The Year That Was: Best of The Rest
It’s a great year, when a company that almost sold for six billion dollars and reached a billion dollar valuation faster than any other takes second place to a seven year old company. (Then again, there’s always next year.) Here is what else we remember from the year that was:
Like – A word that "valley girls" made famous has become a ubiquitous term for online activity. While many think of it as a Facebook only vocabulary word, it was only Facebook who popularized it. And this year, besides ubiquity, we learned something from it. We now have a new only action – the soft-touch, the no-commitment action. Now, a click doesn’t mean you have to leave the web page. Now, you can interact without actually having to interact. It has done for the web what sms did for the phone; it gave us an easier way out. Yet, it also increased web activity without diminishing marketing ability. Brilliant.
Deals – Almost overnight a new business model was invented. Groupon wasn’t the first to aggregate restaurant coupons. They weren’t the first to offer time sensitive deals. They were the first to put the two together and to add in the concept of a deal tipping. They may not have even been the first to do all that, but they figured out how to put it all together in one heck of a scalable format that has hundreds of other businesses thinking they can do the same. And, it’s not just clones, but the deal phenomenon has become the de facto method for monetization of any audience. Zagat? Opentable? Travelzoo? Expedia? Everyone with merchants and an audience, not to mention the hundreds of traditional publishers, has jumped into the deal space. Next year, we will see this as either genius or the ruin of retail.
Social and The Death of Web 2.0 – It’s either the death of social or the birth of social, but this year marks a true turning point as we no longer see a glut of social networking companies. We see plenty of new companies that leverage social networking functionality, but almost any new startup, even ones that are incredibly well capitalized, have forgone trying to create their own network. Social today means leveraging an existing network for identity – Facebook, Twitter, and sometimes LinkedIn. Social today actually makes sense. As with "Like," social today means three things – profile, follow, and some form of interaction. Be it Blippy to Quora, we’ve finally seen the future of social.
Data – We thought we knew what the web could do for tracking, but each year we find ourselves amazed, and this year is no exception. It used to be a simple ability to track the actions. Now, data is much more; it’s about being able to track and target in advance of the actions. Exchanges have radically transformed what can be done in display and the types of companies that operate in that ecosystem. Part and parcel are the sites themselves that generate data. So much data is now available, that companies will spend the next several years trying to figure out just how to use all of it.
Legislation – It seems no stone was left unturned by the government this year. They made up for their general hands-off approach to the internet by looking into almost every aspect of the ad industry. From the FTC, to congressional hearings, to legislation, innovation has started to square off against potential legislation. For every advance, especially as it pertains to data, there has been a new inquiry into the companies that look to make money off that advance. Unfortunately, we’ve only seen the beginning. This year was less about actual legislation and more a big red flag to any operating in the internet space that change is underway, and we will have to be prepared.
Buy Once Use Everywhere – Microsoft’s series of commercials with a call to action of "To the cloud," has, it seems, signified primetime arrival of this thing called "the cloud." From a technology standpoint, cloud computing isn’t new, but that it is starting to become something for the rest of us to grasp, is. For us, understanding the cloud comes down to one great application. Calling this app cloud computing is probably not even the correct term, but it’s the type of technology that will soon become commonplace – seamless access. And nothing is easier to grasp than the Kindle Application from Amazon. You don’t need a kindle to use the kindle app, but with the kindle app, so long as you have an internet enabled device you can read a book on any of your devices, the same book, without having to purchase again. Even better, the app tracks where you last read, so regardless of the device, you always pick up where you left off. We’re just starting to see similar applications from DirectTV, and we can’t wait to see how else buy once, use everywhere gets employed.
Apps – dub dub dub what? That’s the question bouncing around in people’s minds now. It’s not as though "www" is dead, but all of a sudden it seems to have some serious competition. A year ago, certain individuals and companies wouldn’t have thought twice about the purchase of a highly valuable generic domain name. Now, those on the bleeding edge are thinking twice about such investments. The app ecosystem may have started out as a Facebook / social networking buzz word, but with smartphones reaching critical mass sooner than expected, it looks as though there is a serious contender to both search and direct navigation.
