossible not to experience an intense and rapid identification with that outline of your own body moving in synch on screen. And you can add to this the minor miracle of facial and bodily recognition. You step in front of the camera and wave, and a machine is no longer simply being controlled by “a user”; it’s being controlled by you, and specifically by you as defined by the same things that make you “you” in other most people’s eyes: your body and face and movements.
 

Creative of the week – The glitch-art of stAllio!

Forget Photoshop. Be creative with technology. stAllio! creates art by manipulating the data structure of photos to create some intriguing imagery. Read More >>

And not to be ignored

Exciting because there are lots of opportunities to explore the role of new media in this oh-so-old-school industry and to redefine the nature of story-telling.

Scary, because possibly the greatest threat is the fact that it is getting easier and easier for authors to cut-out the middle-man altogether and tell their stories all by themselves. Whenever and however they want to.

A great example of that is Twitterdawn by renowned South African author and musician Koos Kombuis. Twitterdawn is effectively a Twitter novel. It is written in short updates of 140 characters each, published on Kombuis’ Twitter account. We’re not sure whether Kombuis writes it as he goes along or whether it’s pre-written and he publishes it over a certain period of time, but it feels like the former.

It’s not the first time people experiment with the short format. Small Places was written on Twitter over the span of 2 years. And already back in 2007, five of the top ten bestselling novels in Japan were written as cell-phone novels.

But the nice thing is that Kombuis’ ‘book’ (sounds strange, no?) is about Twitter and Social Media. As he calls it in Tweet 2, it’s “An urban fantasy about what may become of social media in the distant future”. A sort of meta-twovel. And Kombuis uses his own personal Twitter account, on which he’s very active, to publish his short bursts (with the hashtag #Twitterdawn). It may seem a small detail, but it makes the updates seem very personal and part of his life.

The problem with that is that it’s not particularly easy to trawl through Kombuis’ feed and read the relevant parts. And you can’t just search for the Twitterdawn hashtag; Twitter doesn’t store Tweets very long for search purposes.

So we decided to work our way through his personal timeline and use curated.by to curate the novel into the below feed.

One day, when we find some time, we’ll try and automate it and even auto-publish it in a chronological way, but for now we’ll update it as and when Kombuis adds to the story.

Did you know…

That Brazil has 10 million more internet users than India? But that it still has less than a 5th of the internet users of China?

Or that the US has 136 million 3G users at a penetration of 48%, the UK has 29 million 3G users and a 38% penetration rate, while China has 14 million at 2%?

Or how about the fact that the iPhone, iTouch and iPad platform has sold 120 million units world-wide in its first 12 quarters. For comparison: Netscape Navigator, the web's first mainstream browser achieved 32 million downloads in the same period during the first years of the web.

Or that by 2012, smart phones will outsell desktops and laptops together. Laptops will sell almost double the amount of desktops.

Or that in the US time spent on print is a mere 12% of time spent on all media, yet it still gets 26% of all advertising. Time spent on the internet stands at 28%, while ad revenue spent on the net is only 13%.

All this and much more come from an informative report by Morgan Stanley.

Social browsing

For some young demographics social browsing has completely over taken other forms of casual browsing. In other words users sit for hours imbibing the status updates of Friends in the News Feed.

Will this bother Google? Probably not, because people normally use their site with the intent to search. Or will it?
 

PageRank and EdgeRank

Most marketeers have familarised themselves by now with how Google ranks pages (PageRank). But very few have an understanding of how Facebook Ranks content in the News Feed. Behind that link is a primer .
 

Digital publishing pays better for authors

By 2015 eBook sales will top $3 billion according to PaidContent.Org. And says the Indie, the margins publishers will get for these sales will be lower, while authors will get more.
 

The real barriers for marketers in the UK in terms of investment in social media

The Internet Advertising bereau (IAB) has conducted an open-ended, anonymous survey with around 50 ISBA members. And the results make for an interesting read.

In terms of general usage, the most popular use of social media amongst ISBA members was found to be:

- As a PR tool to reach bloggers and online influencers (69%);
- To extend brand websites via social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter (63%);
- Over half (52%) were using social media as a research tool to find out what people are saying about their product or service;

This would suggest that few brands are ready to follow the Old Spice route to social media glory.

The main challenges for using socia media were:
1. Monitoring and control
2. Measurement and ROI
3. Policy and regulation
4. Social media strategy
5. Where social media sits within organisations
 

Getting sentimental

Sentiment analysis is a holy grail for marketing folk. The idea? Monitor a brand and see how positive and negative sentiments fluctuate depending on events. But this well-argued and considered post by Tim Whitlock points out that the technology is still not up to the task.
 

