What’s happened this week:.
- Facebook have begun to test a consumer pay to post scheme as another potential revenue source, if it succeeds it will be another example of the emerging ‘branded consumer’.
- Google+ for iOS re-launched with a very distinctive look and feel.
- Bing has reinvented itself around social search with a specialist set of results. ‘What your friends may know’ is taken from our ever expanding social graph.
What we have learned:
- US consumers now spend more time on Facebook Mobile than on the main website, a sign of the fundamental shift to mobile happening all over the world.
- Smartphones are tracking to be the fastest adopted technology of all time.
- The Mobile industry is set to be worth USD 1.5trn this year over 2% of Global GDP.
Cool stuff:
- A sign of the emerging Internet of things, a milk jug that texts you when you are low on milk.
- Clothes Horse is a new suite of tools to link personal body data to retailer stock and style information to create a more streamlined and curated service.
- New tools to increase Facebook engagement such as the edge rank checker. Increasingly important in the ever growing eco-system of Facebook apps.
Where to find more:
- The re-invention of TV, NDS have an interesting vision for the future of our TV sets; modular and passively obedient.
- *Angel investor Roger McNamee believes that we are on the verge of a new phase of the Internet disruption where content will be far easier to monetize (primarily due to html5 driving intelligent ad models).
- Susan Greenfield believes that mobile is changing the way that we think as it increasingly becomes the focus of our domestic lives, something akin to the piano in the Victorian era.
