Predicting the future is usually the preserve of mad men (and, in our game, analysts and bloggers with no sense of self-deprecation)!
But as 2011 draws to a close, and January welcomes a New Year, I find myself sat at my ipad and wireless keyboard; midway through a 23-hour flight from Sydney to London, and therefore willing to enter the realm of the insane and the self-contratulatory by offering up six key predictions for 2012!
So here we go:
Some facts are indisputable: Day follows night, night follows day; and the growth in online video in 2011 has been simply staggering!
When we last blogged about online video, we agreed with commentators that expediential growth in the amount of content (and the number of views) would be seen month-to-month, year-to-year. By and large, this has absolutely been the case:
According to ComScore’s Online Video Rankings Data from only two months ago:
“Google Sites, driven primarily by video viewing at YouTube.com, ranked as the top online video content property in September with 161 million unique viewers, while VEVO ranked second with 57.3 million. Microsoft Sites climbed to the #3 position with 54 million viewers, followed by Viacom Digital with 53.4 million and Facebook.com with 49.9 million.” Continue reading
The Economic Times today reported some interesting news from Delhi: social networking giant Facebook expects its largest user base to come from the Indian subcontinent in the near future, surpassing Indonesia and the US in terms of sign-ups.
More than 70% of Facebook’s 800 million users are outside the US, with the Indian customer-base growing at a phenomenal pace. Continue reading
With great, and to be honest slightly cheesy fanfair, Nokia unveiled their 2 new windows phone handsets at Nokia World here in London yesterday. Despite the slightly cringe-worthy apeing of the informal presentation style popularized by you know who (who in fairness never shouted “it’s awesome” in the middle of a demo) I was pretty impressed with what they had to say and show off. Is this a return to form for Nokia? Have they come up with an iPhone killer? The answer has to be a big, and conclusive “maybe”. Continue reading