Living Social sold one million Whole Foods deals in less than half a day today.  Technology is quickly beginning to disrupt our buying habits!

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.

Andrew at the conference showed me the augmented reality demo by GE.  You basically print out a special piece of paper created by a vendor, hold that piece of paper in front of you and that paper will animate right before your eyes.  We showed this at the CMMA presentation and it is very innovative.  Douglas sent me this website which lists 35 awesome augmented reality demos.

I showed this video at the end of my talk at today’s CMMA conference.

Photo credit: Microsoft

Liked the article below by TechRepublic which talks about cloud and utility computing being the future.  Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are investing heavily to get ready.

1. Cloud computing: Applications and services delivered over the Internet
2. Utility computing: On-demand server capacity powered by virtualization and delivered over the Internet

“For governments, large financial institutions, and other high-security environments, outsourcing the data center will probably never make sense. For virtually everyone else, it’s going to become a very attractive option in the next 3-5 years. I suspect that a decade from now running your own data center will be the exception and not the rule, and IT departments will need a strong business case to justify the existence of a private data center.”  >> Read the article

Take a look at this Web Trends Map (~8MB) which lays out the 300 most popular websites in a Tokyo train map type design.  Obviously at the time of this post it is almost 2009 but this is a pretty useful resource.  The below text is from the Information Architects website.

A Closer Look

The map pins down nearly 300 of the most successful and influential websites to the greater Tokyo area train map.  Different train lines correspond to different web trends such as innovation, news, social networks, and so on.

The Forecast

We’ve brought back the weather forecast from version 2 and incorporated it along the main Yamanote train line.

Brand Experience

The bottom layer includes a rating of brand experience analogous to restaurant experience. It illustrates our perception of user experience and brand management of the main stations. We studied the usability, user value, and interface (simplicity, character, and feedback), and rated each site on a scale of eating at various types of Japanese restaurants.

Found this article in my RSS feeds today and thought I would share.  Very interesting idea to allow artisan companies and products to have a presence online when they can’t fit into what traditional grocery stores may allow.

Foodzie Raises $1 Million For Its Specialty Food Marketplace
from TechCrunch by Jason Kincaid

“Foodzie, an online marketplace for high-end artisan food vendors, has raised a seed round of $1 million from noted investor Jeff Clavier of SoftTech VC, First Round Capital, and a number of angel investors. The company, which we were introduced to over the summer as part of the TechStars class of 2008, recently launched to the public with a marketplace of 25 vendors ranging from Vermont and California cheese makers to specialty BBQ sauces from Smokin’ Joe Jones.

Foodzie helps provide a centralized hub for these small food vendors, giving them more exposure than they’d get from their standalone sites and making it easy for food aficionados (or ‘foodies’) to find the products they’re looking for. Foodzie generates revenue by taking a commission on each transaction (around 20%), but vendors still make as much as double what they’d get if their products were sold in traditional specialty food sites. Foodzie can charge a lower commission because it doesn’t warehouse the items it sells – instead it handles all of the transactions (a boon for less tech-savy vendors) and leaves distribution up to the individual stores.

Given the economic downturn, it seems like high-end food would be among the first “cuts” made by consumers in an effort to cut back on spending. However, Foodzie CEO Rob LaFave says that the recession doesn’t seem to be having a major impact on the marketplace. He explains that many of the products on Foodzie are actually cheaper than those in supermarkets, and that many customers come to Foodzie looking for foods they can’t find elsewhere that fulfill special dietary needs (like vegan or gluten-free products).”

We all know that Nostradamus is famous for his predictions so the great Jeremydamas is here to predict that in 2009 we are going to see Apple enter into the gaming market.  Why not, Apple is brilliant at design, usability, and lets face it just being cooler than everyone else.  Many were surprised that Microsoft got into the gaming arena but if Apple were to enter the gaming space could they completely revolutionize gaming and give Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony a run for their money?  I say absolutely but what are your thoughts?

Enjoyed an article by O’Reilly Radar about the effect of the depression on technology.  If you don’t have time to read the article it basically says the following:

• “First, this recession will be good for innovation because recessions generally are
• Second, this recession will be great for free and open source because of the shortage of cash
• Third, open source services and cloud computing will benefit from the tight financial situation
• As Phil Torrone said, people will have more time than money. This is good for open source software…”

Reading an interesting article from Mobile Crunch on how high end hotels are using iPhones.

I was talking with Scott the other day about video formats and my prediction that Blue-ray will not ever go mainstream because standard DVDs can be upconverted to 1080p.  Is the future of video going to be video upconvertion?  Check out the Xdoc (pictured above) which was featured in Engaget back in January.  The Xdoc allows you to take iPod video and upconvert it to 720p / 1080i.  For the record I am definitely not an expert at video but I’m wondering if someone could take compressed videos for the web and use the same technology to upconvert standard YouTube type videos (for instance) to full screen, near high definition quality videos.  Heck, why stop there, why not also upconvert standard definition TV signals which haven’t been converted to high definition yet?  Any thoughts?

Techcrunch has an interesting article about blogging trends.

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.