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On this episode of The Bella Buzz podcast, Desiree and Joe revisit the podcast called Technology Predictions for Small Business in 2010, to see if they should put out the Fortune Teller’s shingle. First, we hear about Desiree’s fantastic efforts to achieve Chris Brogan’s challenge of 100 Blog topics to write.
Desiree has established a blog called ChrisBroganProject.com that will officially launch in January with two posts per week for the entire year. The inspiration for this effort came from the movie Julie & Julia, which is based on a blog by Julie Powell in which she documents her experiences cooking the 524 recipes in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Motivation can come in many forms and a movie with a blogging connection about achieving an objective certainly works in this case.
The goal of this project is to establish the fact that no matter how busy a business owner might be, there is always time to generate quality content for social network distribution. Chris would agree and has personally given his thumbs up approval on the project.
As far as our predictions for 2010, we feel like we did a pretty good job of looking into the crystal ball. Although as you will hear we did not hit the details exactly, we think we make a case for listening to our next podcast when we will tackle the 2011 prognostications.
In 2010 we predicted:
1) Twitter will evolve … although it did not get bought by a mega-player like Google or Yahoo, Desiree makes the point that it did evolve dramatically from it’s original user interface. Having survived the numerous infrastructure issues that plagued the service in the early days, they were able to evolve during 2010 by focusing on the user experience. Coined the “new Twitter“, features such as threaded comments and a slick mobile application did take Twitter to another level in 2010.
2) 2010 will be the year of Location … Score points for us! From the meager beginnings of 100,000 users when we made our predictions to a Techcrunch report that they have now reached 5 million users, we had this one covered. Add to that the growth of Gowalla and birth of Facebook Places and we have certainly added location apps to the arsenal of marketing technology for small businesses.
3) Facebook will prepare an IPO … okay so we can’t be perfect, but you could say that all things would be pointing in this direction if they actually needed an IPO. The secondary market for Facebook shares (those shares being liquidated by employees and initial investors) are now trading at a company valuation of $50 billion dollars. In some quarters, this capitalization is actually a better scenario than the IPO crazy days of the first wave of internet entrepreneurship. With businesses able to raise funds without bringing the public markets into play, this will protect against a severe backlash should another bubble burst.
4) Traditional marketing funds will be moved towards digital … this one was another homerun as major old school companies like General Motors and Ford have seen the value of using the cost effective reach of social media for brand messaging. This trend will continue going forward into 2011 according to GM.
5) Merchants will accept payment via iPhone … we haven’t seen any new developments along this front yet, maybe we are a year too soon? Don’t look now, but the tech specs on the latest Google Nexus phone includes built in capability for Near Field Communication, which is just what is needed for payment systems. Hmmm.
6) Mobile phones will be customizable … for a completely radical viewpoint on our initial prediction, thinking that the hardware would be customizable a la Dell configurations, Desiree points out that the unique way in which individuals use apps makes the phone a custom device!
7) More opportunity in the free agent economy … business continues to look for unique ways to hire creative individuals to achieve their objectives. As an example, you have Calvin Lee who gets sought out by brands interested in having him evangelize on their behalf.
So … as we prepare our 2011 predictions, what do you think happened in 2010 that we didn’t predict? Share with us in the comments your big stories of the year!
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