Tech Trends 2011

By L.A. Lorek

Visual Note-Taking • Since the dawn of time people have used pictures to tell stories. In the

Internet age, graphic story telling will increase in importance. And 2011 will be the year in which several new Web sites launch to allow this method to flourish.

• Dave Gray, Founder of ViziThink, says “Every five year-old can draw, everyone was five once. Therefore everyone can draw.”

• Wired Magazine’s Clive Thompson on the power of visual thinking.”In essence, I used “visual thinking” – drawing pictures to solve a problem. And if you believe in visualization experts, a new language of pictures may be precisely what we need to tackle the world’s biggest challenges.”

Video DiariesFor the first time ever, the average US online consumer spends as much time online as he or she does watching TV offline, according to a Forrester Research report. But until now, it’s been difficult for non techies to create video diaries but that changes in 2011. A Web site will make it easy for people to create their own video diaries to share easily on Facebook.

• Youtube Statistics:• More than 2 billion views per day• 24 hours of video uploaded every minute• More video uploaded to YouTube in 60 days than the three major US

networks created in 60 years

Gaming • More than 65 percent of U.S. households play

video games• Video gaming is the second most popular

activity behind Web surfing on the iPad• Mobile gaming on phones and app-enabled

devices will continue to boom• Gamers spend, on average, 18 hours per week

playing games

Vooks• Vooks are e-novels that have videos embedded in their virtual

pages. With the drop in price of e-readers like the Kindle and Nook, these book hybrids will continue to grow in popularity in 2011.

• Amazon.com reported in 2009 that e-book versions account for 35% of total sales, up sharply from less than ten percent just a year earlier.

• The sales of digital book readers will top 12 million in 2010, up from just 1 million in 2008.

iPad• The price of the iPad will drop to around $250

making it far more accessible to the masses in 2011.

• Apple will sell 8.5 million iPads this year, growing 128% to 19.4 million in 2011 and growing another 55% to 30.1 million in 2012, research firm eMarketer predicts.

Geolocation• Where are you? Lots of companies want to

broadcast that information to friends and followers including Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Gowalla and Yelp.

• The pioneer in the space, Foursquare with over 5 million users, 2 million check-ins and 25K new users a day will more than quadruple in size in 2011.

Discounting

• Groupon, the runaway hit discounting site online, turned down a $6 billion offer from Google so that means tons more of these sites will appear in 2011. Groupon has 40 million subscribers.

• Living Social, the number two online couponing discount site, has 10 million subscribers but is increasing in popularity.

Talk the talk

PR Nation

• "We are now in a PR society" said Walter Pincus with the Washington Post.

• That means if you’ve got to take control of your image and brand and monitor social networks. You’ve also got to promote your own content.

• The established media is under siege and that trends continues in 2011 with the failure of more major newspapers and the rise of bootstrap alternative outlets.

Open Those Kimonos Guys!

Radical Transparency• “Radical transparency is a management

approach in which (ideally) all decision making is carried out publicly” from Wikipedia.

• Just look at Wikileaks as an example of the free-flow of critical information

Unplugging• Awareness of the need to disconnect from our

digital lives will grow in importance in 2011.• William Powers, the author of Hamlet’s

Blackberry, details this trend in his book • Increasing popularity of “Digital sabbaticals”

will take hold in 2011 with more people pulling the plug on technology during the weekend and reclaiming their off-screen lives.