Posts tagged Shaping
With 3 Stellar Keynotes, SES London 2013 Is Shaping Up
Jan 31st
The final conference agenda for SES London 2013, which has just been updated, features three keynote speakers who tackle the latest trends and challenges facing the online marketing industry, 36 sessions on hot topics, and 72 expert speakers.
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With 3 ‘Kick-Ass’ Keynotes, SES London 2013 Is Shaping Up
Jan 31st
The final conference agenda for SES London 2013, which has just been updated, features three keynote speakers who tackle the latest trends and challenges facing the online marketing industry, 36 sessions on hot topics, and 72 expert speakers.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
5 Trends Shaping SEO & Content Marketing in 2013
Dec 28th
The Mayan calendar ended this month. Contrary to the “predictions,” it wasn’t the end of the world, just the end of Mayan content. To avoid having your company come up short on content, let’s look at the history of web content and trends for 2013.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
From Google to Comcast, Tech Giants Are Shaping Your Home’s Smart Future
Apr 3rd
If you think the Internet has changed your day-to-day life, just wait. That massive, glorious network of information that we now connect to from laptops and handheld devices is getting weaved ever more thoroughly into our lives.
At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, connected cars and TV sets were all the rage. That’s just the beginning. Increasingly, everyday appliances and objects are adding Internet connectivity, opening up a world of new possibilities and further altering how we live our lives.
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One major culmination of these trends is the smart home. We’ve been hearing futuristic-sounding predictions about them for years, but they’re now poised to become an easily achievable reality. Home automation products available today deal mostly with energy management and security. Yet it’s not just the utility companies and traditional home security players that are making moves in this space. Familiar names in big tech are claiming their positions in this market while it’s still emerging.
The Hyper-Connected Smart Home of the Future
So what will smart homes look like? Right now, the focus is on managing energy usage and ensuring our homes are safe from intruders and natural disasters. Inexpensive cameras connected to the cloud serve as modern-day surveillance systems for the home, while wireless lighting and Wi-Fi-connected thermostats help households better manage the energy they use.
Not content to rely on its legacy business model indefinitely, cable giant Comcast has been aggressively making moves in the smart home space. Its Xfinity Home offering runs the gamut from cloud-connected video monitoring and remote security system management to an iPhone-controlled thermostat. Everything from security cameras to household lighting can be controlled from a centralized touchscreen interface or from any Internet-connected computer or iPhone. Last month, the company partnered with a firm called EcoFactor to provide better climate-control features, including the ability for the system to learn temperature patterns in a given house and make adjustments accordingly.
Comcast isn’t the only telecommunications giant aiming to connect the home of the future. Last year, Verizon unveiled its own smart home offering, which focuses on remote home monitoring and energy-use management. It’s an offering not unlike the one created by Control4, a vendor that works closely with Cisco on its smart home initiatives.
In late 2012, AT&T acquired Xanboo, a startup that specializes in home automation technology. At about the same time, Motorola bought 4Home, another smart home startup that may well find itself integrated with Google’s future offerings in this space.
Open Sourcing Your House: Enter the Developers
Last year at Google I/O, the search giant announced Android@Home, a framework that will aim to bring the Android OS and Internet connectivity to a range of household devices and appliances. Like Android itself, this new initiative is open to developers, who can use Google’s APIs and protocols to build new functionality into smart homes.
Some of what Google previewed centered around home entertainment, which will be a key component of the smart home revolution. Microsoft is already leading the charge in this space with the ever-evolving XBox 360 and Kinect. As if the Kinect’s motion-controlled user input for video games wasn’t cool enough, the hacks cobbled together by developers everywhere have begun to show off the device’s true potential, which we suspect will go beyond the living room and have implications throughout the home.
Like the Kinect, Apple’s Siri voice control feature has been hacked by developers and applied to scenarios that go well beyond what Apple originally intended. Many speculate about the inclusion of Siri on the company’s rumored HDTV set, but it doesn’t matter. Siri can already control the Plex media center platform, not to mention adjust Wi-Fi-connected thermostats, home lighting and curtains. Officially, Siri is only available on the iPhone 4S. In the future, we’d be surprised if the technology didn’t find its way into a variety devices, as developers have already begun to prove is possible.
