This weekend, I am playing with the Wickr App. Wickr provides and ultra-secure mobile messaging App (for free, via iTunes):

• Quadruple, encrypted military-grade encryption of messages
• That expire (“this message has self-destructed” after elapse of a specified time
• That can only be read on specified mobile devices
• That is easy enough for anyone to use (cnet says that a “three-year-old could use [it]“)

This is a really compelling product offering in a world of ever-increasingly open exposure of privacy–not just for personal messaging, but conducting secure business transactions (like maintaining attorney-client privilege over mobile). It does not take too much of a stretch of the imagination so see Wickr as a great enterprise platform: allowing employees of a company to send SMS and MMS messages–on their own devices–without fear of interception or disclosure outside of the company.

However, I have got to think that Wickr’s real transformational value would be realized by using it as a secure messaging platform. Imagine being able to conduct mobile commerce–with complete privacy and encryption–over mobile messaging. Gone is the need for your customers to take the time to download an App. Instead they can just SMS their credit card number (or even an MMS picture of their card) to you, knowing it will disappear at the end of the transaction. mCommerce becomes as easy as texting–but with the security and encryption previously only enjoyed by our military and intelligence services. This would be really exciting to explore. I hope the folks at Wickr open up APIs to try this out.

Until then, kudos for a great–free product–to help us protect our privacy.

The last month has introduced much new food for thought if you are trying to decide which mobile platform to build on first:

• Thirty days ago, you were probably thinking to start with iOS, not just because of the launch of the iPad Mini but also the preponderance of Apps in iTunes
• Then Microsoft launched Windows 8 (and the Surface), driving a full-court press to get developers to build apps for the Windows Store
• A few days later, IDC came out with the latest numbers, showing Android was crushing everyone, with a 75% market share of new phones sold in Q3.
• As a result, some declared that iOS was going the way of the Dodo–until last week, when iOS (especially the iPad) crushed the competition in online purposes purchases on Black Friday.

It has definitely been an eventful pre-Holiday Season in mobile.

Which Platform To Build On First?

With all these different metrics and shifts in leadership, which platform do you pick? The market share leader (Android)? The eCommerce leader (iOS)? The one most familiar to enterprise (Windows)? The one most open of all (HTML5)?

If you are Fortune-500 company with a big mobile budget the decision is easy: build on several. If you are smaller, you probably can only build one or two at most (or at least one to start on first). Which one do pick? The answer is actually simple—if you ask two key questions about your intended user base.

Question 1: What is the (Intended) Usage Pattern of Your Customers?

Notice that this question does not ask, “What is the Intended Usage Pattern for Your App?” Why? Because sometimes building an app is the wrong thing to do.

Apps are really fun to build. However, they require a lot from your customers. First they have to find the app. Then they have download and install it. Then remember to open up and use it. That’s a long chain of dependencies required for success.

If your customers use your product regularly—and this use is transactional or highly interactive in nature—then build an app. Open Table is a great example: I book dinner reservations several times a month, on the spur of the moment. It is much easier to do from an app, especially one that needs to interact with other Apps on my device (i.e., calendar, telephone, maps).

However, if your customers only use your services intermittently, don’t waste (their and your) time and effort with an App. Instead, use HTML5 to make your site work really well on mobile. The same is true if your customers only consume content from one source. There is no need to download an App to read a news site. As the Financial Times has shown, HTML5 is much better for this.

Question 2: If You ARE Building an App, What Are Your Customer Demographics?

If an App is the right thing for your customers, then you are really lucky: you get to pick from a great set of mobile platforms. The question now is which platform best suits your needs.

Whereas back end technologies are hidden from customers (allowing the freedom to pick based purely on technical considerations), mobile platforms are virtually “joined to the hips” of your customers. Picking a platform that your customers do not widely use will not provide the results you want—no matter how great the platform and app is.

To avoid this problem, pick the platform that best fits the demographics of your customer base. If you are building for gamers, build on Android (do the same if you are building for users in Emerging Markets). If you are building for doctors, build on Apple (do the same if you are building for high-end commerce). If you are building for internal enterprise IT use, Windows 8 or BlackBerry 10 may be your answer.

There are many ways to find out what platform you customers use most: industry analyst reports, Xyologic stats, or even your website’s Traffic by Operating System in Google Analytics. As long as you pay more attention to these metrics than the latest attention-grabbing mass mobile headlines, you will be using the right technology for your customers.

