Boomers -- Yes, Boomers -- Spend the Most on Tech

Nice piece from Adage revealing the real age of the technophiles amongst us

Due to Broad Demographic Grouping Problems, Biggest Misconception About Group Is That They're All the Same

by Beth Snyder Bulik
Published: October 11, 2010

YORK, Pa. (AdAge.com) -- Marilynn Mobley has a desktop at work, a laptop at home, a netbook for travel, an Android smartphone and just last week she bought an iPad. She time shifts all her TV viewing using DVRs and enjoys watching Blu-ray movies at home. She's also 63 years old.

Tech Use

"The misconception that boomers do not appreciate tech crosses all generations. I've heard it from fellow baby boomers who say, 'Wow, you're so into technology,' and on down to 20-year-olds who are also surprised," said Ms. Mobley, a strategic counselor for Edelman in its Boomer Insights Generation Group.

However, she's not nearly as unusual as the media portrays. Boomers are almost as likely as Gen X and Gen Y to own computers, access the internet daily, own mobile phones, DVRs, digital cameras and GPS systems. And while boomers do trail in areas such as early adoption of new devices and services, many of those generation gaps are closing.

"It's actually a myth that baby boomers aren't into technology. They represent 25% of the population, but they consume 40% [in total dollars spent] of it," said Patricia McDonough, senior VP-analysis at Nielsen Co.

In fact, spending on technology is one area where boomers are ahead of their younger counterparts. The 46- to 64-year-old group now spends more money on technology than any other demographic, according to Forrester Research's annual benchmark tech study. That includes monthly telecom fees, gadget and device spending, and overall online purchases. They averaged around $650 spent in online shopping vs. Gen X ($581) and Gen Y ($429) over a three-month period.

And adoption rates of the tech areas where they do lag are soaring. In 2000, baby boomers made up 28% of the internet population and accounted for just 24% of the traffic on a typical day, according to Pew Internet & American Life Project data. But by 2010, those percentages had climbed to 34% of the internet population and 32% of all traffic. Ten years ago, only a quarter of boomers went online every day; in 2010 that number jumped to 70%.

Among 50- to 64-year-olds, social-media usage grew by 88% from April 2009 to May 2010, up from 25% to 47% of all users in that age group, according to Pew Internet. And one in five of them now use social media every day, up from one in 10 last year.

Along with the timeless youth platitude that "old people just don't get it," the misconceptions about boomers and technology incompetence may also be a demographic grouping problem.

The age range in many market-research surveys and studies, for instance, often puts the oldest demographic group at 50 and older. However, Robert DiLallo, director of Grandparent Marketing Group, New York, said that designation is too broad.

"People who are 65 and older were at the tail end of their careers when the real tech revolution began and did not get introduced to the internet that way," he said. "I'm 60 years old, but I'm no more like a 70-year-old in my tech use than I am an 18-year-old."

THE FACE OF TECH CONSUMPTION: Edelman strategic counselor Marilynn Mobley

Forrester's research, for instance, found that among seniors ages 66 and older only 67% owned cellphones. However, 84% of young boomers ages 45 to 54 and 80% of older boomers ages 55 to 64 owned cellphones.

Boomers also use their phones for more than calling, vs. seniors. According to Deloitte's annual media research, 66% of boomers send text messages, trailing Gen X-ers at 80% and millennials at 88%, but way ahead of the 28% of matures (64-plus) who text. Another 37% of boomers have accessed the internet by phone, just behind Gen X at 42% and millennials at 55%, but again ahead of matures at 20%.

Grandparent Marketing Group research notes that the boomer generation and millennials are strikingly similar demographic groups. Both number around 80 million and both grew up in some of the U.S.'s most prosperous eras ('50s/'60s and the '90s).

So it should be no surprise that boomers' internet behavior is more similar to millennials, according to Pew research. Both groups overwhelmingly use email (91% of boomers/94% of millennials), search engines (88%/89%), research health information (78%/85%), get news (74%/83%) and check out online ratings (30%/31%).

The key for marketers to reach boomers is not to dismiss technology as irrelevant to them, but rather to figure out what technology they prefer.

"Which platforms resonate with which demographic?" said Ed Moran, Deloitte director of insights and innovation. "Take gaming for example. For male mature users aged 60 to 75, the PC is the preferred platform, while for the under-15 age group, it's consoles or the iPhone."

Ms. Mobley concurred: "I think the biggest difference in the way boomers use technology vs. the younger generations is that we tend to see it as a way to get something done -- whether that's something at work or staying in touch with friends and family. Gen X and especially Gen Y just see it as a part of life."

Who's Innovating in 2009? Finovate Preview

Thanks Netbanker for this preview of some of the year's financial innovators

By Jim Bruene on September 1, 2009 6:18 PM | Comments (3)

I've participated in dozens of online banking and technology conferences over the years, first as a banker, then as an analyst, and now as the host. Each time, I try to walk away with not only specific action items, but with overall themes that will drive product development over the next few years.

