Having previously worked together with colleagues from BMW ConnectedDrive, this commercial caught my attention.
So much has changed since the early days of ConnectedDrive… It is amazing to see what cars today are capable of, leaving aside the drivers distraction discusscion…
I have been thinking about this for quite some time.
Then via Twitter I came across this Adage article about how the internet or let’s say digital media in general is having a desasterous effect on the auto industry.
Sounds far-fetched? Maybe, but there is truth to it as I will prove.
THE RISE OF CARS
Beginning in the early 19th century cars began to replace horse and carriage. Slowly but steadily, and as productivity improved and cars became more affordable (think of the Ford Model T), the success of automobiles could not be stopped anymore. Until now. Sure, cars have not yet been replaced by small convenient electric aircraft or such, but they are under pressure. From a medium no one could have imagined it would be a threat..
HOW THE CAR EMPOWERED US
Some 10, 20 or even 40 years ago, a car was the dream of any young man or woman. Why? It is a symbol of freedom, it allows you to move where you want when you want, and thus enables you to communicate in person with people living too far away to walk. It enables you to haul home goods that you bought elsewhere, it takes you to your job interview and it may be the romantic setting on a first date. You had to have a car or you where nobody.
Still the case today, you might say. Well yes, but only to some extent.
WHERE DID ALL THE DRIVERS GO?
The number of young adults who have no driver’s license is decreasing. Just as the article on adage.com nicely illustrates, this is no coincidence but rather a strong tendency away from the car. This does also apply to my personal network. People don’t get their driver’s license because they are unable to drive properly. No, they simply do not need it and save the money for other things. Coming back to the graphic in the adage.com article you should be aware, that in the U.S a driver’s license is very easy to obtain (financially and concerning the test – if this is good like that? Well the auto lobby surely would not want it any other way). To compare: in Germany an auto driver’s license can easily amount to EUR 1000. This would at least partly explain why less and less people get the license. However, for the US and that is the country the adage.com graphic refers to, it is no explanation at all.
Now why would young adults shy away from all the wonderful possibilities a car offers you? Do they no longer have the needs? They do. But they found an easier, more convenient, yet digital way to cover all the things mentione before:
-symbol of freedom
-go where you want when you want
-communicate in person with people living too far away to walk
-haul home goods that you bought elsewhere
-job interview
-setting on a first date
-be someone
-…
HOW THE (MOBILE) INTERNET TOOK OVER
Internet and mobile internet via your cell phone allows you to be free. You can do anything at any time. From shopping for exotic products to watching a UStream livestream of a highschool basketball final.
You can virtually access any point on this planet via Google Maps and billions of photos and videos at your disposal. You want to see how huge the waves in Hawaii are – surely someone has been there and shares his photos, videos and impressions with you. The internet allows you to communicate with anyone in the world – whether you are somewhere in the Bavarian Alps or downtown Manhattan. Skype and other applications allow to even see each other live. You can literally purchase everything online. From a new car to groceries to a new movie – many goods even come with free shipping right to your apartment door. Job interviews or at least first level interviews can easily be undertaken via video conference. No need to drive60 miles just to find out the position is absolutely not your piece of cake. Dating today does no longer take a car to take the girl to the movies or the diner as we know it from the 50s and 60s movies. Instead online dating platforms have become highly successful and even come with a money-back guarantee (now how weird is that?).
And to some it up. While before identification happened via clothes, your car, your peers, this has considerably moved online. Today, teenagers as well as young adult identify themselves by their myspace or facebook profile, the type of cell phone they have and which b(r)ands they favor. As a recent Southpark episode nicely illustrated: if you have no profile and or no friends you barely exist.
Sure, you can also show off your car. But think of young people and how they are searching for their own identity via brands etc. An iPhone is much cheaper than a car, and very often today, a car does not impress as much as an iPhone, the latest apps or how many friends you have on facebook. Another aspect is that we tend to move to highly populated cities. Who needs a car, when you have some 50 different subway lines, another 50 bus lines plus the train system? You often do not even have the possibility to demonstrate your car to your colleagues because many times you do not know where you will be parking the next day (if there is no company parking lot). And lastly: cars cost you money even when they are standing in the garage. In times of economic uncertainties you would rather not invest too much into a car.
