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.

TrendsSpotting's 2010 Social Media Influencers

Trend Predictions in 140 Characters

TrendsSpotting's 2010 Social Media Influencers - Trend Predictions in 140 Characters

View more documents from Taly Weiss.

I hope the Mac mini goes 'Green', instead of just going away

Rumors are flying that the Mac mini may be on its way out. Such rumors seem to indicate that the mini will either go away, or see a refresh. Let's hope it is the latter.

The Mac mini not only needs a specs refresh, it needs a refocusing of it's market position. Rather than being marketed as 'the underpowered Mac for people too cheap to buy a real Mac', it should be celebrated for its BYODKM (Bring your own display, keyboard, and mouse) heritage.

First off, Apple needs to build the next Mini in line with its improving stance on environmental considerations. Once the manufacturing story has a 'Greener' tinge, then the Mac mini can finally become the recycle-reuse-green-machine it almost is. They also needs to make it truly powerful enough to be worthy of the "Mac" prefix.

In addition, Apple could use its website to help build a community for DIYers looking for ways to locate peripherals from the vast array of hardware that's already out there. This could be as simple as creating an online catalog that help customers connect with local computer recycling centers and similar sources for cheap/free monitors, keyboards, and mice.

Continuously churning out improved machines every few quarters is what keeps Apple products ahead of the cool-curve. But there's definitely a niche to be served by bringing the latest Mac OS to people who would prefer the modestly smaller carbon footprint offered by using pre-owned peripherals.

One more thing, let's not rule out an unexpected scenario like the Mac mini being cross-bred with Apple TV or something.

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
    

LogoLounge.Com Reports on 2008 Logo Trends

LogoLounge.Com recently posted an insightful article covering their observations on 2008 logo trends. They have organized examples into 15 trend themes:

1. Supernova
   
2. Fine Line
   
3. FoldOver
   
4. Global Expansion
   
5. Loops
   
6. Jawbreakers
   
7. Strobe
   
8. Nimbus
   
9. Stitch
   
10. Colorblind
    
11. Amoeba
    
12. Facets
    
13. Doodles
    
14. Flourish
    
15. Fibrous
    

Read their full report to see the various examples of logo designs.

Are 3-D logos ruining or revolutionizing logo design?

brandchannel is hosting a 'branddebate' on this topic. As they state in their introduction of the topic: "On the front lines of the branding industry - among the designers - an ongoing battle is being waged over an essential branding component: logos, and in particular, 3-D, or dimensionalized, logos..."

It used to be said that format restrictions were a primary functional limitation that informed the decision making process of logo designers. Thoughts like 'it has to look good in black and white', or 'our budget only supports two color printing' often informed the amount of detail and color that made up a logo design. With the web and better/cheaper printing, these two primary limitations have less bearing on the design process (but don't forget about low quality fax cover pages!). Overall, it is now more of a pure design decision. What level of detail, color, and dimensionality will best serve the brand you are representing with the logo design?

Read some interesting opinions on both sides of this topic at brandchannel.com

ECO-ICONIC

The May/June 2008 edition of Trend Briefing is now online, highlighting three new 'green' trends: ECO-ICONIC, ECO-EMBEDDED and ECO-BOOSTERS. "It's a hands-on take on how the branding and design of eco-goods and services is about to enter a new phase..."

8 trends to capitalize on in 2008

trendwatching.com has released it's report on "8 trends to capitalize on in 2008". Always an interesting source for high-level marketing strategy and thought, the in-depth overview is worth a read (note: the full report download is a premium item). To summarize, they've dubbed the hot 2008 trends as:

1. Status Spheres
   
2. Premiumization
   
3. Snack Culture
   
4. Online Oxygen
   
5. Eco-iconic
   
6. Brand Butlers
   
7. Miy | Make It Yourself
   
8. Crowd Mining
   

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

Amazon finally eliminates tabs in favor of menus

It's the end of an era. Tabs are gone, long live drop-menus! Amazon has launched a redesign that more appropriately organizes their store sections into primary left-hand navigation with sub-menus. This is a vast improvement to the lonely few tabs that had been up at the top for a while now. That single giant drop menu is thankfully gone as well. Amazon was the dot com tab innovator, so it must've been hard to let got. But hey, there aren't any more white iPods anymore either. So, I guess if you have a site with white tabs, you are really behind the times now? ;-P

The Impact of Social Media on Search Rankings

SiteProNews:: "Over the past few years, the Internet has increasingly become a participatory social network where user-generated content is just as important as traditional advertising messages. This means your articles, blog posts, videos, podcasts, and other comments on the Web are now critical sources of information about your company, your products and services... Social media, therefore, becomes increasingly important to a Web site's success and its visibility in search engines...

With the advent of universal search by Google and others, search marketers and site owners will soon find it necessary to optimize their Web sites for a broad range of content types. This means creating content in every media and vertical niche applicable to your brand..."

This article summarizes the importance of a broad-media approach very well, highlighting the categories of: Search Personalization; Universal Search; Optimizing Podcasts; and Optimizing Google Base Data Feeds.

You don't want to necessarily implement content types or social media frameworks that aren't appropriate to your business, but be sure you are not overlooking a variety of options. And another trend is to NOT lock-up assets like PDF downloads and demos behind registration walls. Give a prospect all you have, if they are interested, they'll eventually wind up in your CRM database.

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...

Web Apps 101: Your Three Point Success Plan

TechCrunch - Building a web app is easy. Building a successful and profitable web app is where most people fail. If you want your app to stay out of the Dead Pool, you need to know the answer the following questions:

1. Who is it aimed at?
2. Why will they use it?
3. Will they pay for it?

Also, you can download the MP3 audio and PDF presentation that appear to be the foundation for this article at: http://www.futureofwebapps.com/

read more | digg story

MySpace News: The Digg Killer?

"MySpace is launching a news aggregator called MySpace News in the second quarter of 2007. It’ll rely on both algorithms and user rating - basically a combination of Google News and Digg..."

Yeah maybe it will be like the parallel-universe kind of digg with a really ugly design, giant ads with scantily clad women, and constant intermittent outages! I know, I know, it will probably succeed due to the sheer volume of existing users... Add to the '_-killer?' watchlist :-P

read more | digg story

The 50 Most Important People on the Web

pcworld.com: "Despite what Time magazine would have you believe, you are not the most powerful or influential person on the Web. At PC World we love online personals, social networks, and videos of people falling on their keisters as much as the next person, but without the folks who create the Craigslists, MySpaces, and YouTubes of the world, much of the Web's potential would be lost among spam sites and other online detritus."



read more | digg story

Top trends for 2007: Marketers' influence grows even as customers demand more control of the message

Happy 2007. I thought that BtoB had a pretty fair set of predictions. Here's a summary:

1. Rising influence of CMOs
2. Web 2.0 explodes
3. Global expansion
4. Boom in online video ads
5. Measuring engagement
6. More sophisticated search
7. Need for leads
8. Behavioral targeting hits the spot
9. Trade shows make a comeback
10. E-mail still going strong

Read the full article to get the details...