The Summer Olympics are very special. Every four years, for over two weeks, people all over the world (even those who are not normally sports fans) spend hours every day engrossed in the innermost details of dozens of sports—at home, at work, at school and at play.

However, in 2012 the IOC had opportunities never seen in any prior Summer Olympics…

This year was not just the first Summer Olympics since social media, multi-media mobile phones, and smart phone (and tablet) apps have become the ubiquitous means that over a billion people use to find and share information, opinion, photos and video globally—and instantly. It was also the first Summer Olympics since the rise in use of Open Data Platforms and Apps Competitions to tap the innovation of thousands of people to create better ways to access information (without adding the cost and complexity of hiring thousands of designers, developers and testers).

The IOC could have taken advantage of this by doing four things:

• Creating of an open data platform for access to all data (back to 1896) on events, medals, schedules, athletes, scores, etc. along the likes of NYC Open Data, Data.gov, the German Open Data Set and San Francisco Open Data
• Establishing deals with traditional media to make metadata-tagged, embeddable video and audio available for widely and easily use in Apps
• Writing a social media policy that advocated (rather than limited) sharing on-the-spot comments, updates, photos and videos—promoting event, sport, country and perhaps even athlete hashtags to make social media data easier to find and use
• Launching an Olympic App Competition along the likes of NYC Big Apps, Apps for Development, Apps for Climate Change, Apps4Africa and so many others.

If the IOC had done this they could have created the biggest, most exciting Open Data and App competition we have ever seen. Not only would this have tapped into the innovation of tens of thousands of developers, it would have harnessed competition between teams who wanted to highlight the technology strength of their countries, their love of their country’s history and culture, and their passion for the athletes representing them in their favorite sports.

Imagine what kind of Apps this global technology could have created:

• Apps written by ex-gymnasts that combined athlete bios and explanations of events and rules with (official and fan) video of preliminary rounds and the World Championships. Apps that even let the audience score what they saw in real-time.
• Apps combining location-based data with captured photos and video along the entire 26-mile, 385-year course of the marathon, letting you play back key parts of the race, see every part of the course at once, and cheer on runners via Facebook and Twitter
• Fantasy Olympic Team apps that let you assemble your own dream team for events and compete with your friends—or globally in the Olympic spirit
• Training gamification apps that let you record and visually display your running and swimming times (like Nike’s training apps) to understand in new ways the tremendous the speed, strength and endurance of Olympians

AT&T’s Rethink Possible Ad: Imagine if the swimmer did not have to write down the new record (and instead an App logged his times and showed them again every record Olympic Record—and every qualifying round—back to 1896)

Apps like these would have made these Olympics more interactive and participatory than any in history. While we did not get this in 2012, I am keeping my fingers crossed for a 2014 Sochi Winter Apps Competition, and perhaps an even 2016 Rio Summer Apps competition.

Last week Paul Berry, former CTO of the Huffington Post, launched his new Rebel Mouse social aggregation service. My first reaction was, “Oh great! Just what I need, another social media service.” However, as I like to keep abreast on new technologies and platforms can change how we work and live, I thought I would check it out.

I was pleasantly surprised by what I found.

A Bit of an Epiphany

I wasn’t surprised by Rebel Mouse’s feature set (although it is quite rich: not only can you aggregate social streams, you can add posts, invite contributors, and analyze all of your traffic—giving you a new blogging and publication option beyond Tumbr, WordPress and SquareSpace). What I was surprised by was a more visceral reaction:

Rebel Mouse took my social media stream and made it much easier to grok.

One Dimension Is No Longer Enough

Twitter greatest strength, its simplicity, is also a weakness. Twitter’s one-dimensional, time-based streams tend to get overwhelmed by noise-of-the-day. Step back through someone’s Twitter stream and you will see clusters of Tweets about Yammer, then Tweets about the Facebook IPO, then Tweets about Instagram, etc. Even worse, the stream consists almost entirely of fonts of single size (only using color to differentiate hyperlinks).

Facebook’s Timelines improve on this by adding inline photos and videos, expanding upon the amount of text you have, etc. However, it is still a one-dimensional (time-based) stream. Tumblr is the same (albeit prettier).

These approaches present information in a way that requires a lot of conscious effort to consume. This was fine when social media services were small. However, it not scalable to size of social networks today.