You may have realized that I have spoken of different groups of people i.e. potential consumers. Teenagers who are allowed to drive a car much earlier in the US than in Europe and then young adults and adults in general. The latter may still be the more easy-to-handle target group with a fixed value set in their mind and often times strong loyalty to auto brands (and their heritage). But ask the younger generation! Cars have become much more similar in recent years. It is not longer the US brand vs. Japanese brand fight. The market is much more diverse, intertwined and thus confusing for the consumer. Is Subaru American? Jaguar still British or really Indian now? Does the Mini Cooper really have a Toyota engine? And is it true that Japanes cars are built in the U.S. by U.S. workers?
This industry is chaotic.
AND FINALLY: CARS ARE BAD
The car today has lost some of its power. And the world has changed leaving less space for our cars. What I have not yet mentioned is the entire environmental issue. Cars today are considered harmful. They endanger our future and that of our children. New technologies are being demanded by the public. As the world around us has changed so cars have to change to maintain their role in our lives.
THE CONSEQUENCES FOR CARS AND AUTOMAKERS
What does the changed environment mean for automobiles?
-cell phone-like apps for the car
-connecting the digital sphere with the car sphere (colleagues may not see your car on the road, but on social networks)
-hybrid, e-cell, fuel cell and other technologies to take away the negative touch
-alternatives to owning a car, such as car-sharing
-mobility on demand, e.g. via a rental car when you need one
-cars and auto brands have to go online and into Social Media (Don’t loose touch of future target groups!)
-cars have to identify new „reasons why“ to persuade consumer to purchase a car
-brand facets such as sustainability have to be pursued and must be cemented as core brand facets
-auto brands have to make sure their brand can be understood by consumers
Editor’s note: Pete Cashmore is founder and CEO of Mashable, a popular blog about social media. He is writing a weekly column about social networking and tech for CNN.com.
(CNN) — As 2009 draws to a close, the Web’s attention turns to the year ahead. What can we expect of the online realm in 2010?
While Web innovation is unpredictable, some clear trends are becoming apparent. Expect the following 10 themes to define the Web next year:
Real-time ramps up
Sparked by Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed, the real-time trend has been to the latter part of 2009 what „Web 2.0“ was to 2007. The term represents the growing demand for immediacy in our interactions. Immediacy is compelling, engaging, highly addictive … it’s a sense of living in the now.
But real-time is more than just a horde of new Twitter-like services hitting the Web in 2010 (although that’s inevitable — cargo cults abound). It’s a combination of factors, from the always-connected nature of modern smartphones to the instant gratification provided by a Google search.
Why wait until you get home to post a restaurant review, asks consumer trends tracker Trendwatching, when scores of iPhone apps let you post feedback as soon as you finish dessert? Why wonder about the name of that song, when humming into your phone handset will garner an instant answer from Midomi?
Look out, too, for real-time collaboration: Google Wave launched earlier this year, resulting in both excitement and confusion. A crossover between instant messaging, e-mail and a wiki, Wave is a platform for getting things done together. Web users, however, remain baffled. In 2010, Wave’s utility will become more apparent.
Location, location, location
Fueled by the ubiquity of GPS in modern smartphones, location-sharing services like Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite and Google Latitude are suddenly in vogue.
As I ruminated in this column two weeks ago, Foursquare and its ilk may become the breakout services of the year … provided they’re not crushed by the addition of location-based features to Twitter and Facebook.
What’s clear is that location is not about any singular service; rather, it’s a new layer of the Web. Soon, our whereabouts may optionally be appended to every Tweet, blog comment, photo or video we post.
Augmented reality
It’s yet to become part of the consumer consciousness, but augmented reality has attracted early-adopter buzz in the latter part of 2009.