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How Mobile, Social & Trust Are Shaping Local Search Usage [Study]
Feb 29th
Online local listings are the most trusted and relevant results to access local business information, especially as consumers are adopting new technologies, applications and social networks, according to a new study from comScore and Localeze.
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How Developers Are Shaping the Future of Music
Feb 14th
That the music industry has radically changed in the last decade is a serious understatement, if not too cliche to mention. Technology has altered everything from the creation and distribution of recorded music, upending retailers, studios and business models across the industry. But it’s not all bad news. Music isn’t dying so much as evolving, and the landscape is already beginning to look quite different.
Not long ago, the professional music industry involved a complex but fixed set of players: artists, labels, managers, promoters and the like. Many of these roles have changed, but none have disappeared. They’re joined by a new set of participants: tech giants, streaming services, social music startups and, perhaps most crucially, developers.
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Every stakeholder in this new (and still emerging) digital music ecosystem plays their own important role in the creation and consumption of music. But it’s this new contingent of hackers and developers that appear poised to have the biggest impact on what music will look like in the future.
This weekend, coders and industry representatives gathered in San Francisco for Music Hack Day, a tradition that has spanned continents for the last four years. Like other hack days and hackathons, the event is dedicated to bringing developers together to build new things using the latest technologies and platforms. In this case, the focus is on music, so the toolkit includes everything from mobile hardware and homemade digital instruments to open Web standards and the APIs of services like SoundCloud, Last.fm, Spotify and the Echo Nest.
Noteworthy hacks conjured up in the past have included various software mashups between services, as well as things like invisible, interactive instruments that can be played in the air or on a surface. Some hacks are strictly Web or software-based, while others involve some tinkering with hardware, including LED lights, Nintendo Wii controllers and Kinects.
The most recent Music Hack Day spawned a total of 62 hacks. The list included a music search engine that queries multiple streaming services, as well as a Theramin made from two iPhones. One app succeeded in predicting Sunday’s Grammy winners almost as effectively as Billboard did.
Some creations were simpler, such as a Spotify-based clone of the classic MP3 player WinAmp, a mash-up between iTunes and the Echo Nest’s recommendation engine and a SoundCloud plugin for WordPress.
The hacks ranged from the mind-blowing to the simplistic but useful. They dealt with everything from the creation of music to its distribution and promotion.
How Music Hack Day Helps the Music Industry Evolve
Music Hack Day was started in 2008 and hasn’t stopped growing since. In the tradition of other hacking events, SoundCloud VP of Business Development David Haynes teamed up with experienced hack day organizer James Darling to create a music-specific event. The proliferation of APIs from various music-related platforms plus some of the other disruption going on in the music industry made the space ripe for some creative hacking.
“Weren’t sure what to expect from it at first,” said SoundCloud cofounder and CTO Eric Wahlforss. “It got off to such a good start that’s now become sort of a tradition for the last few years. Music Hack Day is a big part of our culture.”
For startups like SoundCloud, events like Music Hack Day yield creations that could one day find themselves integrated with the company’s core product. The vast majority, however, will not. And that’s okay. The event’s value is of a much deeper nature, in that it fosters a developer community around music and brings a wide range of players into the same, from independent coders to music industry representatives.
A side effect of this type of collaboration is that the entire industry is creeping forward. A few years ago, Wahlforss told us, some record labels had no idea what an API was or how it was relevant to their business. Today, EMI has an API of their own. They, along with Universal Music Group, participate in Music Hack Day and are curious about much of the fruit it bears.
“If you speak to the labels today, they’re all about API’s and mashability of their content,” Wahlforss said. “They’re very on board with this trend, which is very exciting to see.”
For SoundCloud, this spirit of hacking is something that plays a prominent role in the culture of the company and its growing team of developers. Modeled after Google’s “20% time,” the company encourages employees to use what it calls Hacker Time to experiment and build new things that may or may have any direct bearing on the official product strategy for SoundCloud.