Rebel Mouse: Moving Beyond One Dimension

Rebel Mouse, does not just aggregate your content; it presents it in way that makes it easy for others to subconsciously consume. This is not only achieved by its use of the Masonry layout (now better known as the “Pinterest-style UI”). Rebel Mouse adds some clever UI design elements that let you easily—and instantly—understand the topic of the post, see what you added social content, and differentiate this from comments, shared source material, etc.:

This takes what the best of what people love about Twitter (simplicity) with Pinterest (visual browsing) and Tumblr and WordPress (blogging and analytics) and puts them together in a single package. This looks simple, but it is BIG accomplishment. The value is clear: If I wanted someone to rapidly and easily get a perspective on what interests me, I would recommend they first go to the my Rebel Mouse page (rather than my other of my social media pages):

What Comes Next

In the “Post-Facebook IPO World” it is now more important than ever to ask what comes next (and how this creates business value). An obvious way Rebel Mouse can make money is charge users for value-add services: vanity domains for individuals, pages for corporations, expanded analytics, eCommerce integration, etc. It looks like most of these are already on Rebel Mouse’s (publicly-disclosed) radar.

However, the foundation Rebel Mouse has achieved (i.e., subconsciously consumption of mass content from multiple streams) opens two additional doors.

1. It could create a fantastic Discovery Service. Imagine an easy-to-consume Rebel Mouse page aggregating content on a specific business topic (e.g., mobile), products, or even personalities. I am pretty sure I would subscribe to and read many such pages, many times each day to discover new information.
2. It could create an exchange to deliver incredibly relevant ads. Furthermore, these ads would be more valuable than other socially driven ads as you are much more likely to be in a purchasing mindset if viewing a business topic, product or personality page, than your are if you are just checking in on your friends.

It will be great to see these and other services come to fruition. Until then, I recommend requesting a page and grabbing your name—before someone else does.

Mobile Advertising is NOTHING Like Web Advertising

Facebook’s IPO, and the myriad analyst remarks on its challenges in the mobile space, has brought the discussion about how to make mobile advertising work back into the limelight. Many have argued that mobile advertising, especially mobile advertising in non-Search apps, has much lower likelihood of success because customers are not in the process of “seeking to buy something”. These arguments are based on the assumption that mobile advertising is like web advertising. This assumption is wrong.

Web advertising (in-text or display ads) offers you the opportunity to present many advertisements to a customer at once on a screen. You can leave these ads up for the duration of the customer’s perusal of the screen or rotate new ads in place over time. In addition, if the customer is logged in (or you have really good cookies) you have high certainty of his or her identity.

Mobile advertising is entirely different. The screen real estate only provides the opportunity for one advertisement. Even worse, you only have a small amount of time (less than two seconds) as your advertisement is “getting in the way” of the customer’s attempt to do something on their smartphone. What you do have in your favor is near certainty of the customer’s identity.

The Approach Needed Solve Mobile Advertising Has ALREADY Been Developed

This is not a new challenge. It is the same situation faced for years when cross-selling products and services to customers from the call center. They had: 100% accurate customer identification, lots demographic and account information on the specific customer, and only a few seconds to offer one compelling promotion before ending the call.

The trick to solving this challenge was to figure out the one ideal promotion to present to each customer based on who he is, what he is currently doing, and the current time-of-year, day-of-week, and time-of-day. Just as important is using the feedback on each to calibrate future promotions to the same customer (to avoid turning advertising into a nuisance), making this more of a Recommendation Engine challenge than an Advertising Engine one. The rewards are enormous: bounty payments for accepted promotions are frequently 100x greater than those for clicked-on ads.

The Technology Exists to Scale This to Mobile

A decade ago, we scaled this model from the 10-transaction-per-second world of call centers to the 10,000-transaction-per-second world of the Internet, generating billions of dollars of value per year. Now is the time to scale this to 1,000,000-transaction-per-second world of mobile to capture tens of billions of dollars in value (luckily we can now grab Big Data technologies off-the-shelf to do this, in the past we had to invent new technologies to scale 100- and 1,000-fold). Mobile, with its “Perfect combination” of validated identity, addressable application data, location awareness and real-time notification services offers an amazing opportunity to take this to the next level.

The Results Would Be Incredible

Imagine this mobile Yelp-like example:

Barney has smartphone and is in the Financial District in Manhattan, Monday through Friday each week. When he installs your app, you get his email and mobile phone that lets you (via sources such as Flurry and PRIZM codes) guess he is likely an affluent male in his mid-thirties. Based on this you may want to advertise local bar Happy Hour promotions when he opens your App between 12pm and 6pm ET on Thursdays. Clicking on the promotion provides a bar code, QR code or confirmation number for redemption with the ad buyer. You can adjust future advertising by tracking redemption rates and controlling for mobile location, day-of-week and time-of-day.