Enabled by GPS, mapping data from the likes of Google and the accelerometer technology in modern phones, AR involves overlaying data on your environment; imagine walking around a city and seeing it come to life with reviews of the restaurants you walk past and Wikipedia entries about the sights you see.
When using Layar, for instance, the picture from your phone’s video camera is overlaid with bubbles of information from Yelp, Wikipedia, Google Search and Twitter. The challenge for such services is to prove their utility: They have the „cool factor,“ but can they be truly useful?
Content ‚curation‘
The Web’s biggest challenge of recent years is that content creation is outpacing our ability to consume it: „Information overload“ has become an increasingly common complaint.
In the attention economy, with its millions of daily status updates and billions of Web pages vying for our time, how do we best allocate that scarce resource? One solution has been algorithmic: Sites like Google News source the best stuff by technical means, but fall short when it comes to personalization.
In 2008, the answer revealed itself: Your friends are your filter. With the launch of its Facebook Connect program, Facebook allowed sites to offer content personalization based on the preferences of your network.
Meanwhile, Google’s Social Search experiment is investigating whether Web searching is improved by using information gleaned from your friends on Twitter, Facebook, Digg and the rest. Increasingly, your friends are becoming the curators of your consumption, from Web links to movies, books and TV shows.
Professional „curation“ has its place, too: Who better to direct our scarce attention than experts in their fields? I explored this possibility in a CNN article last month titled „Twitter lists and real-time journalism“ .
Cloud computing
Cloud computing was very much a buzzword of 2009, but there’s no doubt this transition will continue. The trend, in which data and applications cease to reside on our desktops and instead exist on servers elsewhere („the cloud“), makes our data accessible from anywhere and enables collaboration with distributed teams.
The cloud movement will see a major leap forward in the first half of 2010 with the launch of „Office Web Apps,“ free online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote released in tandem with Microsoft Office 2010.
Next year will also see the launch of Google’s Chrome OS, a free, Web-centric operating system that forces us to ask: How many desktop applications do we really need?
Internet TV and movies
Is 2010 the year the majority of our television starts coming to us via the Internet? There’s certainly more activity here than at any other time: Among the early-adopter set, Hulu, Boxee, Apple TV and Netflix’s Roku box lead the field.
Hulu in particular has sustained remarkable growth this year, while the movie studios are getting on board with the launch of Epix, a Hulu for films.
Convergence conundrum
The outlook for devices in 2010 appears somewhat contradictory: While the convergence trend continues apace and many of our gadgets are folded into the smartphones we carry around every day, we’re seeing a converse trend in which task-specific devices gain popularity.
GPS device maker TomTom recently introduced a $100 iPhone app that removes the need to buy a TomTom hardware device. Google then one-upped the company by releasing free turn-by-turn directions on devices running its Android operating system. Garmin and TomTom beware: Standalone GPS devices may meet their demise in 2010.
Also on the endangered gadgets list: Flip video cameras, which PC World declared dead upon the launch of the iPhone 3G S. Meanwhile, Apple executives say the iPhone is cannibalizing the iPod: Why carry two devices when you only need one?
Paradoxically, the e-book reader is seeing traction as a single-use device. With hard-to-read, power-hungry laptop screens proving impractical for reading, and smartphone screens proving too small, the Kindle and its competitors are gaining buzz.
However, I’d argue that the e-book reader is a fad: Carrying an extra device is never desirable, and the major factor preventing convergence is the lack of superior screen technology. Flexible, expanding low-power screens on cell phones might tip the balance.
The real power of Amazon’s Kindle is its ease of use: a virtual bookstore so simple that it does for books what Apple’s iTunes did for music. The devices will converge, but the „app store“ model for books will persist across all devices. The technology won’t be with us in 2010, however.
Social gaming
There’s little risk of social gaming proving a bad bet in 2010 — Zynga’s FarmVille game on Facebook now counts more active users than Twitter, claims a Facebook executive. Meanwhile, rival Playfish was recently acquired by Electronic Arts in a deal valued at up to $400 million.
