What's jumping the shark in 2011 in the world of tech?

Posted At : January 20, 2011 2:18 PM | Posted By : Andy Beaupre
Related Categories: Technology,Commentary

As I watched The Office the other night (missing its original cleverness & quirkiness), I wondered: what’s jumping the shark in the world of tech?

Some are obvious: MySpace; cable TV subscriptions; brick & mortar video chains; Digg; flip phones, eBay and DVDs.

But what’s jumping the shark before our eyes? Consider the following candidates - some are unquestionably declining; others remain arguable in their pending sharkiness :

Delicious – word got out last month that Yahoo was shutting down its social bookmarking site. Then it shifted gears, talking about selling the service. Does this mean the world doesn’t need wide-scale storing, sharing and discovering web bookmarks?
Netbooks – the handwriting is on the tablet – netbooks from the likes of HP, Dell and Asus have been usurped by the Tablet Rush. (Thanks Apple for showing the way.) Now established companies like Motorola are in the game with the favorably reviewed Xoom and unknowns - like Notion – are garnering buzz with Adam. RIM skipped the netbook phase and moved directly to the tablet.
Virtualization – although it might be a tad early to make the call, there are some indications virtualization may be taking a hit as all things shift to the Cloud as companies worry more about taming management complexity issues.
Cloud computing – a harried, flight-delayed couple gets happy when they say “let’s go to the cloud” in a current TV commercial. Is cloud computing so mass market already that it’s jumped the shark? Some people think it’s already peaked.
Chatroulette – who doesn’t want a face-to-face webcam experience with an endless parade of strangers with a complete inability to manage the experience (find friends, trace your steps back, etc.). Evidently, a lot of people.
Twitter – a frequent knock against Twitter is “lots of talk but is anybody listening?” If Twitter usage hasn’t peaked, has its clout?
Large email service providers – several very capable small email service providers have proven themselves and are delivering a high level of functionality at far less cost. Why pay more when you can get it from vendors like Newsberry?
Quora – it hasn’t been around long (launched June 2009) and buzz is growing not declining, but some are already questioning its viability. If you’re not familiar Quora, it’s Search meets Wikipedia meets Yahoo Answers. Is it a retread or a valuable idea we’ll need more.
Facebook – some pundits are saying Facebook has peaked. With 500 million friends and climbing, it’s hard to make the case though. But maybe they’re right…The Social Network won a Golden Globe for Best Picture.
Augmented reality – there’s growing buzz that while it’s definitely cool, augmented reality hasn’t (and might never) find a useful purpose. To avoid jumping the shark, it needs to go from cool to practical applications.
Blu-ray – every year since it came out, marketers have prophesized “the year of Blu-ray” but it hasn’t happened yet. Blu-ray video now accounts for 11% of all movie sales according to Nielsen. The format appears to be growing, but the buzz has flattened. For example, there were fewer Blu-ray announcements at this year’s CES (except for the Star Wars trilogy news). Will 2011 be the tipping point year?
Blogging – last year’s Christian Science Monitor article (Has blogging peaked?) made a case for Twitter and Facebook now being the glue that keeps online communities together. There’s growing buzz that blogging requires too much work and diminishing returns. The biggest sharkiness sign may be that the majority of blogs are never updated.
Governance risk and compliance (GRC) – is this software being increasingly marginalized as more and more customers go SaaS?

What isn’t on this list that should be? What shouldn’t be on the list? Talk to me…

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Can we get more media variety in 2011?

Posted At : January 4, 2011 11:08 AM | Posted By : Andy Beaupre
Related Categories: Commentary,News

We either get too much of the same thing, too little of the formerly hot thing or not enough of the real thing.

Consider too much of the same thing: last year the media focused incessantly (and often aggravatingly) on BP’s oil spill and its blackened brand, Toyota’s troubles, Facebook’s face, Gap’s new logo, Android’s surge and iPad’s popularity. And let us not forget Foursquare, GM’s resurgence, Nestle’s blunders, Jet Blue’s whacko attendant, Twitter’s apparent omnipresence and technology’s journey to the cloud.

But this isn’t anything new; beating a story to death personifies today’s media.

More curious are the occasions when the hottest story goes glacial. Not because the story ended, but because media interest waned. Case in point: the Haiti earthquake. The story dominated TV, online news and mainstream pubs for three months. But then coverage virtually stopped. Sean Penn called the media on it.

A similar thing happened with the BP oil debacle. Yes the oil had stopped flowing, but like the Haiti earthquake, life-altering ramifications continued to unfold including more affected shoreline, oil tenaciously clinging to marsh grass and people disagreeing with the FDA that it’s now safe to eat Gulf seafood.

Finally, and most inexplicable, we have the third story type affecting the media blend: not enough of the real thing. Consider this mere handful among hundreds of underreported stories:

While we heard all year that Twitter was everywhere and a major social force, a December 2010 Pew study about Twitter gave us fresh perspective, saying only 8% of American adults using the Internet use Twitter. This equates to only 2% usage on a typical day. Nearly half hardly ever read a word of the endless Tweets being Tweeted. You wouldn’t know that from all the buzz.
Who knew that defrauding health care companies has now become the hottest thing since Medicare fraud? $2.5 billion was collected in the past year alone. It’s only going to get worse.
Last week, Amazon announced the Kindle 3 became its best-selling item of all time. Interesting news considering iPad’s media mania.
More than 30 states are extracting natural gas from shale rocks, fueling a new “gas rush” as we seek to diminish our reliance on foreign oil. But critics are saying the EPA is underestimating the impact this is having on our drinking water.
Fiber optic cable was positioned as a be-all-end-all solution, but last year companies holding dark-fiber inventory (fiber not being used) took portions off the market to push prices up. Prices have doubled in the last 12 months as the inventory shrinks while more computing goes to the cloud. Is our Internet future in danger?
Good news! Did you know people gave more money in 2010, despite a troubling economy?
Did we hear enough about the anti-regulators who “permitted the Great Recession” who were left in charge, or even promoted?
Even though the banks repaid TARP funds, this doesn’t mean they are healthy. “Their asset values are often grossly inflated, which means their net worth is grossly inflated.”

Getting more story richness and balance in 2011 is arguably a naïve request. But can you imagine a media climate where we heard less of what we’re tired of hearing and more of what we don’t know? Bring it on, we have the time, interest and ability to deal with more variety, not less.

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Checkmate post is 2010's #1 social media blog on Ragan.com

Posted At : January 3, 2011 3:50 PM | Posted By : Andy Beaupre
Related Categories: Social Media,News

The #1 social media blog on the popular Ragan.com site in 2010 was a Checkmate blog about Nestle and Facebook called Seven social media lessons from Nestle's reputation crisis. See our original post here.

These lessons are still relevant as we enter a New Year with social media's continued omnipresence.

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