With 32 new products and services being unveiled next month at our Finovate Conference (see note 1) and with planning season just around the corner, I thought it would be a good time to review the themes taking shape this fall:

• Control: More and more tools are being invented to help consumers and small businesses take better control of their finances, both on the credit and deposit side. The tools vary from very focused tools to manage health care expenses or 401(k) allocations, to broad tools that manage the big picture. This trend is expected to continue well into the next decade.
• Mobility: Most simple financial management tasks, such as checking balances, authorizing purchases, and so on will move to mobile devices. Another huge trend that will play out over the next 20 years.
• Peer-to-peer: You can't really cut out the middleman entirely in financial services; a trusted third-party is needed to authenticate both parties. However, the third-party may not always be a traditional financial institution.
• Safety & security: This one never goes out of style. But more so than usual, consumers are seeking safe havens for their savings and investments. And they expect more from their financial service providers. It will be a long time before risk-taking reaches levels seen much of the past 10 years.
• Segmentation (online): For the most part, online banking has been a one-size fits all service, since it came on the scene in the mid- to -late 1990s. That's not good enough going forward. There will be online, and mobile, services tailored for distinct segments. Initial efforts rolling out this year target youth markets, small- and micro-businesses, and savvy investors among others.

Guide to FINOVATE Companies
The following 30 companies (plus two more in stealth mode) will show their latest and greatest innovations in 7-minute demos at Finovate on Sep. 29 in NYC. Here's how our presenting companies describe themselves.

Backbase
Backbase enables organizations to leverage their understanding of valuable customer data into highly-personalized eBusiness Portals and Applications. Branding, content, applications, and tools can be targeted to customers using profile-based personalization. Guidance and expertise can be proactively offered based upon specific customer needs. Customers can even be empowered to tailor their own user experience based upon their individual preferences.

BancVue/First ROI
These successful sister companies provide innovative checking accounts backed by dynamic marketing, data driven consulting and powerful software to community banks and credit unions. BancVue and FIRST ROI aim to change the world of banking by launching a whole new product delivery model for consumer deposit accounts and community financial institutions.

Billeo
Billeo gives consumers a fast, easy and intelligent way to exercise choice and control over their online purchases and payments. Billeo functions as the catalyst to make online purchases and bill paying as easy and financially rewarding as possible. Billeo was founded by experts from the EBPP, card issuer, banking, ecommerce and technology industries.

BillShrink
BillShrink is an unbiased, free online service that saves people money by continuously updating personalized recommendations on everyday bills. BillShrink monitors millions of wireless plans, credit cards and gas prices across the country to provide an apples-to-apples comparison of the best options available on the market.

Bling Nation
Bling Nation brings mobile payments to consumers and merchant points of sale, offering lower costs, increased efficiency and improved security compared to credit cards, debit cards, checks and cash. The Bling Nation service also enables financial institutions and merchants to offer consumers robust rewards programs and real-time redemptions, promoting loyalty and convenience and supporting “shop local” initiatives.

BrightScope
BrightScope is an independent data analytics firm that quantitatively rates 401k plans and gives employers, employees, and brokers tools to enhance plan performance and maximize retirement outlook. The BrightScope Rating™ developed in partnership with leading independent 401k fiduciaries, reviews more than 200 unique data inputs per plan and calculates a single numerical score which defines 401k plan quality at the company level.

Canopy Financial
Canopy Financial provides innovative technology solutions that power the Consumer-Directed Healthcare (CDH) programs of some of the world's largest healthcare and financial institutions. Ranked #12 on the 2009 Inc. 500 list, Canopy empowers millions of consumers to take greater control of their healthcare dollars, enables price transparency for routine medical services, and increases the speed in which healthcare providers are paid.

CashEdge
CashEdge is the leader in Intelligent Money Movement™ services that enable financial institutions to engage customers in new ways. CashEdge's Intelligent Money Movement services provide a single point of access, through an online banking or mobile application, for multiple easy-to-use consumer and small business transfer routes.

Credit.com
Serving as an educator, advocate and facilitator, Credit.com empowers consumers with easy-to-understand information about money, credit, loans and more. Credit.com is partnered with trusted financial experts and select companies in order to offer online consumers insightful tips, helpful tools and excellent deals.

Fidelity National Information Services
Fidelity National Information Services, Inc., a member of the S&P 500 Index, is a leading provider of core processing for financial institutions; card issuer and transaction processing services; and outsourcing services to financial institutions and retailers. FIS has processing and technology relationships with 40 of the top 50 global banks, including nine of the top 10.

