Bye bye dancing sugar plums, and to 2009. A big enthusiastic welcome to 2010! Surviving the roller coaster of the economic meltdown has not been easy for anyone but the silver lining has arrived as a shining new breed of leaders that are battle-tested, customer and product driven. This voracious collective consciousness is writing history with enormous speed. The focus is on community, health, job creation, the environment, innovation and entrepreneurship. The result, I hope, will be a more sustainable global economy that we can be proud of as it will benefit all people.

“A smooth sea never made a skilled mariner”.  This English proverb is a stark reminder that it is in a time of crisis, not during growth periods, where one’s emotional fortitude is tested.

Our evolving digital world presents four  interesting trends to harness for growth in 2010. These are Social, Wireless, Analytics, and Security/Privacy.

Social:

There is going to be a lot more advertising revenue move online according to Forrester Research – especially from the old Yellow Pages which has seen rapid decline in usage this year – as businesses embrace social media as a lead generator and branding method. By dynamically engaging content, including blogs, reviews, videos and the like, business owners are discovering they can build stronger relationships with customers. As such in 2010 we are going to see social media integrated into the sales funnel where business objectives and ROI will be measured.

In 2009 Twitter proved we had an appetite for Real-Time search. In 2010 users are going to help Twitter find its revenue model. Twitter is an amazing lead generating tool that provides a segmentation and geo-targetting opportunity not rivaled by anyone else. I would not at all be surprised if we see an alliance between Twitter and FaceBook as there are clear synergies between these two products.

Wireless:

Our cars are destined to become wireless hot spots which should appease the kids on road trips. However, the increased data traffic will put a stress on the 3G networks. AT&T ran ads this Christmas promoting conservation in the area of text messaging. Apparently 40% of their network is used by 3% of its customers who have smart phones.

Applications will continue to abound and will be available in the cloud and in cross-platform format. Social networking via mobile will drive a lot of the mobile app innovation. Augmented Reality apps aimed at integrating our physical and virtual worlds will continue to be enhanced to bring our network closer to us in real-time.

Analytics:

Businesses will increase their budgets (60%) using existing data and predictive models. There is an understanding now that actionable insights help generate increased leads, eliminate guesswork on allocated advertising dollars, assist in understanding changing consumer behavior, and increase customer engagement.

Security / Privacy:

There has been a 477% increase in the amount of Malware added to Ad-Awares’s threat list in 2009 and expectations for 2010 is that malicious attackers are going to move to the emerging platforms, like smartphones, and social networking sites to launch their activity. Because Hackers follow trends, IBM predicts they will move their activity to the cloud. Businesses and marketers must focus more heavily on monitoring this area.

The Next Big Thing is… an integrated 3D virtual and physical world that provides real-time interaction and commerce

Our world is being hyper-linked at a rapid speed. Soon there will not be an object in the world we can not photograph from our cell phone and bring up information on. Google’s new Android mobile application “Goggles” promises to bridge the gap between our physical and virtual web worlds. “Goggles” is an image recognition technology that is more sophisticated than the augmented reality apps like Wikitude which allows you to point a cell camera at a landmark and pull information from maps. While “Goggles” does use maps to gather information it takes the visual search a step further by analyzing the image next to the vast “cloud” data of information. At this time the technology is still experimental performing best with images that are easily identifiable. But, it isn’t hard to see the future commercial application for this technology.

There are many lives being touched by interesting mobile application developments. Yesterday I was reading about some professors from Carnegie Mellon University and their mobile project aimed to help rural children in India understand English. Led by Professor Mathew Kam the “Mobile and Immersive Learning for Literacy in Emerging Economies” (MILLEE) is developing a series of mobile games modeled around games the rural children find familiar in order to teach them English. “Goggles” photo search could provide an interesting enhancement to this education project.

How long will it take for Google to index the world’s objects and leverage all those street view images? With all those consumers out there walking around with those killer apps in their pockets – their cell phone equipped with GPS and camera – it may be sooner than you think.

Actually we are not far off from the development of tiny implants or devices to add to our glasses that would enable our own eyes to connect and retrieve the vast data available on a viewed object. I am talking about new designer glasses equipped with tiny cameras capable of connecting to the “cloud”

Getting off to a good start each morning helps set the pace for the day. Up at 5:45am I slip out of bed, put on my thick cotton dressing gown and carefully step over the snoring labradors sleeping outside my bedroom door. These lap-lover dogs enjoy creating this rather formidable barricade for me each morning. I collect my first large cup of coffee for the day and head to my home office, my refuge and thinking centre where for the next hour I focus on creative thinking, dreaming and short meditation. It’s a quiet hour when things are simple, and ideas are fresh. At the end of the hour I set the goals (not too many) for the day. Henry Beecher, an American minister called “The first hour of the morning the rudder of the day” I believe this time I have found for my own introspection has helped me better tune into the power of the rudder so that I am better equipped to steer the boat. You can’t predict the direction of the wind but you can watch the telltales throughout the day to skilfully adjust your course and sails as needed. A strong hand on the tiller is important.

Google the undeniable leader in search has just taken the search engine wars up a notch. From initially crawling the web once a month for updates, then every few seconds, to now providing real-time search updates from live news feeds on social sites like Twitter and Facebook, Google is on its way towards delivering information at the speed of light. Google’s “Relevancy Expert” Amit Singhal explained that Google has come up with an algorithm which considers query fluctuation, language modeling, quality of the author, semantics, query hotness, topicality and real-time URL resolution. Searchers can select real-time search on their mobile phone as well as take advantage of the “hot topic” feature. So, if eyeballs were straying to Twitter and Bing they are now firmly back on Google. The lines between SEO and social media have blurred a little too. It will be interesting to see if negative Tweets, for example, could affect click thru rates on Ad Words and hence have a broader affect on organic rankings.