Web 3.0 and Social Dance: West Coast Swing

West Coast Swing is one of the most fun social dances. It is highly improvisational, not choreographed at all, and the blues style music is always lovely! Many of the principles we discussed in the series Web 3.0 and the Argentine tango would apply to other social dances, including the WCS.

Web 3.0 and Social Dance: Lindy

And here’s lindy hop …

2012: Top Trends and Opportunities

New year. Fresh energy. Time to take stock of trends and open problems for 2012. The most notable change this coming year is that Steve Jobs is dead. In death, however, he has become even larger than life, and his legacy will drive this decade’s technology movement for a while at least. One of his key legacies is the marriage of technology and humanities, which I believe will shape the next phase of evolution in the IT industry. I elaborated my vision in Silicon Valley: The Next Decade.

In Top 10 Tech Trends For The Decade, I outlined a set of key movements which are pretty much the driving factors for the time being:

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Social Contacts: A Hairy Open Problem

Our audience of readers is full of entrepreneurs. And what do entrepreneurs do? They market and they sell. Well, at the very heart of the marketing and selling problem is the concept of lead generation. Once upon a time, it was a rather straightforward exercise of collecting names and mailing addresses, and then running direct mail campaigns. As the Internet became mainstream, this was largely replaced (at least in the universe we live in) by email marketing campaigns, so the key information was the email address of a lead.

Today, the problem has once again changed definition. Suspects and prospects are everywhere in the vast realm of social media, watching, reading, commenting, engaging. And to engage effectively with them, we need to reach them through all those various channels.

So, the definition of a lead database has expanded from being Name, Address, Email ID, Phone No, etc. to include Twitter handle, LinkedIn profile, Facebook profile, Blog URL, and more.

Yet, the process of generating such lists with all the Social Contact data remains cumbersome, time-consuming, and necessarily manual. Very little by way of technology has been applied to the problem thus far.

It needs to be.

1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2011: QuadMo Solutions, Bangalore, India

Rewards programs have been around for a long time. Gartner reports that systems that leverage social and mobile concepts have seen rapid growth recently, and increasing global adoption of employee recognition systems is expected over the next three to five years. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Social CRM and Crowd Sourcing

There are many trends hitting large enterprises at the moment right in their bellies. Within the broad sphere of cloud computing, with the adoption of the social Web, one of these trends is crowd sourcing. The business function that is most acutely impacted by this trend is CRM. All the way from marketing to sales to customer support, the social CRM trend is becoming an avalanche, and for some industries the implications bear particularly serious consequences.

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Customer Service And The Social Web

Earlier this year, I wrote a piece called Top 10 Social Web Trends For The Decade. In it, I suggested that the way various business functions are done will change owing to the impact of the social Web, crowdsourcing, and so on. The areas that are seeing the most upheaval are customer services, which spans customer support, technical support, and related services. Below are observations from two 1M/1M entrepreneurs working in this area.

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1M/1M: Mobile and Social Apps Module Of The Curriculum Is Ready

Readers, we have just released the Mobile and Social Apps module of the 1M/1M premium curriculum. In it, you will find a synthesis of the various trends and opportunities that I see at this point, along with case studies and video lectures. I will do an additional module specifically focused on Gaming, coming soon.