Creative of the week – Han Hoogerbrugge

Sure. We're biased because we've worked with him before. But Dutch animator-slash-webartist Han Hoogerbrugge makes us laugh every time we see one of his creations. Read more >>

Perhaps not entirely scientific, but probably more or less bang on. Ross Dawson made this provocative map charting the extinction of newspapers in various countries.

Britain’s papers face the chop in 2019, only second to the USA who will be paperless in 2017. But France’s rags will only face the music in 2029 and metro South Africa only in 2037. The reason for the difference? Things like the increased cost performance of mobile phones, development of high performance digital paper, changes in print production costs, trends in advertising spend and allocation.

Go direct to your audience

It is of course not just newspaper publishing that is undergoing a massive structural change. In a fantastic in-depth article The Media Briefing makes a number of good points. Publishing is concurrently dying a slow death, and exploding in growth. They quote Clay Shirky who said:

“When a 14-year-old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.”

And they give some good advice:

So, a major opportunity, or rather necessity, for publishers is to jump the supply chain and build direct-to-consumer relationships. The vertical systems of the past have left many publishers devoid of actual consumer contact, and in a world where consumers are identifiable, trackable, transparent, and easily accessible, publishers must build those relationships. It might sound soft, but relationship is the right word: long-term, stable consumer relationships where the publisher consistently provides value to the end-user is the only form of competitive advantage. This means that you already have the audience before you even make the book, or album, or magazines.

It sounds like they are talking of RAAK’s Social Media Ready program!

Facebook, Facebook and more Facebook

It was reported this week that 1 in 6 pageviews in the UK is now a Facebook pageview.

And judging by the numbers of new features Facebook is developing, that number won’t go down any time soon. Last night they announced Facebook Deals, a service that allows businesses to create specials, which they can give to customers when they check into their venues.

Inside the Facebook user’s head

Another Facebook related study explored why consumers “Like” and follow brands on Facebook. Nearly 40% of Consumers “Like” Companies on Facebook to publicly display their brand affiliation to friends – so called social badging. But the biggest reason – by a small margin – is to get discounts and promotions.

Another study reported that the best time to find people on Facebook are weekdays at 11:00 a.m., 3:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m.

Domino’s on the money

We’ve written before about how Domino’s has raised profits through the use of Social Media. In the interview they gave us, they mentioned they’ll keep on looking for new ways to engage with their customer.

And sure thing, this week they launched a Farmville-style game that lets you collects points and turn those points into actual product vouchers.

Are you influencer enough to get Klout Perks?

Our favourite influencer measurement tool Klout is dipping their toes into the world of big brands. They’re hooking up with the likes of Disney and Virgin to hand out freebies to people with a high enough Klout score.

Checking-in in Brighton

This Saturday is Foursquare Day in Brighton. The city council has teamed up with the location service to generate awareness of its library services. Given the recent budget cuts, this is a commendable move. Especially as their plan seems to make it more than a gimmick. According to their head of communications:

We hope to go on from this experiment to build location-based services into all our locations whether they are swimming pools, libraries, gyms or events. In fact, we want to embed social media into all our services.

She’s a Blogger and she’s looking good

The fashion industry has been pretty fast to catch on to the influencing power of bloggers. Wessel wrote a splendid overview on which brand is doing what and how can you avoid making mistakes.

Tomorrow we’ll be able to add another cool project to this list. We’ve helped Guided Collective to develop TakeOnTed, a project for Ted Baker where selected bloggers will be live styling some Ted Baker models by only using Twitter. Live, from 18:00 GMT.

Texting is dear

Texting is more expensive than inkjet printing by a factor of 20! In fact a British scientist calculated that texting costs about $749 to send just one megabyte. This makes texting 4 times more expensive than sending data from the Hubble telescope. It would cost you $18,000 to transfer a song via SMS to your iPod.

So what then is the point of text messaging? There is no let up in the millions of SMS messages that are being sent worldwide. Despite its inordinate cost, people love communicating with people they know. That’s why the Reuters of Humanity is Facebook and has 500 million users and counting. That’s the power of social media.

Monetize

Oh shucks, it’s almost the end of our newsletter and we have not said enough about our darling Twitter. Fear not dear RAAKonteur reader.

Twitter’s finally rolling out ads in the timeline. Read this Techcrunch post for more on that. Oh, and Promoted Tweets are now appearing in Google Search too.

Creatives of the week – Chris Milk & Aaron Koblin

Milk & Koblin are the people behind The Johnny Cash Project. But really, we should also credit the 250,000 participants that contributed drawings to this crowdsourced music video slash art project. Read more >>