Adding social data to mobile makes this scenario even more valuable. Imagine this mobile Facebook-like example

Barney has entered lots of information about himself in your App: he is single, he is interested in women, he works at Goliath National Bank (GNB), etc. You can now get incredibly targeted. You can offer a promotion that gives Barney more savings if he brings co-workers from GNB with him. You can now track his response against others based on location, day-of-week, time-of-day and a slew of confirmed individual demographic data (gender, employer, age, etc.) to plan and refine future promotions.

What Are We Waiting For?

Companies like Facebook, Twitter, Groupon, FourSquare, Yelp and many others have assembled a “treasure trove” of data on customers. Today’s technologoes make it easier for companies to parse this data for recommendation and promotion than ever before. Apple and Google make it easy to reach over a billion people worldwide through in-App ads, alerts and notifications. The next step is to map traditional cross-sell models into the mobile space (rather than force-fitting web advertising models).

So how do we find the very best? How do we attract them to our companies? There are the obvious choices: advertisements, job boards, networking, referral bonuses, etc. The problem with these methods is that they focus on people who are actively looking for the work. They often don’t find people we would love to hire who are not looking for work. In addition, these methods provide little assurance we are getting the best, forcing us to apply proxies to test capability.

Luckily, we now have an excellent way to find great developers: the hackathon. Why? Here’s what happens when you sponsor a hackathon:

1. You Tap the Hacker Culture: Today’s development culture is the hacker culture. By sponsoring a hackathon you are reaching out to the most dynamic developers in an appealing way: a competition to demonstrate their knowledge and creativity
2. You Attract the Go-Getters: Most developers work very long hours. Even so, the best are always looking for new ways to learn skills and test knowledge. Those with the drive to go and compete in a hackathon are exactly the kind of people you want.
3. You See Teams in Action: At a hackathon you can watch teams in action, under time and competitive pressure. You can see which teams handle this pressure best, and who the leaders are—incredibly valuable insights when seeking the best talent.
4. You See Real Work Product: As a member of the award panel, you see who has the best designs, who built the most in the time permitted and who had the best performing code (you can even do spot code reviews). You even get all this without any violating confidentiality provisions.
5. You See How People Work With Your Product: You get to see who likes your APIs* and who doesn’t. (You will also get great insights to improve them.) You see who can build the most with your product and who can help you improve it.

These are incredibly valuable insights. What is more amazing, is that you see these before you even consider making a job offer—instead of sixty days after hiring a new employee.

So, if you are looking for great people, sponsor a hackathon. You’ll quickly find the talent you want, significantly reducing the length (and risk) of the search process. Just remember to make it fun and appealing—don’t turn it into an obvious career fair or recruiting event.

*If you don’t have APIs that readily apply for a hackathon contest, you are not completely out of luck. You can orchestrate a hackathon around the platform you are based on, open source libraries you use, or many other proxies for your product.

If you have not heard, Facebook’s Timeline for brand pages has arrived. If you are managing a brand page, you can already setup a Timeline-based page, previewing and editing it as much as you want before pushing it out “live” for the rest of the world to see. (If you have not started to do this yet, you might want to soon, as Facebook will automatically convert all brand pages to Timeline-based pages on March 30.)

Some brands are complaining about this change (just look at the comments on any article writing about this change). However, others have already embraced the new format. One that has really stood out (to a “news junkie” like me) is the new Facebook page of NBC’s Meet The Press. It lets visitors visually browse a 60-year timeline of the major news events that have defined three generations of US history—letting them delve deeper into items of interest by viewing, sharing and commenting on videos and read stories.

What struck me most while perusing Meet The Press’s new page is that the Facebook Timeline is a great format to connect to others by telling an interactive story. It combines elements of Facebook, Blogs, Twitter and Tumblr. You can scan across time, dive down into areas that attract your interest, watch videos, read stories, share information with others—and exchange comments with a community of 800+ million members—all without leaving a single “infinite” page This is very different exploring a traditional website, disruptively different

So, what should you do over the next three weeks if you have not figured out how you want to convert your brand page to the new Timeline format? Use the Timeline to tell your brand’s story. This is fantastic is you are a non-profit: it lets you tell how you have achieved your mission so far—and what more there is to do. It is just as good for personalities: entertainers can share the evolution of their work—and the resulting accolades of their fans—over time. It is great for larger brands, letting you show how their products have been part of our lives for decades—take a look at Coca Cola’s page for a great example. It even works for small businesses and startups—we often hear from news organizations advice those who want to gain coverage, “Don’t give us a press release, tell us a story”—the Facebook Timeline lets startups and SMEs tell their stories.

