So the fabled Mary Meeker Powerpoint tome hit the internet at the D11 conference this week and, if you have the patience to wade through the stats, the messages are pretty clear: It’s a wearable, shareable future for mankind.
It’s all in the wrist, isn’t it?
It’s not hugely revelatory (you can detect the undertone as you walk down your own street), but the pace of change has certainly caught both consumer and industry unawares. From phone to tablet to wearable tech for the quantified self and computing platform, the entire tech ecosystem is evolving into one where our bodies are an extension of the device. The future of the mobile computing platform may be wearable, but the form it takes is still up for debate and there’s a clear divide: Apple believes it’s the wrist; Google says it’s the face. Knowing Microsoft, they’ll proclaim it’s the knee.
Share and share alike?
They’re all generating data at a constant rate for the enterprise to consume, whether users are aware tacitly or explicitly. And people love to share — or so it seems on the surface. According to Meeker’s report, on average more than 500 million photos are shared per day so far in 2013. This is on pace to double by the end of 2013. But here’s an interesting fact: Snapchat’s success has accelerated where it’s starting to overshadow Instagram as a platform for sharing; I predict that its selling point will become more prevalent across other networks and new tools in the coming years. As Toby Beresford, a social strategist, mused “…[users] like the fact that the digital content disappears, so truly reflecting the stream culture of Gen Y rather than the ocean culture of Gen X.”
Data: Grab it while it’s hot.
So where does this leave the shareable future for business?
If the likes of Snapchat, and other social apps yet to spring forth, begin to take off, it will mean that real-time, right-time processing will have to become more adaptive and able to consume fleeting moments of data before it’s deleted by a user set parameter. Both consumer insight and marketing will change to be less reactive and more predictive based on data that’s only available for seconds, not weeks or months.
We are literally living in the two-second advantage right now. Make those seconds count.