Firethorn (Qualcomm)
Firethorn, a Qualcomm company, is the crucial link in the emerging mobile commerce ecosystem. As a pioneer in mobile banking, Firethorn is transforming the traditional wallet into a streamlined, efficient and protected mobile revenue channel that will bridge relationships among financial institutions, retailers, wireless carriers and consumers.

Fiserv
Fiserv, Inc. is the leading global provider of information management and electronic commerce systems for the financial services industry, driving innovation that transforms experiences for financial institutions and their customers.

Home-Account
Home-Account is a web-based mortgage finding service helping America's 75 million homeowners take control of their largest asset-- their home via their ‘home-account’. The service grades and analyzes homeowners and their mortgages, presents scenarios to improve their financial situation and then pinpoints the best realistic mortgage options in the market.

Infosys
Infosys defines, designs and delivers IT-enabled business solutions that help Global 2000 companies win in a Flat World. These solutions focus on providing strategic differentiation and operational superiority to clients. With Infosys, clients are assured of a transparent business partner, world-class processes, speed of execution and the power to stretch their IT budget by leveraging the Global Delivery Model that Infosys pioneered.

Intuit
Intuit Inc. is a leading provider of business and financial management solutions for small and mid-sized businesses; financial institutions, including banks and credit unions; consumers and accounting professionals. Their financial institutions division, anchored by Digital Insight, provides on-demand banking services to help banks and credit unions serve businesses and consumers with innovative solutions.

iPay Technologies
iPay Technologies is the leading independent provider of Internet bill payment services. Founded in 2001, iPay develops and fully supports consumer and small business online bill pay solutions for more than 2,800 financial institutions nationwide and in Puerto Rico. iPay offers a 99.93% payment success rate with more than 1,200,000 bill pay customers, and over 4,000,000 payments processed each month.

Kapitall
Kapitall is a rich web application that makes investing easy for everyone. Inspired by game design, Kapitall combines an intuitive and engaging graphic user interface with powerful tools that make it easier than ever to research companies, build portfolios, share ideas and get smarter about the market.

MShift
MShift, Inc. provides Mobile Banking solutions that offer the widest array of features, including Bill Payment, Presentment, Transfers, Account Summaries, History, ATM locators, and much more. MShift also provides the only available Facebook Banking application – online banking directly tied into the Facebook environment. MShift’s Facebook banking application won the Online Banking Report’s “Best of the Web” award for 2007.

On Deck Capital
On Deck Capital offers fair and fast financing to small businesses that do not meet traditional bank lending criteria. The company's proprietary underwriting and loan processing platform looks deeper into the health of small businesses, focusing on the overall business performance, rather than the owner's personal credit history.

Outright.com
Outright.com is incredibly simple, online bookkeeping specifically created for the 20 million Americans who work for themselves. Outright offers a streamlined, online solution, with the bookkeeping needs of the small business owners first. Outright's goal is to keep financial records as simple as possible, helping small businesses accurately track all of their income and expenses to estimate and prepare their taxes. And yes, it works on a Mac too.

PayByMobile
PayByMobile is a virtual wallet that will let anyone text to pay when shopping online. Shoppers load money on their wallet at the same shops where they top up to buy airtime and then simply text to pay when shopping at their favorite online store. PayByMobile uses familiar prepaid mobile usability to deliver a simple yet secure online payment alternative for everyone who has a mobile phone.

People Capital
People Capital underwrites students without credit history by projecting individual income levels and ability to pay. Their Human Capital Score™ incorporates merit data such as GPA, standardized test scores, college and major to provide a true and unbiased, data-driven measure of economic value of an education. Their peer-to-peer lending platform allows students to finance their college educations through improved access to private student loans.

S1 Enterprise
More than 100 banks and three million consumer, small business, and corporate users worldwide rely on S1 Enterprise solutions to access and manage their financial information. A division of S1 Corporation, S1 Enterprise is a leading provider of integrated banking solutions that deliver financial service providers a holistic view of their customers whether online, in the branch or in the call center.

Silver Tail Systems
Silver Tail Systems provides next generation fraud prevention to protect against business logic abuse - a rising threat on application logic costing financial institutions hundreds of millions of dollars and significant loss of trust. Silver Tail products use real-time behavior analysis to detect and alert on known threats and new behaviors, then enables the business to disrupt these attacks in real-time.

SimpliFi
SimpliFi is a free online financial planning and advice service that lets anyone plan for their financial future. The company was founded in 2004 as a tenant company in Wake Forest University’s Babcock Demon Incubator. SimpliFi is headquartered in Winston-Salem, NC, and has been providing white label financial planning services to credit unions since 2005.

Skill-Life
Skill-Life, Inc. began as CentsCity, LLC in January 2007 with the goal of building financially healthy youth and communities. Their initial vision of employing online gaming to teach financial skills has evolved into a more interactive, game-based, and comprehensive resource for awarding incentives and building life skills.