It will be quite interesting to see what new brand pages emerge over the next few weeks and months as the Facebook Timeline rolls our worldwide. It will be even more interesting to look back in ten years and see how these pages have captured moving snapshots of our society with Likes and comments: just imagine what it would have been like to explore a Rolling Stones Timeline page from the 1960s to today.

PS – At Oulixeus, we aim to practice what we advocate. We invite you to explore (and Like) our new Oulixeus Facebook Timeline page

Why Risk Management Matters is So Important in Creation

A Risk is a possible situation that could materially affect (i.e., derail) your plans. Risk Management is a set of techniques to reduce the likelihood and/or effect of risks on whatever you are doing.

While any operation or activity has implicit risk, the act of creating something entirely new—be it a company, platform, product or process—is fraught with some of the biggest risks imaginable:

• What if your underlying assumption regarding the need for what you are creating does not match reality?
• What if your select approach to fulfil this need does not fit the market?
• What if customers cannot readily recognize the value of what you are creating?
• What if your assumptions of customers’ priorities differ from what they really are?
• Are your customers do not use your creation in the way you expected?

Get all of these right and you will have created “The Next Big Thing.” Get any one wrong and you will likely have a big failure on your hands: lost or delayed revenue; failed launch; wasted time, work and money; etc. Managing these risks from the start—without undue overhead and complexity—is vital to success. The #LeanStartup easily lets you do this.

Tactic 1: MVP Testing to Avoid the Biggest Risks to Creation

As outlined above, act of creation faces bigger, more fundamental risks than any other endeavor. A core principal of risk management is to “manage the biggest risks first—when they are easiest and least costly to address.” The #LeanStartup does this using the Minimum Viable Product (MVP).

MVPs test high-risk assumptions (regarding market, platform, product position, product scope, etc.) from the start, using rapid, low cost development efforts. This avoids the biggest risk of all: wasting time and money creating something customers do not need, want or use as expected.

However, what is refreshing about the Ries’ approach is how he challenges current conventional wisdom regarding how to do this:

I was a devotee of the latest in software development methods (known collectively as agile development), which promised to help drive waste our of product development. However, despite that, I committed the biggest waste of all: building a product that our customers refused to use. (The Lean Startup, pp. 46-47).

Instead of focusing on eliminating “product development waste” (i.e., figuring out how to build faster), the #LeanStartup model focuses on eliminating “customer learning waste” (i.e., figuring out how to understand your customers faster) using the principal of Validated Learning. Validating Learning first uses MVPs (and later Innovation Accounting, see below) to let you focus your time and energy on creating the things most useful to customer (and vital to your success).

Tactic 2: Innovation Accounting to Continuously Avoid New Risks

Risks are not static. They do not all start at the beginning but can emerge at any time. If you do not continuously keep your eye out for new risks to manage, you are likely to face unpleasant surprises as you progress with creating your new product, platform or process. The #LeanStartup model addresses though use of a new form of metrics called Innovation Accounting.

Innovation Accounting is based on the use of actionable, accessible, and auditable metrics to detect and avoid risks by measuring what customers are doing with your product. It throws out “Vanity Metrics”—both measurable ones such as website hits and anecdotal ones such as “person X said our product was great”—in favor of metrics that focus on how customers proceed through their entire life cycle:

• Of those who looked at our product, which actually bought it?
• Of those who bought it, which used it (and how much or how often)?
• Of those who used it, what features did they use most and least?
• Of those who bought and used it, how many continued to do so? How many recommended it to their friends and colleagues?

Through use of Innovation Accounting (frequently in tandem with A/B Testing, Cohort Analysis and other pilot strategies), you can detect aspects of your product, platform or process that are resulting in undesired outcomes (e.g., abandoned sales, customer turn-over) earlier, addressing them before they become large problems. Furthermore, by tying metric results into your product development lifecycle (another unique change to Agile and Lean methodologies), you can avoid the risks of build whole sets of product features and capabilities that are not useful to your customers (and hence, a waste of time, effort and money to you).