The company also recently hired its first developer evangelist and is silently preparing a major announcement about its platform.
Pushing Music into the Future
SoundCloud isn’t the only company pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in online music. Innovation is all over the place, from Spotify’s new third party app platform to the long and growing list of apps powered by the APIs from services like The Echo Nest, Last.fm, Bandcamp and several dozen others.
The open architecture of the Web, the proliferation of APIs and hacker culture have already made a notable mark on how people create, discover and share music, yet all of this is still very much in its earliest stages.
Twenty years from now, things will look even more different. The industry and ecosystem will move forward together, probably with a few players becoming obsolete along the way. Artists and sound engineers may lead the creative charge, but if what emerges looks and works radically different from what we have today, we’ll have developers to thank as well.
Music Hack Day Photo by Thomas Bonte
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How Niche Social Media Sites Are Shaping Online Communication
Feb 22nd
Sure, everyone has heard of Facebook and Twitter, but what about Feed the Bull or Tweako? Yes, you can talk about sports on your old college roommate’s Facebook wall, but what about squaring off with strangers on YardBarker or BallHype? These types of niche social networking sites are what the…
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3 Analyst Firms on the Trends Shaping the Future of IT
Nov 23rd
As we said last week, it’s prediction season. We’ve kicked off our own trends to watch series, but we also wanted to check in with what the analyst firms are saying. Forrester, Gartner and ZapThink have all published their own trend watch-lists. Common themes include cloud computing, mobility and analytics.
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Forrester
Forrester identified 15 trends, broken down into five categories in its The Top 15 Technology Trends Enterprise Architects Should Watch: 2011 To 2013 report. The firm used the criteria “impact, newness, and complexity” to determine its list:
“Empowered” Technologies:
- SaaS and cloud-based platforms become standard
- Collaboration platforms become people-centric
- Customer community platforms integrate with business apps
- Apps and business processes go mobile on powerful devices and faster networks
- Telepresence gains widespread use
Process-Centric Data and Intelligence:
- Next-gen BI takes shape combining real-time access with pervasiveness, agility, and self-service
- Analytics target text and social networks
- IaaS finds a broader audience
- Master data management matures
Agile and Fit-to-Purpose Applications
- Business rules processing and policy-based SOA move to the mainstream
- BPM will be Web-2.0-enabled
- Event-driven patterns demand attention
Smart Technology Management
- System management enables continued virtualization
- IT embraces planning and analysis tools to manage the future
- Client virtualization is ubiquitous
Gartner
Gartner has a much shorter list, looking at only four high-level trends, without any reference to time frame. Four Converging Trends That Will Change the Face of IT and Business:
- Cloud
- Business impact of social computing
- Context Aware Computing
- Pattern Based Strategy
ZapThink
ZapThink rounds out the analysis with its five supertrends of the next decade:
- Location independence
- Global Cubicle
- Democratization of technology
- Deep interoperability
- Complex Systems Engineering
Adding it Up
Looking over all of this, I think we can find some common themes and boil it all down to five points:
- Location independence, mobility and remote work
- Cloud computing
- Standards and interoperability
- Patterns and analytics
- Collaboration
What’s Missing
The trends listed here are conservative to the point of obviousness, which is fine – these really are the important trends for IT managers to be looking into. But is there anything else out there that’s staring us all in the face but hasn’t been mentioned yet?
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Catching-up with Evolution: Shaping the Next Generation of Digital Marketing
Jun 17th
The evolution of search and social, and more broadly the interaction of the public at large with the internet and the available media online, is naturally of huge interest to all those that offers services in the industry.
As search engines continue to evolve and social media stretches its own boundaries, this set-up really tests the agility of a companies offering. I’m predominantly working with clients, who are looking to harness their assets for greater visibility online, and maintain and develop channels that work commercially with them as a brand.