SmartyPig
SmartyPig allows customers to open goal-based savings accounts and to invite their friends and family to contribute to their goals. The system is based on proprietary, patent-pending technology and the latest in security standards. SmartyPig’s U.S. banking partner is West Bank, a subsidiary of West Bancorporation, Inc. The company’s Australian banking partner is Australian New Zealand Banking Group Limited (ANZ).

Strands
moneyStrands is an innovative, easy-to-use online personal financial service that goes beyond providing financial analysis tools, with personalized money-saving advice and recommendations, and lets people anonymously compare themselves with people with similar backgrounds and financial goals. The interface is widget-based and highly customizable by the end user. moneyStrands is accessible via a full-capability mobile web version and a native iPhone application.

Yodlee
Leading financial institutions trust Yodlee to power critical online financial applications. Yodlee's personal financial management, payments, and customer acquisition solutions unify all personal financial account information to deliver a simple, centralized and secure source for consumers to manage all of their financial tasks anytime, anywhere. Yodlee makes financial institutions' websites essential to their customers and generates new revenue opportunities.

Mould computing

oh yes, i want that stuff growing in the back of the fridge to be able to pump out a quick spread sheet for me!

Thanks PSFK: Biological Computing: Robots Made of Mold

Scientists in the UK are working on creating a robot out of mold. Using vegetative stage of the common slime mold Physarum polycephalum, they aim to create the world’s first fully biological (no silicon components) robot. Professor Andy Adamatzky of the University of the West of England explains to ScienceDaily:

“Most people’s idea of a computer is a piece of hardware with software designed to carry out specific tasks. This mould, or plasmodium, is a naturally occurring substance with its own embedded intelligence.

…Through previous experiments we have already demonstrated the ability of this mould to transport objects. By feeding it oat flakes, it grows tubes which oscillate and make it move in a certain direction carrying objects with it. We can also use light or chemical stimuli to make it grow in a certain direction.

…The robots will have parallel inputs and outputs, a network of sensors and the number crunching power of super computers. The plasmobot will be controlled by spatial gradients of light, electro-magnetic fields and the characteristics of the substrate on which it is placed. It will be a fully controllable and programmable amorphous intelligent robot with an embedded massively parallel computer.”

Nanotech

Ever wanted a site of what's happening and who's doing in the nanotech spaace? Well look no further:

http://www.nanotechproject.org/inventories/

7 Technologies Shaping the Future of Social Media

Yummy future (and current) tech stuff from mashable

June 1st, 2009 | by Mike Laurie15 Comments

Mike Laurie works as a Digital Planner at UK Integrated Agency JPMH where he helps brands get the most from digital media. You can follow Mike on Twitter.

In 2019, when you look back at the social media landscape ten years earlier, you might laugh at how hard you had to work. You had to type things into forms (ha! remember those?), type URLs in the address bar (how archaic!), and put up with irritating communications about irrelevant products. Social media in the future will be effortless and everywhere. Here’s a look at some of the new technologies in store for us over the next 10 years that will make our social (media) lives easier.

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1. The Arduino – One Tough Little Italian

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Arduino is a small circuit board commonly used to prototype electronics. Its low cost and ease of implementation has meant that this little device is now leading a hobbyist revolution in connecting real life objects to social networks, like Twitter (). It has allowed one man to create a device attached to a chair that tweets at the presence of noxious natural gasses (ahem), another uses Arduino to monitor when his cats are inside the house or out, and a small bakery and cafe in East London is now able to tweet what’s fresh from their oven. This may all seem like pretty pointless stuff, but the pointlessness is the point.

The revolution of objects notifying human beings of their state (e.g., The Internet of Things) isn’t happening in the R&D labs of large multinational conglomerates, it’s happening in the spare rooms, garages and bedrooms of developers. The printing press, possibly one of the first inventions to aid information sharing, was invented by Johannes Gutenberg with investment intended for an altogether different enterprise: polished metal mirrors intended to capture holy light from religious relics, presumably to sell to hapless tourists. In other words, what might seem like silly tinkering today, might be a key contributor to our future world.

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2. RFID Tags & Transponders

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While Arduino will help household items become involved in our social media world, transponders such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags are truly breathing life into our objects.

For a number of years RFID tags have been used in passports, ID cards, travel cards and credit cards as a means to identify us when scanned, and they are used commercially for inventory tracking. Brands including Abercrombie & Fitch, Levis and Kleenex have experimented with RFID tags to track their inventory at an item-level. Transponders can be made as small as a grain of sand and can be produced very cheaply. So it is widely thought that they may one day be installed in everything from a packet of biscuits to a pair of underpants.