Tactic 3: Pivoting to Mitigate Realized Risks

No matter how skillful you are, some risks will simply “just happen.” Even if your execution is flawless, external events (e.g., new market trend, new competitor, new invention) will change your competitive landscape. When this happen, you may need to change what you are doing if you want to continue to grow your new creation.

The #LeanStartup model introduces the concept of the Pivoting to adapt to change. Pivorting formalizes a fact-based process for change (using Validated Learning from MVP Testing and Accountability Metrics) adding calmness and control when reacting to new information and external events. Ries highlights ten categories of pivots to help you more effectively adapt to a broad range of scenarios, such as:

• Your product is compelling but its delivery model is not
• Your product is compelling but its sales model or channel is not providing the results you need
• Your product is compelling but your valuation for pricing does not match your customers’
• Your strategy is compelling but underlying market and technology changes require a different approach

Inclusion of Pivoting in your overall business model provides a tool to mitigate the effects of late occurring (or late discovered) risks that could not be avoided earlier in the creation lifecycle.

***

Creating anything new is an exciting—but risky—endeavor. Eric Ries’ #LeanStartup model provides three tactics that not only help you guide your venture to success, but also seamlessly harness the most powerful risk management techniques from the start of your idea through realization of your goals.

Article first published as Ten Tech Trends for Your 2012 New Year’s Resolutions List on Technorati

One of the most exciting things about working in tech is using it to create new ways to work, play—and even live. We have seen many great technology innovations develop over the past few years. Over 2012, ten of them will complete the jump from “new concept” to “mainstream trend.” How many of them are your ready for?

1. Everything Will Be Portable. The move to portable computing (smartphones, tablets and ultrabooks) will accelerate. Thick laptops and—even worse—desktops will be a relic of the past (except for those with high-power computing needs). If you are not yet mobile- and portable-ready, you better get there very soon.

2. Augmented Reality Will Go Mainstream. Augmented Reality (AR) is no longer a science fiction concept. Smartphones and (especially) tablets are mass-market platforms for everyday augmented reality. We are already seeing the first applications at Tech Meetups, CES and more. At least three innovators will exploit this, gaining mainstream adoption, by the end of 2012.

3. Touch Will Be Ubiquitous. Over the past five years, capacitive touch interfaces have re-programmed how millions of us interact with technology. As more devices are now sold today with touch than without, it is time to begin optimizing your user interface and user experience for touch (instead of a two-button mouse and keyboard).

4. Voice Will Be Next. While the intuitiveness of touch is a leapfrog improvement over mouse-and-keyboard, it still ties up our hands. Voice-based interaction is where we need to go. Apple’s Siri began the move of voice-driven interaction into the mainstream. This year, we’ll see SDKs for iOS and Android that harness the creativity of thousands to explode use of voice.

5. Fat Will Be the New Thin. Over a decade ago, broadband Internet enabled browsers to replace thick client applications. Now, portable computing usage across low power, lossy networks (e.g., mobile, WiFi, Bluetooth) coupled with AppStore Model has brought locally installed apps back in vogue. Building web apps is not enough; you need AppStore apps too.

6. Location-based Privacy Will Be Solved. Over the last two years location-based services became really hot. Unfortunately location-related privacy issues became hot too. The move of these services into mainstream populations of tens of millions will expand anecdotal security scares into weekly news stories, forcing adoption of safer location-based privacy policies.

7. Cloud Will Be the New Norm. Cloud computing is no longer an “edge market.” It is now adopted by big enterprises, public sector agencies—and even consumer tech providers. The cost, convenience and flexibility advantages of cloud computing will make it too hard for everyone not to use—everyday—by the end of this year.

8. …So Will Twitter. While people still love to debate the reasons to use Twitter, everything from the Arab Spring to the Charlie Sheen Meltdown showed that Twitter is now a well-recognized media channel. #Election2012 will accelerate mainstream use of Twitter—with the same overwhelming intensity we have seen for years in “traditional” campaign advertising.

9. ‘Consumerization of IT’ Planned and Budgeted. Consumer tech has become so sophisticated (without sacrificing ease-of-use and intuitiveness) that we began last year to demand its use in the enterprise. 2012—the first year in which most enterprise budgets include planned projects to support the consumerization of IT—will both accelerate and “lock in” this new tech trend.

10. 2012 Will Be Declared the Begin of “The ‘Big Data’ Era.” This year we will see another 40% increase in data we need to manage. This growth, coupled with recent releases of enterprise-ready high-scale NoSQL products will begin adoption of this tech by the entire industry. Looking back, 2012 will represent the start of the global, cross-industry Big Data era.

