3 major trends

In the mid '90s you had the PC and Internet revolution. Things were exciting as computers got more and more popular and more and more affordable. Everybody was jumping the wagon and in a short period of time a lot of people became "experts". Later on the bubble burst showed that in fact very few of them actually were ...

Almost a decade passed by without many major break throughs. We got more and more bandwidth. We started to collect more and more data. Our databases grew bigger and bigger and they invented the word "business intelligence". Our websites started to look slicker and slicker. We tighten up security and started to build more and more barricades. But other than VMWare with their innovative virtualization products, nothing really outstanding came up.

For a while things dragged. Major companies like Sun Microsystems and Digital went down and got acquired. Mid size firms started M&As processes. And start-ups had a harder time to launch.

And then people like Jobs and Zuckerberg stepped up to the plate with new concepts in mobility and social media. That worked. New industries were born and now we are still riding that wave.

Here are what we identified as 3 major trends of the last decade:

(1) Cloud computing

I used to say that cloud computing is not really a new technology- it just got a fancy marketing name. But in reality the concept of sharing networking resources and optimizing their utilization is new and is very useful. It's reliable enough. It's inexpensive. It's good.

Companies were slow (and they are still slow) in adopting the Cloud- as with any other kind of technology. Some of them have reasons (security, compliance, rules and regulations etc.), some others just don't bother: they either don't feel like they have the skills sets or don't see enough business value in it.

The Cloud is growing though. While there is still resistance every day we see new companies looking at hosting in either private or public cloud environments and asking us questions about it. The Amazons and Rack Spaces of the world did a good job at promoting the Cloud concept. And international markets (where the reliability of their electricity grid is an issue) are more open to migrate their hosted solutions to the Cloud.

(2) Mobile computing

Since Apple created the iPhone a whole new industry was born. An industry that got immediately adopted by the consumers and businesses of all sizes.

It happened so fast that companies like Blackberry for example (who actually had the first commercially available mobile e-mail device) could not keep up! Google jumped in with their Android acquisition and came up with a big challenge: an open source and totally free development sdk based on java and linux.

A couple of years later if you were not in mobile you did not exist: that was the reason we here at Witty Mobile Apps actually decided to provide design of mobile applications starting as of 2011.

And, if three-four years ago the market was driven mainly by consumer focused applications, nowadays we see a lot of businesses going mobile with pretty much everything from portable Excel spreadsheets, to real time business data for meetings, location based business services, mobile bidding systems, sophisticated decision making systems, stats, business niche mobile ready social media etc.

Mobile leads generation for different marketing companies is another growing segment. Real estate is definitely there- most of the respected realties sites are now mobile ready and the ones who are not will be soon. Attorneys are mobile. IT and Computer Repair shops are getting more and more mobile. Doctors are getting more and more mobile. You name it.

(3) Social media

Social media, like many other great things, started in a College dorm room and exploded to epic proportions. The other day I was reading somewhere that "if Facebook was a country, it would have been the second country population wise in the world." I would add than it will more likely become the first country population wise soon.

But what's interesting about social media is that lately it gears a lot towards business / niche social media rather than just a place to socialize with family and friends, share pictures, chat or show off locations.

Last year we had designed a social media solution for realtors and real estate investors. Over there people don't login to waste time. They login to socialize to do business. They refer leads. They present deals. They bounce ideas and collaborate on projects. The site is subscription based and it already has sixty four hundred professionals on it (the site is owned by a medium size business here in town). The realtors LOVE it! The site is designed with users security in mind: they do not sell people's data. And the site is 100% mobile ready: Android, iPhone, Windows Phone, Blackberry.

Now THAT's where I believe social media is heading to.

We will be around for the ride :)

Make it a great day!

Adrian Corbuleanu
Miami Beach, FL
http://wittywebnow.com