Now my title makes me an SEO specialist but in all honesty, I keep on thinking that the remit of ‘search engine optimisation’ is really being tested – especially as there is far too much cross-over with other channels…maybe something along the lines of an organic visibility specialist / earned media specialist would be a better way of describing what we do as SEO’s? The future of SEO in my mind, given whatever budget, needs to promote access to the optimisation of all media and marketing channels for organic visibility…and shouldn’t be restricted to only websites and link-building.
This means that not only do each and every company out there create a huge competitive advantage in developing an agile culture and digital business model, but so too do the agencies that support them. That should be a given but in all honesty, I really don’t think it is where it should be. Are agencies struggling to keep up with all the changes that are occurring in the marketplace and the technologies and marketing opportunities at large? Maybe, but I really think it needn’t be this way. A solid grounding in training and development to encourage inquisitive and analytical thinking, and the subsequent support and promotion of a culture where the understanding of these opportunities should be held at the heart of every team wit ha long-term agenda in this sector.
I’ve been lucky enough to have had exposure to a wide range of SEO practice and strategies from around the UK and abroad, and I think that agility needs to be made into a much greater priority. When was the last time your documentation, processes, ‘best practice guides’, reports, training and overall approach to SEO was revised to reflect the changes? Every month or each year? Maybe this could be an on-going process, whereby your team lives and breathes the development of better opportunities? Old school management would put this sort of thinking down as the continuous improvement process, or Kaizen.
Without this sort of thinking, your team is going to be immediately on catch-up, and I know from speaking with many SEO’s in the UK that a number of specialist agencies are certainly not allowing their staff to generate this value – not only doing an awful thing by their staff, but also degrading the reputation of the industry. And I for one don’t want the reputation for driving exceptional CPA’s, innovative ideas and resounding outputs to be lost to those with crumby management of their staff without any thought for the sector at large, the company’s reputation or the people that work for them.
Market changes to tested ideas to genuine opportunities
This isn’t meant to be a post saying that my SEO is better than their SEO, but simply to prompt you, as the reader, to answer the question: what are you doing for your team to promote the creation of ideas, the diligent testing of those ideas in order to develop their commercial proposition, and the presentation of those ideas as a genuine opportunity for the brand that you are working for online? A big question, but a VERY important one!
How is this being nurtured within your team, your company and the industry at large? Is it simply through reading case studies online, or are you creating your own case studies, your own ideas frm multiple channels in a much more proactive, fluid and expansive way?
The link-building team at MEC frequently astonish me with their ideas in creating new opportunities that have the direct or indirect result of building links, not simply recycling other people’s ideas – something I absolutely love to see – genuine ingenuity in the SEO industry. It reminds me every day that it’s the best sector to work in! How can we all encourage this development of testing, doing and promoting of how we work as specialists in the industry?
Evolving digital media from within
The evolution of search and social is vast, but just think of where it has come from: banner impressions to targeted, interactive display, paid search, SEO, social media optimisation, online PR, to ever-maturing channels such as usability, conversion rate optimisation, forms of semantic search, personalisation, integrated marketing planning and implementation, re-targeting, eCRM, optimisation of multiple offline media channels…truly amazing – there’s so much out there to inform what we will be doing in months and years to come.
As such, the shaping of marketing in the digital arena is going to come in so many different forms as each company interprets these opportunities in their own way, but this is only going to come from within. This unique approach isn’t not necessarily a bad thing, though – it’s more important to encourage and celebrate this change and innovation after all, as long as those that are driving this innovation are developing these opportunities with an eye on the commercial value that they are going to serve – not simply to flog a poorly tested, planned and implemented ‘opportunity’.
I hope that those now entering this field are entering because they are energised by the opportunity that exist, and that companies that employ these folk nurture this energy in a way that shapes the next generation of digital marketers and the industry itself – in this ultra fast-paced, exhilarating and truly challenging environment to work in, it’s worth thinking about this today. So, I’ll put that question to you again: what are you doing to nurture your team’s talent and create new value for the brands that you work with?
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Catching-up with Evolution: Shaping the Next Generation of Digital Marketing
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