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Posts Tagged ‘Technology Trends’

Boomers Slowly Joining the Mobile Web

New statistics about baby boomers’ usage of the mobile web are here, and the news, sadly, is not surprising. This generation of users (ages 45 and older) has been slow to adopt mobile Internet technology. However, that’s not to say they aren’t getting on board with the mobile web revolution – they’re just taking a little more time to get here than the other demographic groups surveyed.

Today, only 55% of boomers consider their mobile phone a necessity, a number which likely shocks younger generations whose attachment to their handheld device is so strong, they claim to “feel naked without it.”

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Boomers: Slow to Adopt New Technology

The delay with which baby boomers embrace new technologies isn’t limited to the mobile web – this is just the next item in a series of technology trends where boomers seem to lag behind. Outside of the pro-social media analyst group Forrester (whose reports we desperately want to believe), most studies show boomers have been slow to adopt new technology, be it social networks or smartphones.  

Although as of summer 2009, older users were joining Facebook in record numbers, even outnumbering high school students on the site, it took a long time for them to get there. This group of technology users is definitely not filled with early adopters. Instead, boomers need to wait and see the benefits of a new technology before signing on, or so says eMarketer, the analyst firm who released this latest mobile web report. On Facebook, that benefit was likely the “network effect” – enough of their friends urged them to join at the same time as their younger family members were busy posting photos and videos of the boomers’ grandchildren, something boomers didn’t want to miss out on.

Stats on Boomers and the Mobile Web

As for the mobile web, although the technology in question is different, the desire (or lack thereof) to participate is the same. Until the boomers see a real need for the mobile web, smartphones and the accompanying mobile apps, they’ll get by just fine without it, thank you very much.

A few key stats from eMarketer’s report:

• 85% of baby boomers own a mobile phone, but the majority own feature phones (non-smartphones)
• 55% consider their mobile phone a necessity
• Boomers make up only 19.6% of touchscreen phone users
• Boomers make up only 21.1% of smartscreen phone users
• Younger boomers (ages 45-54) are more likely to own a smartphone or touchscreen phone than older boomers

Things are Changing

As Lisa E. Phillips, eMarketer senior analyst, kindly puts it, “boomers are underrepresented among smartphone users.” The good news is that’s starting to change. Slowly but surely, boomers are becoming more interested in smartphone devices. Phillips notes that their interest is influenced by the prevalence of smartphones in the marketplace combined with a down economy which is forcing boomers to forgo retirement. Because many smartphones have a business aspect to them, boomers are starting to see the appeal of these devices.

However, the most important factor slowing their adoption is price. As carriers reduce prices for both phones and data plans, many more boomers will join their younger counterparts to become mobile web users themselves.

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Top 5 Web Trends of 2009: Structured Data

This week ReadWriteWeb will run a series of posts detailing what we think are the five biggest, most cutting-edge Web trends to come out of 2009. We’ll be posting one trend analysis per day. Then at the end of the week we’ll publish a major update to our standard presentation about web technology trends.

The first major Web trend we’re looking at is Structured Data. In prior presentations, this has sometimes been referred to under the umbrella term of ‘Semantic Web’. However the way 2009 has panned out so far, it’s become clear that this trend is much more than the Semantic Web. In this post, we’ll analyze the developments in Structured Data this year and provide you with 3 product examples: OpenCalais, Google, Wolfram Alpha.

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Editor’s note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we’ll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year – and ahead to what next year holds – we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It’s not just a best-of list, it’s also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

Web of Data, Not Documents

Tim Berners-Lee said in February this year that we’re now in a Web of Data, rather than a Web of Documents. The organization that Berners-Lee heads, the W3C, has heavily promoted two key initiatives that are helping to build this Web of Data: the Semantic Web and more recently Linked Data.

However over the past few years, we’ve seen that there are many other ways to structure data and enable others to build off it. The best current example is surely Twitter, whose API has historically been responsible for around 90% of Twitter’s activity – via third party apps.

The basic principle of the Web of Data is still the same as what Alex Iskold articulated on ReadWriteWeb back in March 2007: “unstructured information will give way to structured information – paving the road to more intelligent computing.”

Example 1: OpenCalais

Our first example product, OpenCalais, is probably the best current example of Linked Data (which is a type of structured data endorsed by W3C). Thomson Reuters, the international business and financial news giant, launched an API called OpenCalais in Feb ‘08. In a nutshell, OpenCalais turns unstructured HTML into semantically marked up data. It orders data into groups such as ‘people,’ ‘places,’ ‘companies’ and more. This way, third party applications and sites can build interesting new things from that data – one of the defining principles of Linked Data.

For a full explanation of Linked Data, read Alexander Korth’s technical introduction The Web of Data: Creating Machine-Accessible Information from April 2009. I also explained the background and benefits of Linked Data in a May ‘09 post entitled Linked Data is Blooming: Why You Should Care.

Example 2: Google Rich Snippets

In May this year, Google added structured data to its core search, in the form of a feature called ‘Rich snippets.’ Essentially this feature extracts and shows useful information from web pages, by way of structured data open standards such as microformats and RDFa. On launch in May, Google invited publishers to mark up their HTML. While it will take a while for this markup to become widespread, the fact that a huge company like Google implemented it shows the increasing importance of structured data on the Web.

Other big companies are also heading in this direction – in particular, Yahoo was an early leader.

Example 3: Wolfram Alpha

Ever since Wolfram|Alpha’s much hyped launch in May, we’ve been tracking this innovative product closely. It’s a self-described “computational knowledge engine” and while it’s not quite the Google killer some predicted, it has many potential uses.

Wolfram|Alpha has a search engine-like interface, allowing you to type natural language statements into it. But the main part of the product is the computations you can do on data. The product is premised on using and computing data. If Web 2.0 was about creating data (a.k.a. user generated content), then the next generation of the Web is all about using that data.

Conclusion

We can see from the above three examples that structured data is rapidly becoming a feature of today’s Web. Companies like Thomson Reuters and Google are enabling data to be structured, and new types of products (like Wolfram|Alpha) will make use of structured data in ways we perhaps can’t imagine right now.

ReadWriteWeb’s Top 5 Web Trends of 2009:

1. Structured Data
2. The Real-Time Web
3. Personalization
4. Mobile Web & Augmented Reality
5. Internet of Things

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Giving thanks: tech trends (and other things) Ars is thankful for

For those living in the US, this time of year brings visions of bargain-priced gadgets and big box stores opening their doors to throngs of shoppers at some ungodly hour. But Black Friday is always preceded by the one day where we get to sit down, watch some football (hand-egg?), and tuck into some turkey, stuffing, and mashed potatoes. Oh, and we also give thanks for the good things in life.

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, we offer some technology trends for which we are thankful.

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