Of growing interest in 2010, however, will be the virtual currencies these games have spawned: In the allegedly unmonetizable world of social media, virtual buying and selling may be the route to riches for some social media sites — a concept I outlined in this column under the title „Is Facebook the future of micropayments?“
Mobile payments
I’d wager that 2010 will be the breakthrough year of the much-anticipated mobile payments market. While much of Asia has embraced the technology, the U.S., in particular, has lagged. There’s reason for optimism in 2010, however: From PayPalX to Amazon’s mobile payments platform for developers, the big players are seizing the mobile payments opportunity.
Meanwhile, newcomer Square, founded by the creator of Twitter, began its rollout this week to much early-adopter excitement: The company enables merchants to accept payments via Apple’s iPhone.
Fame abundance, privacy scarcity
Warhol was right: Fame is now abundant. Social media has birthed a galaxy of stars in thousands of niches: We’re all reality stars now, on Facebook, Twitter and all the myriad online outlets where we hone our personal brands.
We’re seeing the ongoing voluntary erosion of privacy through public sharing on Facebook and Twitter, the rise of location-based services and the inclusion of video cameras in a growing array of devices.
The incredible efficiency of Web-based communication and our Google-fueled appetite to know everything about everything (or everyone) right now are combining to make Tiger Woods the canary in the privacy coal mine. Expect personal privacy — or rather its continued erosion — to be a hot media topic of 2010.
more by Pete Cashmore at www.mashable.com
Article originally published under: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/12/03/cashmore.web.trends.2010/index.html
The face of the Internet is about to change, and its potential impact on international Internet use cannot be understated.
Earlier today, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which governs domains, registrations, Internet Protocol addresses, and many other aspects of the net, voted to approve a fast-track process for implementing non-Latin domain names by early to mid 2010.
This means that by next year, you could be seeing domains in Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, and dozens of other non-Latin languages.
The new domains, which ICANN terms “Internationalized Domain Names” or IDNs, has been something the organization has discussed for several years, but now IDNs have been placed on a fast track process, beginning November 16th. It will involve around 100 new, international characters on top of the traditional 26-character English alphabet.
ICANN even takes the time to explain the impact of IDNs with a 7:10 video. In it, people from nations across (along with ICANN President Rod Beckstrom) the world discuss how IDNs will help them use localized keyboards and local email addresses. It’s a bit silly, but it really nails the key point: it’s time to expand domains to the native languages of over half the world.
International Domain Names Are Coming in 2010
Posted using ShareThis
Ein Unternehmen aus Texas, Eolas Technologies Inc. hat nun 24 lawsuits à 500 Millionen US-Dollar vor einem texanischen Gericht eringereicht. Was etwas weit hergeholt klingt hat Realitätsbezug. Bereits 2004 wurde ein bestehendes Patent vor einem US-Gericht bestätigt und als Konsequenz Microsoft zur Zahlung von 565 Millionen US-Dollar verdonnert. Die aktuelle Klage basiert auf eben diesem Patent mit der Nummer 5,838,906 und beinhaltet prinzipiell die Möglichkeit, im Rahmen eines Browsers und aus einer Web-Seite heraus via Mausklick eine Anwendung aufzurufen.
Hier die Liste der aktuell verklagten Unternehmen, eine bunte Mischung des Who is Who der nordamerikanischen Wirtschaft:
# Adobe Systems Inc.
# Amazon.com
# Apple Inc.
# Argosy Publishing Inc.
# Blockbuster Inc.
# CDW Corp.
# Citigroup Inc.
# eBay Inc.
# Frito-Lay Inc.
# PepsiCo Inc.
# The Go Daddy Group Inc.
# Google Inc.
# J.C. Penney Co. Inc.
# JPMorgan Chase & Co.
# New Frontier Media Inc.
# Office Depot Inc.
# Perot Systems Corp.
# Playboy Enterprises International Inc.
# Rent-A-Center Inc.
# Staples Inc.
# Sun Microsystems Inc.
# Texas Instruments Inc.
# Yahoo! Inc.
# YouTube LLC
Weiterführende Infos:
