Fast Company has an interesting post on The University of Washington’s plans to make smart contact lenses.  Do you know what this means?  It means if this happens (and you know it will…some day), Terminators are next!  

“According to 2010 Sunday in America, a recent survey from Parade magazine, the majority of Americans (64 percent) like Sunday the most of any day of the week — perhaps because of the opportunity it affords them to shop for, prepare and enjoy food.  The survey found that Sunday is likely spent shopping for groceries (72 percent of respondents), cooking or preparing a meal (89 percent) and eating at home (breakfast, 91 percent; dinner, 86 percent). Additionally, 69 percent of respondents said they’re also apt to eat out at restaurants on Sunday, while 59 percent often have guests over.  Unsurprisingly, while women usually do more of the cooking than men (94 percent vs. 83 percent), men are almost as likely to shop for groceries (70 percent vs. 74 percent) or make trips to mass merchandiser/club stores (45 percent vs. 49 percent).

When they’re not shopping, cooking or eating on the first day of the week, Americans are making plans regarding food. Seventy-three percent of survey respondents say they plan which grocery items to purchase for the upcoming week. Seventy-two percent of Americans read the Sunday newspaper on a weekly basis, and nearly all of them consider it a major shopping resource. Ninety-four percent hunt through the paper for sales information in their communities, and 92 percent depend on the publication for money-saving coupons.  “This makes sense to me, because our lives are increasingly hectic,” said Brett Wilson, publisher of New York-based Parade. “People like Friday because it heralds the weekend. Saturday is less harried but often spent running errands, doing chores, and chauffering the kids to games and appointments. Sunday is the one day of the week when we have more time — for home and family and, of course, food.”

Source: http://www.progressivegrocer.com/

This is why Blockbuster stores are closing left and right and will continue to do so unless they adapt to changing consumer habits:

“More than 40% of consumers said they will rent a movie at a kiosk this year compared to 36% who said they will do so at a video store, according to a new report.  In addition more than twice the percentage (26%) of consumers will get their rentals of DVDs/Blu-ray Discs at kiosks, rather than video stores (12%), according to Market Force Information, a Boulder, Colo.-based research firm that compiled the report for ShoWest 2010, a theatrical confab through March 17 in Las Vegas.  Fifteen percent of consumers said they watch movies from their cable TV subscriptions, with 18% said they expect to increase that practice in the coming year.  The survey, compiled from more than 300,000 respondents, including 75% women, was meant to bolster the theatrical outlook in 2010.  The report stated that a higher percentage of female respondents was important since women (50% with children) are the primary household consumer purchasers.  Thirty percent of respondents said new releases prompted their movie purchases, while 25% said going out with friends guided their going to the movies.  The report also stated that subscription-based rental services such as Netflix and Blockbuster Online are being used by 27% of the consumers surveyed, and 21% said they expect that to increase by-mail renting.”

Source: http://www.homemediamagazine.com/

The video goes quick so I jotted down the numbers below for us to analyze.  Here are some interesting facts about the state of the Internet:

• 1.73 billion – Internet users worldwide (September 2009)
  • 738,257,230 in Asia
  • 418,209,796 in Europe
  • 67,371,700 in Africa
  • 20,371,700 in Oceania / Australia
  • 179,031,479 in Latin America / Caribbean
  • 252,908,000 in North America
• 90 trillion emails sent on the Internet in 2009
• 247 billion is the average number of emails per day, 200 billion of those emails are SPAM (81%)
• 1.4 billion email users worldwide
• 234 million websites as of December 2009
• 126 million blogs on the Internet
• 84% – Percentage of social network sites with more women than men
• 27.3 million tweets per day on Twitter (November, 2009)
• Ashton Kutcher has 4.25 million followers on Twitter (@aplusk)
• Facebook serves up 260 billion page views per month (6 million page views per minute and 37.4 trillion page views in a year)
  • Page Views per month
    • Facebook 260 billion
    • MySpcae 24 billion
    • Twitter 4.4 billion
    • LinkedIn 1.9 billion
  • Facebook needs as many as 30,000 servers to run the site
  • 350 million people on Facebook
  • 2.5 billion photos uploaded each month to Facebook (about 30 billion a year)
  • There are 4 billion photos hosted on Flickr (October 2009)
  • YouTube serves up 12.2 billion videos per month in the US
  • Hulu serves up 924 million per month in the US
  • The average person watches 182 videos per month on the Internet in the US (82% of us)
  • 148,000 new zombie computers created per day
  • 2.6 million malicious code threats at the start of 2009 (viruses, trojans, etc)

I just got done reading an article from eChannelLine.com which discusses a recent Gartner report offering five key predictions for where social software is headed over the next several years:

• By 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users.
• By 2012, over 50 percent of enterprises will use activity streams that include microblogging, but stand-alone enterprise microblogging will have less than 5 percent penetration.
• Through 2012, over 70 percent of IT-dominated social media initiatives will fail.
• Within five years, 70 percent of collaboration and communications applications designed on PCs will be modeled after user experience lessons from smartphone collaboration applications.
• Through 2015, only 25 percent of enterprises will routinely utilize social network analysis to improve performance and productivity.

Gizmodo has an exhaustive guide to Apple Tablet rumors and below is a high level summary of that article:

• Rumored to be called the iSlate
• It is rumored to be announced in late January but it sounds like it will be on 1/26/10 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco
• Sounds like it will ship in March or April
• It is rumored to have a color screen
• It is rumored to have 3G capabilities

My take on the device (whatever it may or may not be) is it will revolutionize the print industry just as Apple revolutionized the music industry with the iPod.  If it has 3G capabilities I’d personally wait until it supports 4G.  Digital print as we know it is going to change.  Today’s books consist of plain text and occasionally they have a few illustrations, but with eBooks and eBook readers we will have the ability to offer interactive books like never before possible.  We will see a mix of TV, web, print, and mobile computing in one platform.

Textbooks will no longer be outdated once printed, every word will be able to be defined and we’ll be able to search and link to other sources just as we can today on the web.  These devices will offer students the ability to interact with one another in the classroom as well as their teachers.  Teachers will be able to quickly check for understanding and see who within their classroom is grasping various concepts and who needs more time and explanation.  We will have the ability to take notes on these devices and it won’t be long before someone comes and develops a service which allows us to summarize all digital articles wiki style so we don’t have to read the entire content (book, magazine, ebook, website etc).  If we like what the summary has to say you can read on, if you don’t like the summary we will simply go on to read other things to save us time.

I think bookstores as we know them will cease to exist in 5 years.  I still think there will be some bookstores but they will be more limited in quantity and they will have to differentiate themselves by getting into the eBook space or offering print services from an electronic format.  I think what happened to the music industry will happen to the book industry.  When you go into Best Buy for instance they still have CDs but it is a much more limited selection but some day CDs will cease to exist as well.

Jeff Bezos is one of the most brilliant minds in the business but Steve Jobs is also brilliant and I hope there is room for both the Kindle and the Apple Tablet to compete.  Bezos already has an advantage of having deals with content providers and has both print and electronic versions available allowing consumers one place to get both formats.  Jobs has an advantage of providing revolutionary devices which tend to do well for a few years but eventually others catch up with their innovations and content is what rules on the revolutionary devices.  For instance the iPhone was revolutionary and had lots of fantastic apps but the Droid and Google phone are going to quickly chip away at their market share.

Newspapers have been dying for a while and in 5 years we’ll likely still have a few major newspapers still around but local papers will die off and new models will be created to replace them.  I don’t think the Nook from Barnes and Noble will get very far, they were too late in the game and it doesn’t have the wow factor.  I love Amazon.com and if they are going to compete with the Apple Tablet they must get to a color display quick!  Who will want to read magazines, comics, and some books in black and white?!?!

Last but not least I think it will be easier than ever before to have a book published and I wouldn’t be surprised if both Apple and Amazon get into the publishing business which offers your book, magazine, article to be submitted into their catalogue for a fee.  Of course you can publish your own book and host it on a server outside of their catalog, but by paying Apple and Amazon you will get the marketing mega machine behind your book to provide you more exposure just as publishers do today.