Impacting Markets

You might be aware of this but the iPad has already begun to disrupt many markets. Some big like the netbook market which has already been relegated to “niche”, and some small like the comic book market. The device is a game changer so if you’re not paying attention it’s time to start. As I mentioned before it’s impacting smallish markets in a big way, like the digital comic industry as posted in CNN under iPad boosts appeal of digital comics.

Industry observers say the iPad’s size, portability and color screen make it a good fit for reading comics. Before the tablet computer launched in April, fans could read digital comics in several ways, neither of which were ideal: on a desktop or laptop computer, or via a smartphone’s tiny screen, panel by panel. As for e-readers, which are primarily made for black-and-white text — forget it.

“The iPad is much better suited for comics, and on that platform, comics are expanding very rapidly,” said Milton Griepp, president and publisher of the trend-watching magazine, ICv2, which reported sales of between $500,000 and $1 million in digital comic sales on mobile apps in 2009.

It’s also impacting the way we consume our social networks. I’m a pretty avid social network user and the iPad apps Flipboard and Pulse have radically changed the way I consume the information. Flipboard goes so far as to allow me to read Twitter like I would read a magazine. It loads my followers as “contributors”, and pull the links they tweet into articles ready to read right inside the app. Innovation to the extreme. (See First look at “revolutionary” social news iPad app: Flipboard for more)

There are countless other examples of this ranging from casual gaming to keeping track of daily tasks. So with that being said, let’s get to why any of this really matters anyway.

Business Impact

Recently I had a CIO I know email me asking for help. His boss had purchased an iPad and he was so enamored by it that he wanted to do away with his laptop all together. The CIO was asking for my insight on how to convince his boss otherwise. You see an iPad is really great for content consumption, and OK for light content creation, but for heavy content creation it takes a laptop. Business leaders, as it turns out, tend to create a lot of content.

We had lunch and I shared some insights and he listened while he ate. He’s a smart guy whom I respect a lot so I was feeling kind of self-conscience about how much I was talking and that my plate was still untouched when his meal was already finished. When I had exhausted most of my knowledge I asked him a question. I said, “So what do you think IT needs to do about all these new devices and social networks that employees are bringing to the workplace? How will IT control company information and employee productivity?” and I began to eat furiously. This was my “give me some time to eat” question. This was a question I had heard in countless IT leadership round tables on which I’ve participated over the past few years. It seemed every IT Director and CIO in Chicagoland was trying to figure out what to do about the rogue iPhone employees and the “all throughout the day” Facebook users. They always ended with the same solution, create a company policy against usage…which we all know is like trying to tell a millennial to cut their hands off. What this CIO sitting across from me said next rocked my mind. He was so it was so right on – he said,

“You know Andy, in 3-5 years I don’t think IT will provision any devices to employees. None at all. Employees will be responsible for purchasing their own phones, devices, laptops, tablets, etc. They will bring them to IT and IT will enable their access levels appropriately. My responsibility, he said, will be to keep the information safe on the company side of the firewall. That’s it.”

And there it was. Plain as day. The proverbial “Ah-Ha” moment. The entire technology industry has already shifted right under our very noses. How? The enterprise used to drive the technology industry. People used what IT gave them. IT locked things down to keep the company, and the employees, safe and secure. Now things are different. The consumer is driving technology, not the enterprise. Now the market cap swap between AAPL and MSFT makes all the sense in the world.

Andy leads the interactive offerings and staff engineers at StudioNorth. He consults with clients on strategic technology direction and personally oversees the key phases of the iterative development cycle for many large technology projects. Whether for public web sites, private extranets, or custom applications, Andy uses his rich experience to provide results-driven solutions to our clients. He’s known for being a visionary and for coining the phrase, “conservative wow” in reference to StudioNorth’s ability to create high-impact projects for some of our more conventional audiences. If you want to bring your brand beyond “2.0″, Andy is your connection.

Want to track Andy a little closer? You can follow him on Twitter.

“Cloud Computing”

More and more services online are competing for our lives. They are asking us to invite our friends, store our documents, entertain us, and streamline our lives. What’s more they aren’t just asking to do it, they’re actually making our lives better, providing a return on our “investment of information.” I can say without a doubt that online services make my life easier and more convenient. On the flip side, they also add clutter. However, once you figure out how you work best online it becomes somewhat easy to cut out the clutter and actually simplify things.

Think about these services for a moment… How many of them have you had to install on your computer? How many of them are available offline? Hardly any. They only exist or make themselves available when you are connected to the Internet and because of this you are drawn into the Internet more and more.

The future of marketing, software, services, and products

This is where it gets interesting. Many of the leaders of these services are developing vast data centers using cheap hardware on cheap or free operating systems. Companies like Google, Yahoo!, IBM and Microsoft are moving very quickly to create the facilities to enable and store the services and data that allow people to function in the cloud. Because of this, the ability to find computing power and data storage online is becoming extremely cheap and ubiquitous. It’s actually becoming very much like a utility for companies that take advantage of these data centers in the cloud. Amazon, for instance, has two offerings in particular that they call the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3). These can be used by software engineers and .com start-ups to host virtually unlimited amounts of data and virtual computing power. They can turn them off and on as needed and only pay for what is used…and it literally costs just pennies.

As these services become better and more available people are flocking to use them. Companies like MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube have attracted people in droves, and keep them engaged. That means that more marketing and advertising dollars must follow. We are only beginning to see what context-based and pay-per-transaction advertising will become. The media game is changing and it will be interesting to see how media buying and selling changes with it. There is tremendous opportunity within this transformation to change the old crusty advertising industry.

How StudioNorth is taking advantage of “The Cloud”

At StudioNorth we are very highly aware of how to use the cloud to help our clients. We use it to host high traffic/high bandwidth “components” of websites. Components like videos that are attached to direct marketing campaigns. We are also using the cloud to create the future of our agency service offerings. It’s very cost effective for us and highly scalable. We’ve always been a custom online software application agency, but now we are able to offer much more. Automating and moving some of our core processes into the cloud to achieve usage and reach audience we’ve never thought possible before is very exciting and rewarding.

So…

As Sun Microsystems used to say back in the 1990′s, “The Network is the Computer.” It wasn’t then, but it is fast becoming true today (too bad Google and Adobe are eating Sun’s lunch). Only the future will show for sure how far the cloud boundary will permeate our lives. And once it has, what’s next?

-Andy

Some references for more info.
Wikipedia: Cloud Computing
Advertising Age: What Cloud Means to Marketing Forecast
O’Reilly: The Network REALLY is The Computer

Andy leads the interactive offerings and staff engineers at StudioNorth. He consults with clients on strategic technology direction and personally oversees the key phases of the iterative development cycle for many large technology projects. Whether for public web sites, private extranets, or custom applications, Andy uses his rich experience to provide results-driven solutions to our clients. He’s known for being a visionary and for coining the phrase, “conservative wow” in reference to StudioNorth’s ability to create high-impact projects for some of our more conventional audiences. If you want to bring your brand beyond “2.0″, Andy is your connection.

Want to track Andy a little closer? You can follow him on Twitter.