But RFID tags have potentially valuable real-world applications. It may be possible, for example, to create a very cheap device which sits in your trash can or recycling box and monitors the contents by scanning RFID tags as stuff is thrown in. You might ask why anyone would want to do this with their garbage, but there is a lot of valuable data to be had in what is, in essence, scrobbling for your trash. Your trash is a goldmine of consumption data in the same way that your search data or browsing history is, and could be used to track brand loyalty and consumption habits.

And mobile phone manufacturers, particularly Nokia, are currently experimenting with consumer devices that act as readers and scanners, meaning that your mobile device might be able to do things like exchange information with other phones by bringing them near to one another, or gather information directly from products and find out instantly if anyone in your network has purchased the item in the past. Within the context of mobile phones, this technology is generally referred to as NFC (Near-Field Communication).

Of course, just because we could do this, doesn’t necessarily mean we would, or should. There are clear privacy implications involved that might make the idea of monitoring consumption via your trash or tracking your underpants dead on arrival. Privacy advocates such as CASPIAN are highly motivated to prevent this from happening — the notion that RFIDs could be on our person without us knowing is akin to web sites sharing knowledge about us without our consent. The anti-RFID site spychips.org has more information about the privacy concerns of the technology.

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3. Geomagnetic Sensors in Mobile Devices

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The compass is hardly new — it’s been around for thousands of years — but Yamaha has created a tiny 2mm x 2mm chip intended for use in mobile phones as a compass. When used in conjunction with GPS, AGPS or Wi-Fi triangulation and an accelerometer a compass heading could be extremely useful to give more granular positioning data to mobile applications.

Some older phones used to come equipped with these compasses, and though they have been phased out in recent years, they’re starting to make a comeback. Apple Insider suggests that the next generation of iPhone hardware will contain a “Magnetometer,” the feature already exists in the HTC Dream (the T-Mobile G1), though it is currently used for very little.

But the real world applications are many. For example, let’s say that you’ve just come out of a subway at a roundabout, and the first thing you do is take out your GPS-enabled phone’s mapping application to see where you need to walk to get to your friends waiting for you at a bar. In order to orientate yourself correctly, you’ll need to find street names. But if you happen to be in London, where I live, you know that street names are rarely in convenient places, they’re usually hidden behind trees and other signs (where’s the fun otherwise?). So a compass heading is a perfect way to let you know which direction you roughly need to walk in. Likewise, if you want to scan an area at a certain location for a great place to eat, your device is going to need a heading in order to overlay information over the top of your screen.

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4. Optical Pattern Recognition & Augmented Reality

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Imagine you’re on your way to a conference and you have a couple of hours to kill so you park yourself in the corner of a local bar to catch up on Mashable (). You’ve barely begun reading when an attractive girl or guy catches your eye. You’re transfixed, your heart starts to race — you’re in love. But being the shy type you can’t just go over and introduce yourself, so instead you do a quick scan of the room with your cell phone to pick up any latent metadata. Unfortunately, a social network profile pops up informing you that the object of your affection is in a relationship. Your initial excitement rapidly dissipates and you get on with your reading.

That scenario is pretty far-fetched, but it’s one potential promise of Biometric Face Recognition technology that is already used by police and security services to help identify known criminals. 3 years ago Google acquired Neven Vision, a company that provides such technology. Google reported that it is using this technology in its Picasa product to help keep your personal photos organized without you needing to do any of the actual organizing. I have literally thousands of pictures of my children and family on my computer at home. It would take me days to go through and tag each one so that I could search them more easily in the future. But at some point, Picasa might be able to tag everything for me automatically by recognizing faces and objects in my photos.

That’s still not quite to the level of our hypothetical, but Tochindot’s Sekai Camera and Wikitude are making in-roads into rich and immersive ambient metadata, too. Their current goals revolve around tagging inanimate objects, but someday biometric face recognition could be used to attach metadata to real people.

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5. OpenID, OAuth, and the Identity Graph

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Having to remember passwords for multiple accounts can be frustrating, and answering the same questions over and over on registration forms becomes tedious. Ten years from now, filling out our information once and then easily transferring it from place to place might be commonplace.

OpenID is an open authentication protocol that lets users use a single set of login credentials for every site they visit. It’s already in use at hundreds of smaller websites and large sites like Facebook () are starting to accept OpenID accounts. Once you’ve authenticated, a second open protocol called OAuth will help you share data about yourself with other sites you use. OAuth lets your grant authorization to sites to collect data from other places you participate online, which ultimately could eliminate the need to fill in redundant information about your profile and who your friends are at each new site you use. And companies like Cliqset and DandyID are creating platforms that will allow you to share your entire identity graph information from your profile to your contacts to your lifestream.

Together, these technologies could essentially eliminate the need to fill out forms and register for sites all together.

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6. Mind Reading

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My favorite scene from Back to The Future 2 is one in which Marty visits a 1980s-theme cafe where he sees some kids looking at his old favorite arcade game. Marty tells them he’s a “crack shot” but when he demonstrates the interface, the kids complain, “You have to use your hands!? That’s like a baby’s toy.” Classic.

But the idea of being able to control an interface without the use of your fine motor skills has massive implications for human computer interaction. Consider the ability to tweet what you’re thinking without having to pull your phone out of your pocket, type your message and hit send. Imagine being able to think ‘Facebook’ and your screen presents you with an overview of your friend’s activity stream. This method of interaction is at a very experimental stage but there areproofs-of-concept that exist. Most of this kind of innovation is currently intended to help people with limited motor skills, and not lazy social media addicts, however.

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7. Natural Language Processing

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Like Optical Pattern Recognition, Natural Language Processing (NLP) seeks to automatically categorize and understand that which humans understand with ease. By doing so, computers will be able to understand the requests and needs of their human users far better. Of course, talented programmers can already tell their computer to do things with ease, but the rest of us would benefit from applications that understand our curious ways of speaking.

Firefox’s Ubiquity is one project that’s attempting to change the way we interact with the web by allowing people to use natural language commands. Further, in the future, applications might exist that could analyze your tweets or comments with NLP, and suggest people or brands for you to follow.

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The Future

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Many of the technologies explored in this post are in their infancy, but they could have a profound effect on how we use the Internet and social media in the future. If you know of any other technologies that you feel might advance the future social media landscape please mention them in the comments.

Mike Laurie works as a Digital Planner at UK Integrated Agency JPMH where he helps brands such as BlackBerry, Nestlé, Johnson & Johnson, and Hasbro get the most from digital media. You can follow Mike on Twitter.

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More social media resources from Mashable:

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- Tweet Street: 7 Extraordinary Twitter Uses in the Home

- The Evolution of the Social Media API

- 10 Most Extraordinary Twitter Updates

Ready For a Multi-Touch Web?

OK, and the following re-posts might be a little old, but i liked em when i read them

This one, from Read Write Web on a keyboard free net! Cool

Imagine a world without keyboards. Futurist Ray Kurzweil did 10 years ago when he predicted that by 2009 most portable computers would not have them any longer. Chances are you're still using a mouse and keyboard to point and click your way through this post (and the thousands of other Web pages you view every week). Yet a change is fast approaching, and it's based on touch.

Gesture-based interaction has been around since the dawn of computing, really, and Kurzweil's vision has come true, at least in part, thanks to the widespread adoption of trackpads for laptops (not to mention their predecessors: the trackball, stylus, and light pen). Meanwhile, touch-enabled screens are all around us: in ATMs, GPS navigation systems, grocery checkout lines, bars and restaurants, and TV (think CNN's election maps, and remember Star Trek: The Next Generation from the 1980s?). Yet single-user desktop systems are still mostly dependent on mice and keyboards.

With the advent of Apple's wildly popular iPhone (soon to be joined by the Palm Pre), we've gotten a taste of the potential of multi-touch technology, at least for mobile devices. Now they're being joined by a new wave of interactive walls and tables: Microsoft's Surface, Hitachi's StarBoard, and Sony's new multi-touch LCD screen.

The New Metaphors of Touch

Multi-touch and other touch surfaces offer a more intuitive and natural interaction with PCs, transforming the way we use computers, much the way GUI systems did when they were introduced 25 years ago. While some tasks may still be easier to perform using traditional input devices like the keyboard and mouse, multi-touch is ideal for manipulating objects; creating, editing, and scanning pictures; navigating maps; and even surfing the Web. Gesture-based human/computer interaction represents an evolutionary step, not just in the design of hand-held devices and PCs but also in the look, feel, and functionality of websites.

"Pinch," "de-pinch," "flick," "stretch." This is the growing vernacular of multi-finger and gesture motions. Our current devices (mouse, trackpad, etc.) are designed to focus on a single point and manipulate that point around the screen. With multi-touch, no longer are you limited to double-clicking, dragging, button-pushing, and working pull-down menus. You can sketch, paint, re-size, and crop with a single finger, multiple fingers, multiple hands, and even multiple users. Objects become things you swipe, zoom, push, pull, spin, rotate, and flip.

A More Interactive, Collaborative Experience

Following the introduction of the iPhone, Surface, TouchSmart TX2 multi-touch tablet, and N-trig's DuoSense digitizers, we wonder, too, what's coming next? More intriguing for us as a Web hosting company is how this will transform the online experience: the look and feel of websites, their functionality, and your interaction with them?

There are a few hints of the multi-touch future to come. Bill Buxton is a pioneer in the field of multi-touch. His "Multi-Touch Systems That I Have Known and Loved" outlines degrees of freedom, a concept central to expanding the boundaries of how we interact with computers:

"The richness of interaction is highly related to the richness/number of degrees of freedom (DOF) and, in particular, continuous degrees of freedom, supported by the technology. The conventional GUI is largely based on moving around a single 2-D cursor, using a mouse, for example. This results in 2DOF. If I am sensing the location of two fingers, I have 4DOF, and so on."

DOF then opens up nearly endless possibilities for one-surface computing based on your actions: discrete or continuous, horizontal or vertical orientation, pressure sensitivity, angle of approach, friction, and so one, all influenced by the single or multiple points and gestures you use.

Multi-Touch Made Real

Buxton, Kurzweil, and visionary Jefferson Han provide only a glimpse of what tomorrow's multi-touch websites might look like. No one really knows for certain. Yet they will likely contain at least a few of the following elements:

• Virtual buttons and signatures;
• A faster, more efficient GUI in which the user can customize their own site menu size and shape: for example, by representing layers as individual cards of a card deck;
• Items with 3-D characteristics, with fronts and backs that can be flipped over and rotated.

Joel Eden, a user experience consultant, provides some excellent suggestions for "Designing for Multi-Touch, Multi-User, and Gesture-Based Systems," listing several characteristics that apply as much to website design as to software development. These include:

• Affordances: focus on features, actions, and interactions that can be represented visually;
• Engagement: focus users on simple, quick, natural interactions;
• Feedback must be immediate and easily noticeable by all concurrent users;
• Don't make us think: minimize hidden functionality, except for contextual features that only make sense when revealed during specific interactions.

It may not be time yet to ditch your keyboard and retire your mouse. But sometime between the iPhone and Surface table-top computing, laptop and desktop multi-touch applications will emerge. Interested in a sneak peek at what a multi-touch website might look like? Take a look at these prototypes, and share your examples and ideas!

• Digital Volvelles 1.0
• Kyle Phillips: What Matters Most
• Multitouch-Barcelona Natural Interaction Project

« Prior Post Next Post »

Augemented reality

OK... i've been totally slack and not posted a damn thing for ages, apart from those annoying delicious links which are mostly of use to me, but anyway, trying to get back on track now.

Starting with a nice little, practical summary of AR that our Interactive CD, Fred Hass wrote:

Technologies

There are two main ways to achieve Augmented Reality in a browser.

1: Total Immersion:This French company has been the leader in the Augmented Reality field for commercial use. If you are after the best quality 3D this is the one to go with.
Pros: Higher quality 3D
Cons: Costly licence fee, no community, single vendor, custom code language, large file size, new plugin required
Links: Official Site

2: Flash: Can be integrated into any flash site and works with Flash 8+
Pros: No plugin, small file size, open source, community, flash is a common skill
Cons: Lower quality 3D
Links: FLART

There is also various other technologies which could be used but all have limited web capabilities.

Many universities have Augmented Reality research labs and I think we'll start to see this technology get more mature over the next few years as commercial applications for it start to materialize.

EXAMPLES

Living Sasquatch - Papervision - Augmented Reality
http://vimeo.com/4233057?pg=embed&sec=

Mini Augmented Reality
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTYeuo6pIjY&feature=player_embedded

Doritos Sweet Chili
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJ_4tYUIQ8Y

Eminem Augmented Reality Screencast
http://vimeo.com/4666030

Assassins Creed 2 Teaser
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky7unZQl5nc&feature=player_embedded

Augmented Reality Mobile Game: Catapult
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lfp8id6bpDU&feature=player_embedded

Augmented Reality Snow Flakes
http://vimeo.com/2577927

Augmented Reality Toys.v2
http://vimeo.com/3853814


More Reading

I got most of the examples and more info from the following sites/articles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality
http://www.notcot.org/tag/augmented%20reality/
Yotube Search
http://replicatorinc.com/blog/2009/04/augmented-reality-going-mainstream/
http://blog.zeusdidit.com/web-design/augmented-reality-campaign
http://www.nickburcher.com/2009/05/augmented-reality-5-more-examples-of.html
http://adverlab.blogspot.com/2009/05/augmented-reality-microsites-first.html
http://www.adverblog.com/archives/003689.htm
http://www.basderks.nl/blog/?p=118
http://www.regalatucorazon.cl/
http://www.squidder.com/

There are also two blogs dedicated to AR which have even more examples

http://augmentedblog.wordpress.com/
http://www.augmentedplanet.com/

12 Companies Targeting Early Tech Adopters

And thanks again RWW for this on some companies offering real smarts and bringing the bleeding edge to the commercial space.

Our mission at ReadWriteWeb is to explore the latest Web technology products and trends. We're fortunate to have a great group of sponsors who support this goal. So, once a week, we write a post about them; about who they are, what they do, and what they've been up to lately. We hope you'll pay them a visit as a way to show your appreciation for their sponsorship of this site.

