trendwatching.com's January 2010 Trend Briefing

trendwatching.com has released their latest report. Here's a quick summary of the 10 trends:

1. Business as unusual
2. Urbany
3. Real-time reviews
4. (F)luxury
5. Mass Mingling
6. Eco-easy
7. Tracking & alerting
8. Embedded generosity
9. Profile myning
10. Maturialism

View the full report online or Download the PDF version.

Source: www.trendwatching.com. One of the world's leading trend firms, trendwatching.com sends out its free, monthly Trend Briefings to more than 160,000 subscribers worldwide.

Twittermaven Survey Results:Users’ perception of brands on Twitter

Twittermaven recently surveyed 240 people with 6 questions regarding interacting with brands. Here are some key findings, as well as a sample chart.

• Most users (89%) agree that brands should engage their customers on Twitter.
  
• almost 90% of users would frown upon poor or inappropriate brand use of Twitter.
• 60% of respondents would recommend a company based on their presence on Twitter and 80% of Twitter users will reward those brands
• More than 60% of respondents have 100+ followers and almost 50% of respondents have posted more than 1000 Tweets

For the full results, including a number of other interesting charts, read the article.

10 Tools for Analyzing Twitter Activity

Feel the need to track some tweets? Get your twitter analytics fix, by using these handy web-based tools...

1. Twitter Grader gives you a grade based on the power of your Twitter profile.
2. Twinfulence: a simple tool using the Twitter API to to measure the combined influence of twitterers and their followers, with a few social network statistics thrown in as bonus.
   
3. TweetStats helps you graph your Twitter Stats including: Tweets per hour; Tweets per month; Tweet timeline; Reply statistics
   
4. TwitGraph analyzes your tweets and presents the data in pie-chart form
   
5. Twitstat - Real time Twitter Analytics
   
6. Twitter Quotient will get your Twitter stats (# friends, #updates) and calculate your Twitter profile standing
7. Twist - see trends in twitter in comparison line chart format
   
8. Tweetrush is a service that aims to provide estimated stats on Twitter usage over a period of time via many attractive bar charts
   
9. Twitter meter let's you query an index of all the words that have been sent to twitter's public timeline (since late 2007) and plot the number of times that word was used over time.
   
10. TweetVolume is a useful tool for tracking the usage volume, of specific keywords or phrases, in the twit-osphere
    

Global Insight bought in deal worth $200m

Economic forecasting firm Global Insight Inc. of Waltham (and past client of J.Y. Design) yesterday said it agreed to be purchased for $200 million by IHS Inc., of Englewood, Colo.

"Global Insight was formed in May 2001 when Joseph E. Kasputys, now its chief executive, acquired Data Resources Inc. of Lexington and its rival Wharton Econometric Forecasting Associates of Philadelphia. Kasputys said he plans to remain with Global Insight as chairman emeritus under IHS...

(an IHS executive) said Global Insight will retain its name and expand its Boston area workforce in coming years but work more closely with Cambridge Energy Research and other IHS "insight" companies, which provide data, analysis, and consulting services to businesses and government agencies around the globe...

Down the road, Kasputys said, he can imagine Global Insight and Cambridge Energy analysts working side by side on research and forecasts. "This is a terrific combination of Global Insight's economic analysis and Cambridge Research's energy analysis," he said..."

Source: Boston Globe. Congrats to GI.

Finding Information: Factors that improve online experiences.

The Institute for Dynamic Educational Advancement (IDEA) recently completed a survey about how people find information online. They've posted their findings online. In their own words, "...this report outlines key findings from surveys that explored factors that drive online experience as expressed by the three different subject groups – nonprofit organizations and cities, web designers and firms, and the general public." The survey’s major findings are summarized as:

• Designers underestimate the thresholds for an effective site
  
• Easy access to complete information is key to visitor enjoyment
  
• Good visual design and up-to-date information are critical
  
• Visitors want information fast
  
• Visitors want a broad range of topics
  
• Designers are overly optimistic about visitors’ ability to maintain orientation
  
• Visitors still need handholding
  
• Visitors point to the lack of breadth and depth of site content as causing an “Information Gap.”
  

You can view the information online or download the 17 page report in PDF at:

http://www.idea.org/find-information.html

J.Y. Design Posts: Apple Mac & iPod Buyer's Guide

J.Y. Design has long been an 'Mac shop'. Many Apple products are used in day to day work. We also find that we recommend various products to clients, colleagues, family and friends.

This new page will be the place to see the latest hardware, and what the highlights and tradeoffs are when considering a purchase. Check it out...

The End of Advertising as We Know It

"The next 5 years will hold more change for the advertising industry than the previous 50 did. Increasingly empowered consumers, more self-reliant advertisers and ever-evolving technologies are redefining how advertising is sold, created, consumed and tracked. Our research points to four evolving future scenarios – and the catalysts that will be driving them. Traditional advertising players – broadcasters, distributors and advertising agencies – may get squeezed unless they can successfully implement consumer, business model and business design innovation..."



This is a very interesting 28 page PDF document packed with valuable data, and some hypotheses worth contemplating.

read more | digg story

Competitious: New product in the works

Competitious.com: "Competitious is an early beta release of a much more robust service we’ve been planning here at RivalSoft... The service will be a comprehensive web-based platform that helps companies manage and analyze all information about their competitors, and will incorporate almost all of the suggestions and feedback we've received on Competitious. The new service will also have a new name (which we are keeping under wraps for now). All of your data from Competitious will be migrated when our new service launches. We are aiming to launch the new service in 2-3 months..."

Competitious is a great service even in its current form. It's a handy way to organize a group of related Companies / URLs and attach articles to them, create a comparison matrix for them, and also monitor Alexa traffic. You can create multiple "projects" which makes it handy for doing different competitive scenarios. I've even used it as a quick research tool when looking into topics or new market trends.

70 Expert Ideas For Better CSS Coding

via digg: "Smashing Magazine does it again with a superb list of little CSS tips & tricks to increase your productivity."

This is an excellent compilation of many of the tips and tricks posted to digg, but all rolled up in a nicely organized package with plenty of source-links to expand on the techniques outlined. There's definitely a buzz around what's to be considered "Best Practices" when it comes to CSS design and development. I see a strong opportunity out there for the development of a tool or app that puts a ui on top of these practices, making it easier to replicate across multiple projects.

read more | digg story

A List Apart: The Web Design Survey, 2007

The Web Design Survey, 2007: "Designers, developers, project managers. Writers and editors. Information architects and usability specialists. People who make websites have been at it for more than a dozen years, yet almost nothing is known, statistically, about our profession. Who are we? Where do we live? What are our titles, our skills, our educational backgrounds? Where and with whom do we work? What do we earn? What do we value?"

Give it a go to improve the findings, and you may even win something...