If you haven’t started embracing these already, now is a great time to add them to your “2012 Technology New Year’s Resolution List.”  Sponsor a few pilot projects in your enterprise. Buy one or two Post-CES products to help you work more efficiently at the office. Or—if you want to include the whole family—buy one to use while you shop online, watch TV or manage your household.

Yes, it has been a really bad year for BlackBerry. Their security architecture was almost blocked by several national governments. They have lost significant market share. Their PlayBook has not sold well. Their earnings have dropped precipitously. And now, their new line of BlackBerry 10 (f/k/a “BBX”) smartphones have been delayed until the end of 2012 and their stock hit an eight-year low today.

Right now it would be really easy to pile Pelion on Ossa and bash BlackBerry. However, that would not be terribly productive. Instead, I’d rather offer some unsolicited—but potentially very useful—advice as to how to turn around their brand and market position: get rid of the BlackBerry OS move to Android—at least on a few new smartphones

This may sound like surrender. It is not. It would be one of those rare situations when a company applies creative destruction to itself to regain leadership. Here is how it could work:

• BlackBerry’s OS and Enterprise Server Architecture—the very thing that let them create the smartphone market—is now exactly what is holding it back. It is more vulnerable to outage than newer mobile architectures. It has a smaller developer community and much fewer apps. It does not have the features Android and iOS have. It is no longer a competitive advantage for BlackBerry. It is time to move away from it. Luckily for BlackBerry, Android is open available for their use—without license fees
• However something far less technical—the BlackBerry keyboard—remains a key unique selling proposition for them. Many people stay on their BlackBerry’s (or at least keep one for work) for one simple reason: BlackBerry’s (patented) keyboard remains the easiest, fastest keyboard to use for “power” email and text users. Imagine how compelling a smartphone would be with Android OS, Android Market and BlackBerry’s Keyboard.
• Finally, BlackBerry has something else of enormous market value: established enterprise relationships with near every Fortune 500 company (and many, many SMEs). BlackBerry sales reps and re-seller partners could bring a new Android-powered BlackBerry to the enterprise, introducing this new product to a “captive” audience of enterprise-issued smartphone users faster than anyone else. Pleasing these users would later lead to a return to growth of BlackBerry’s consumer market share.

The interesting thing is that BlackBerry does not have to do this for 100% of their product line. They can try it on a few smartphones, in partnership with Google (I am sure Google would be happy to oblige). I am also betting this innovation would create a lot of buzz around their product lime and give $RIMM a much-needed price bump.

Facebook has the potential to become the “marketing platform of the decade” used by all types of organizations (e.g., small business, enterprise, non-profits) to engage their customers:

1. At over 800 million members, it has the widest reach of any network in history (i.e., nearly all of your customers are on Facebook). Facebook Connect lets you tap this network in one click.
2. Just as important, Facebook has become ubiquitous in people’s lives. Uses spend more time on Facebook than the next four most popular domains combined (i.e., Facebook is the fastest way to share a message with your customers).
3. Best of all, the network effect of Facebook incentivizes people to use true information for identification (i.e., Facebook combines the accuracy of “traditional” paid subscription direct marketing data with the timeliness of online interaction.)
4. Finally, Facebook provides organizations easy-to-use tools to set up pages, access customer data, and analyze trends (tools good enough to potentially displace many enterprise solutions for campaign management and CRM analytics).

The One Feature Holding Back Marketing Platform Dominance

This four-way combination should make Facebook the dominant marketing platform – for small businesses, large enterprises, and non-profits alike. However, Facebook lacks one critical feature to achieve this: providing business customers the ability to geographically target (“geo-target”) ‘Wall’ content (news, videos, status updates, etc.). As a result, businesses using Facebook Pages to reach customers are forced to select from three Hobson’s Choices: 1) spam customers with irrelevant content, 2) reduce content to the least common denominator or 3) fragment their membership across multiple pages. Let’s look at three examples:

1) Large Business Example: International High-end Grocery Chain

A particular high-end grocery chain (I frequent almost daily) makes extensive use of Facebook for customer outreach. However, their stores have different inter-regional needs (based on climate and culture) and intra-regional needs (based on inventory). To manage this, this company uses dozens of different Facebook Pages: one at each country level and one for each individual store. This significantly fragments their reach as their customers are forced to locate and ‘Like’ many different pages (something annoying at best and unlikely to occur at worst).

