Archive for December, 2011
Dec 29 11
Trendwatching – 2012
With the end of 2011 coming up, a lot of blogs and sites out there are evaluating the past year and making predictions for the next. Lance Ulanoff at Mashable.com has shared the five tech trends he thinks will break big in 2012. Here’s an abbreviated description of them:
- Augmented Reality: Ulanoff predicts that, at the end of 2012, it will be difficult to find anyone who hasn’t used AR-technology at least once.
- The Micro-Payment Economy: More and more people (and companies) will capitalize on the fact that it’s now easy to sell your own products online, without complicated business models or advanced software.
- The Rise of the UltraBook: As notebooks are getting thinner and tablets are packing more and more processing power, these two will meet in the shape of an “UltraBook” – a device with all the utility of a laptop, but with the sleek design and good looks of a tablet.
- Social/Digital Exhaustion: Although far from prophecizing the death of social media, Ulanoff predicts that the public in general will reevaluate their social media presence, and how the modern digital lifestyle affects both private and professional aspects of life. What the results of this will be remains to be seen…
- Mobile Chip Wars: As a result of mobile devices becoming increasingly popular, tech companies will be battling each other in order to develop next generation’s micro processors.
Read the full article here.
Dec 14 11
Select your seatmate via Social Media
Mashable reports that passengers flying with KLM Airlines might soon be able to pick their seat partner based on Facebook and LinkedIn profiles and -preferences. See the video below for a more comprehensive explanation.
It will be interesting to see how this initiative falls out; maybe in the future, seat partners are automatically matched according to Klout score..?
Twitter recently released some statistics from 2011, regarding the number of tweets per second. Some of the events that generated the most tweets per second were:
- Japanese earthquake and tsunami (March): 5 530 tweets/second
- End of FIFA Women’s World Cup (July): 7 196 tweets/second
- MTV Video Music Awards (August): 8 868 tweets/second
Notably, Steve Jobs’ resignation from Apple generated more tweets per second than his actual passing away…
For the full list of topics, go here.
Dec 2 11
YouTube becomes NewTube
YouTube has now publicly launched their new and improved site design. Apart from mimicking Google’s visual profile to a larger extent, channels are given a much more central role. YouTube now identify themselves as the digital and web based counterpart of cable TV, and in the same way that you zap between channels on your TV, you’ll be zapping around YouTube channels.
An example of new features is that it’s now easier to post YouTube content directly to Facebook and Twitter.