Interested in being a ReadWriteWeb sponsor? ReadWriteWeb is one of the most popular blogs in the world and is read by a sophisticated audience of thought leaders and decision-makers. We have several innovative new features in our sponsor packages that we'd love to tell you about. Email our COO Bernard Lunn for all the details.

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Calais

Calais, powered by Thomson Reuters, brings state-of-the-art semantic functionality into your blog, content management system, site or application. Calais 4.0 was released in January, for the first time allowing publishers to connect to the Linked Data Web standard. Calais 4.0 goes beyond meta-tagging and enables publishers to integrate their content with Linked Data assets from Wikipedia, GeoNames, the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), Shopping.com, and others. Calais 4.0 also lets publishers share semantic meta-data about their content with "content consumers" such as search engines, news aggregators, related stories recommendation services, and more.

Check out the incredible work being done at Calais and let us know what you think.

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Socialtext provides an enterprise wiki platform for organizations who want to accelerate knowledge sharing, foster collaboration, or build online communities.

Socialtext is currently offering a free white paper entitled "5 Best Practices for Enterprise Collaboration." It explains how collaboration solutions (a.k.a. Enterprise 2.0) can "dramatically reduce enterprise cycle times and costs. These results may be critical to survival in difficult economic times, and the right collaboration solution is the easiest, most cost effective way to achieve them."

Download Socialtext's free white paper at http://socialtext.com.

Crowd Science

Crowd Science gives online publishers reports on the demographics and attitudes of their audience. We at ReadWriteWeb have signed up to this new service, because demographic data is something we've struggled to get in the past. It's important for any online business to know their audience, so Crowd Science is a welcome addition to the stats armory that most of us in the Internet biz use.

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Mashery

Mashery is a platform for Web services, allowing companies to manage their APIsMashery's expertise. At the "Business of APIs" conference, Mashery CEO Oren Michelsexplained to the audience that while APIs are a technology, their use is a business decision. He went on to say that Mashery has helped customers such as WhitePages.com, Thumbplay, Compete.com, and Calais. Check out the white paper "Five steps to scaling your business development using Web services" to discover how you can use APIs for your business. using

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Rackspace

Rackspace is one of the world's largest hosting providers, but it's also competing in the cloud computing arena. In October Rackspace announced two major acquisitions: SliceHost and JungleDisk. Slicehost is a popular cloud computing and hosting provider with about 15,000 users, while JungleDisk is one of our favorite online backup services. JungleDisk used to rely on Amazon's S3 storage solution, but it now also supports Rackspace's cloud storage solution. At the same time, Rackspace also announced a new suite of services, Rackspace Cloud Hosting, which combines a hosting platform (CloudSites) with a cloud storage solution (CloudFS), and, in the long run, a tight integration with Slicehost's services.

Click here to explore Rackspace's hosting and cloud computing solutions.

Aplus.net

Aplus.net offers a variety of services relating to Web hosting, including shared hosting, dedicated server, managed hosting, Web design, marketing and online advertising services, search engine optimization, e-commerce solutions, and domain registration.

You can register for Aplus.net here.

Web 3.0 Conference

The core idea behind Web 3.0 is to extract much more meaningful, actionable insight from information. At the Web 3.0 Conference, taking place in New York City from 19 to 20 May 2009, participants will explore how companies are using the emerging technology collectively known as Web 3.0 for significant bottom-line impact in areas like marketing, corporate information management, customer service, and personal productivity.

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Smub

Smub is the first truly mobile bookmarking, link-sharing tool. Smub lets you share and save any link easily from your iPhone, Mac, or PC without a plugin or application.

Type smub.it/ to the left of http:// on any link to save or share, and SmubSmub has built-in sharing to Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and more. will automatically take you through the process. Make the link public to share with others, or keep it private just for yourself.

2009 Semantic Technology Conference

What are the big players doing in semantic search? Which startups are challenging them? How does semantic technology change search results? What key advantages and new opportunities does semantics provide in consumer and business search markets?

At the 2009 Semantic Technology Conference, taking place from 14 to 18 June 2009 in San Jose, semantic applications and usage cases will be presented by product developers and technical experts in such fields as advertising, business process management, cloud computing, digital asset management, and e-commerce.

Hakia

Hakia is a general purpose "semantic" search engine that delivers a search experience based on focus, clarity, and credibility. Today's search engines retrive popular results via statistical ranking, but popular websites are not always credible and credible websites are not always popular.

Hakia's semantic technology provides a new search experience based on quality, not popularity. Its search results come from credible websites recommended by librarians; they represent the most recent information available and remain absolutely relevant to the query.

Find out what makes Hakia different.

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The companies above pay our rents or mortgages and we appreciate it. We hope you'll stop by their sites and see what they've got to offer.

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