2) Small Business Example: Specialty Recruiting Firm

A colleague of mine runs a small specialty recruiting firm for the software industry that connects companies and candidates at two levels: he shares job postings to attract candidates and he shares candidate credentials to attract companies. He does this nationally, across many metropolitan markets. To manage this in Facebook, he has to share all information with all fans, forcing him to span customers with data that more often-than-not does not interest them. As a result, many of his fans have ‘hidden’ his feeds, making Facebook less useful to his business and his customers.

3) Non-Profit Example: Nationwide Animal Rescue Organization

I used to be a ‘Fan’ of a nation-wide animal rescue group that uses social media to call animal-lovers to help animals in desperate need. However, nearly all of this assistance is local (e.g., can someone foster this cute dog in ‘City X’ before in the next 48 hours before it is put to sleep?) As a non-profit, the organization does not have the resources to manage separate Facebook Pages for each metro area. As a result, they send appeals to help for every animal in every location to every Fan. This presents Fans the choice of being bombarded with animals they cannot help (incredibly disheartening) or hiding the feed (inhibiting the organization’s mission).

Geo-targeting is the Answer

Allowing Business Pages to geo-target Wall posts would solve the problems all three of these organizations are facing:

• Customers of the high-end grocery chain would be able access to global, regional, and local information (for every nearby store) by just following one page.
• The owner of the recruiting firm could target candidates and job offers by geography, something of growing importance in today’s harder relocation market.
• The non-profit would be able to offer those who animals the ability to provide urgent help without feeling “guilty” about circumstances they are powerless to change.

The changes enabled by geo-targeting are not trivial; they are transformational. They turn a flood of mostly-irrelevant noise into tailored stream of highly pertinent information. Customers are more likely to read updates (instead of ‘Hiding’ them), leading to higher engagement (and sales). Even better, the benefits of geo-targeting grow as more organizations use them: customers are bombarded with less noise from each page, making them both happier and more likely to read the Wall Posts of many Business Pages. (It is not surprising that the use of Geo-targeting on social networks creates positive externalities, thanks to network effects.)

This may sound like hyperbole, but there is a precedent for it: Internet advertising. Before the rise of context-targeted advertising, Internet companies bombarded users with display, popup and pop-under adverts to drive as much display inventory revenue as possible. It took companies like Google to show that reducing how much you showed customers (based on location and behavior) would actually increase engagement (and revenue). Facebook has the opportunity to take this to an entirely new level, leveraging their power of their Wall and their real-time access to highly accurate demographic and location data.

One process often over-looked is answering those “account security questions” required to gain access to (or assistance with) your account. Too many businesses manage this is a way that completely falls apart when you are likely to need this most (in an airport, department store of other busy place far from your home or office).

The routine model of most companies is to ask you to provide personal identifying information (PII), such as your mother’s maiden name, social security number. Verbally sharing the answers to these is fine when you are in the privacy of your home or office. Sharing them in public, where you can be easily overheard, is an invitation to identity theft. Typing them over a smartphone is also less than ideal, especially when you are holding bags or waiting at a checkout counter.

Some companies try to get around this by using strong passwords. However this too is an item that you would never want to speak out loud in public. It is also likely be something hard to type on smartphone keyboard or flip-phone keypad.

The answer is to consider the mobile use-case from the start and to design a process that works equally well anywhere: at home, in public, on your PC or on any telephone. HSBC (United Kingdom) does a really good job with this. This is not a surprise as HSBC is a very global company and use of mobile for business transactions is much more widespread in Europe in Asia than it is in the US. HSBC uses a two-part system for authentication, where both parts are completely numeric (enabling easy entry anywhere by keypad or voice recognition) AND both are items that are completely useless to anyone who overhears them in public (a magic combination):

• The first item you use is your account number. This is fully numeric and it is the same number you give others who need to give money to you (i.e., it is something you are not afraid someone else will hear).
• The second item is a numeric PIN (Personal Identification Number). However, it is a PIN that is never used in its entirety. The IVRS, computer or call centre agent speaking to you over the phone will never ask you your PIN: they will only ask you a series of questions like “What is the third digit of your PIN? What is the sixth?” As a result, anyone overhearing you (unless you are silly enough to have your phone on speaker) will not gain any information they can use to crack your account (before triggering a fraud alert and security lock).

This simple design works really well everywhere (it even translates well across multiple languages). It is not only easy to use. It is something that you feel comfortable using in public.

We need more solutions like this to make our mobile lives easier.