Ten technology tips for 2010
As the year draws to a close we’ve dusted off our crystal ball and peered into the next 12 months. Predicting the future in technology is a notoriously perilous activity, but here goes anyway:
- Brands work out Twitter – it’s taken off big time in 2009; 2010 will be the year brands begin to figure out how to use it. Look out for more integration of Twitter feeds into other applications (for example, 3Sixty's Twitmas Tree linking in to Facebook).
- CMS meets data analytics – Content Management Systems will get smarter, allowing for tailoring of content based on user behaviour and easier testing of different designs and copy. Look out for Sitecore’s Online Marketing Suite (OMS).
- Mobile meets social media – smartphones such as the iPhone and the Palm Pre will offer more apps for social media sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Carrying your network in your pocket will open up great opportunities for useful geo-based tools, such as finding out who in your network is close by when you’re on a business trip.
- Applications and content get HyperLocal – the government is promising to open up more of its vast data resources. This raises the prospect of lots more applications and content based on location. The post code newspaper is one example that’s already out there.
- Apple changes the game, again – the tablet PC never really took off, but we have a sneaky feeling that Apple’s iTablet, due out in the second half of 2010, will do for this corner of the market what the iPhone has done for mobile.
- Crowd-sourced direction for brands – crowdsourcing has been used by The Guardian to help its investigation of the MPs' expenses scandal. We think that more brands will start to use the collective wisdom of the web to help develop and improve their products.
- Augmented reality goes mainstream – it all sounds very ‘Terminator’, but we think that the development of augmented reality applications integrated with GPS enabled smartphones will begin to take off in 2010.
- Your mobile becomes your credit card – mobile phone users in Asia have been making payments using their phones for sometime. Surely it’s only a matter of time before the UK catches up and we can ditch all those bits of plastic in our wallets. 2010 could be the year?
- Brands harness the power of cloud computing - the computing power and bandwidth provided by cloud computing means that even small organisations can deploy rich applications and content.
- Content gets further decentralised – rather than trying to host all content on one server, the trend for websites to be an amalgamation of videos from YouTube, photos from Flickr, RSS feeds, maps from Google etc will continue apace in 2010 (thanks to Joe at our friends cxpartners for this one).
None of us are strangers to the advances in digital capabilities. This year has seen the launch of its fair share and as you can see, next year will only offer us more opportunity to communicate with consumers.
Despite all this, our ethos at 3Sixty remains the same: keep things simple!
Simple, smart and effective digital marketing returns far greater results than the over-use of technology. As the iPhone and its 'apps' become dinner party conversations and the technology we use to communicate gets even smaller, so simple will continue to work best.
Have a great Christmas!
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