Category: Mobile

Digital trends: Where’s your camera?

In June 1994, I bought my first digital camera: an Apple QuickTake 100. It was the first consumer-level digital camera and cost about $695. Developed jointly by Apple and Kodak, it was a fascinating breakthrough device.

On the day I bought the camera, I connected it via serial cable to my Mac, installed the QuickTake 1.0 software (from a floppy disk) and downloaded the first digital photos I had ever taken. I brought the pictures into Photoshop and started editing them; these were images that did not come from film and did not require scanning. Wow, I thought, how much time am I going to save with this nifty little camera.

Well, not so fast. The images had a resolution of 640×480 pixels (about one third of a megapixel in today’s terms) and were not very useful for print reproduction. But they were perfect for standard definition video display and I could see how they could be used in presentations and slide shows.

Over the next few years, while I was fiddling around with the novelty of digital photography, I continued using my Canon 35mm SLR to shoot film negatives and transparencies. I’d shoot rolls of film and drop them off at the local camera store for processing and print making and continued to do this for many more years. It wasn’t until 2000 that I made the transition permanently to digital photography.

Fast forward to 2012 … Last weekend, for the first time I deposited a check into my bank account using the mobile banking app on my iPhone. I also shot a video and took photos of a family picnic in my back yard and posted the photos and video to my Facebook page immediately. I was even able to assemble and edit my video clips using the iMovie app on my iPhone.

And, on the same weekend, I saw someone using an iPad to shoot video of a football scrimmage … they were using the iPad screen as a viewfinder as they followed the players down the football field.

Needless to say, in the 18 years between these different experiences, camera technology has undergone a transformation. The last two decades have seen the replacement of conventional film photography with digital photos, but also more recently, the displacement of single purpose digital cameras (both video and still) by smartphones.

The pace and magnitude of these dual transformations are seen clearly in the answers to the following questions:

When did digital photography eclipse film photography?
In 1990 100% of photography was analog/film based. Ten years later, in 2000, just 99% of photography was still analog while 1% was digital. The big change took place over the past decade. By 2011, 99% of photography was digital and 1% film.

How many photos are being taken?
It has been estimated (by 1000memories blog) that since photography was first invented in 1838, there have been 3.5 trillion pictures taken. Today, every two minutes, we snap as many photos as were taken by all of humanity in the entire 19th century. In 1990 there were 57 billion photos taken, in 2000 there were 86 billion taken and in 2011 there were 380 billion taken.

Are mobile and smartphones replacing cameras and camcorders?
It has been estimated (by NPD Group) that in 2010 camera phones accounted for 17% of all images while point and shoot and camcorders accounted for 52%. In just one year, these numbers changed to 27% by camera phones and 44% by point and shoot and camcorders. The balance of the imagery is still dominated by higher end digital photographic and video equipment.

Where are all the digital photos being stored?
The biggest library of online photos is Facebook. It has been estimated (by pixable blog) that over 100 billion photos have been uploaded into Facebook its by users. The following is a list of the top photo sharing sites and their image volumes:

  • Photobucket: 10 billion photos
  • Picasa: 7 billion photos
  • Flickr: 6 billion photos
  • Instagram: 400 million

Instagram is the fastest growing online photo sharing technology and it was purchased by Facebook earlier this year for $1 billion.

The ubiquity and ease of use of cameras on smartphones—capable of shooting high quality color photos and video—combined with social networking and photo sharing have led to an explosion in digital photography. Almost anyone can capture a scene at any time and people are doing it, all the time.

As with other developments in our digital world, a transformation of one kind—the replacement of film by digital photography—is not fully completed when a transformation of another kind—the replacement of digital point-and-shoot cameras and camcorders by camera and smart phones—accelerates the entire process and evolves in an unanticipated direction.

It is these sudden and unexpected twists that make navigating the business environment such a complex task. The challenges facing Kodak, which filed for bankruptcy reorganization last January, is an expression of the way these rapid changes can impact companies and entire industries. Once the king of analog photographic equipment and supplies as well as an originator of the digital camera revolution, Kodak announced on August 23 that it was selling off its film division.

The ability to see and understand the convergence and successive waves of digital transformation, and the way these impact the behavior of our customers, is the only way to keep pace in our rapidly changing world and make plans for the future.

Going mobile

Pete Townsend, Roger Daltrey, Keith Moon and John Entwistle of The Who in 1971

Readers may recognize “Going Mobile” as the title of a song by the rock band The Who (from their 1971 album Who’s Next). Guitarist and vocalist Pete Townsend was writing about the joys of traveling the open road in his RV:

Out in the woods
 Or in the city
 It’s all the same to me
 When I’m driving free, the world’s my home
 When I’m mobile

At the time, Townsend could not have known that forty years later the song would take on a completely new meaning. Today, the world is indeed going mobile.

According to recent data from Canalys—a leading provider of computing technology analysis—the year 2011 was the year of the smartphone. For the first time ever, worldwide smartphone sales (488 million units) surpassed PC sales (415 million units).

“Smartphone shipments overtaking those of client PCs should be seen as a significant milestone,” a Canalys analyst said. “In the space of a few years, smartphones have grown from being a niche product segment at the high-end of the mobile phone market to becoming a truly mass-market proposition.”

Some have referred to this transition as the beginning of the “post-PC” era of computing. Indeed, the expansion of smartphones beyond desktop and notebook computers signals a major shift. With their increased processing power, advanced touch user interface, availability of wireless broadband service—not to mention high resolution cameras, HD video and GPS navigation capabilities— smartphones are dramatically changing the way people interact with computer technology, access the online world and communicate with each other.

This sudden change has important implications for consumer marketing and advertising planning and media buying. And this is not only impacting traditional media such as TV, radio and print. The mobile revolution is affecting social media and online advertising models developed more recently.

A recent article in The New York Times, “Facebook’s Mobility Challenge,” revealed how the social media giant is struggling to come up with an effective solution to advertising to its expanding number of mobile-only users. “We do not currently directly generate any meaningful revenue from the use of Facebook mobile products, and our ability to do so successfully is unproven,” the company said in its review of the threats it faces.

This is particularly problematic for companies like Facebook where much of their user growth (worldwide Facebook users are now at 845 million) is taking place in countries like Chile, Turkey, Venezuela and Brazil where many people have never had a broadband connection to the Internet other than through their smartphones.

The transition to a mobile dominated world is being taken note of by major advertisers. They are looking for opportunities to deliver messages in unique new ways and also drive mobile commerce. A recent report by Forrester Research forecasts that interactive advertising in the US will reach $76.6 billion by 2016 and be equal to TV ad spending. As significant as that projection is, the truly interesting part of this report is found in the details.

Forrester breaks down interactive marketing into five subcategories:
• social media
• email marketing
• mobile marketing
• display advertising
• search marketing.

Of these, mobile marketing is projected to quintuple in size to $8.2 billion between now and 2016! This is a compound annual growth rate of 38% and far faster than any of the four other categories. The report also shows that mobile marketing overtook both email marketing and social media marketing in 2011.

It might seem impossible, but the media landscape is once again shifting dramatically under our feet. Companies such as Google, which went public just 8 years ago on the basis of the latest in search advertising revenue, are now being challenged by mobile alternatives. To its credit, Google is making a huge play into the smartphone and tablet markets with the development of the Android operating system.

But every aspect of marketing and communications should be reconsidered in light of the rapidly expanding mobile universe. For print media companies, this means developing capabilities to assist clients in converting their content into “mobilized” experiences; it means partnering with firms that specialize in all forms of interactive advertising and recognizing that “going mobile” is now on the agenda.

Those that ignore the changes underway, or bury themselves in nostalgia about the good old days of traditional media, do so at their own risk. They may wind up singing another great track from the Who’s Next album: “The Song is Over.”

QR Codes & the future of offline media

By now you are familiar with QR Codes; those two dimensional bar codes scanned by mobile devices. They are popping up everywhere: billboards, catalogs, magazine ads, real estate signs, t-shirts, product packaging and business cards. One of the more creative uses of a QR Code is on the movie poster for Iron Man 2, where the code resolves to a mobile site with photos, trailers and information about the film.

You may also know that the US Postal Service is offering a 3% discount on mail that contains a QR Code through the end of August. You can find the USPS promotion here.

Quick Response (QR) Codes were first developed in 1994 by the Japanese firm Denso Wave to track parts in the vehicle manufacturing process at Toyota. The technology was unique because the codes could be read rapidly regardless of the orientation of the scanner. Also, while other two dimensional bar codes require a license for use, the QR Code is free and code generators can be easily found on the Web.

Japan is currently the largest user and QR Codes are the de facto standard for Japanese mobile phones. Generally speaking, the codes are used more widely in countries where mobile culture is highly developed. It is a peculiar fact of life that technological development is not repeated through the same stages in every country. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that some countries never experienced landline telephone technology and have jumped straight into our mobile world.

In the US, QR Codes are being used in growing numbers for marketing and communications campaigns.  A recent study of QR code adoption by 3GVision.com showed:

  • Worldwide QR Code use more than quadrupled between 2009 and 2010.
  • In Q4 2010, the US had the highest number of QR Code scans of any country  (except Japan, where data was not available for the study).
  • Canada, Hong Kong and Germany had exponential growth of QR Code scans.

As Philip Warbasse of Print2D.com—a company specializing in QR Code and mobile campaigns—explained, “Though we have a way to go before 2D codes completely go mainstream in the US, we are seeing a steady increase in their use in almost every industry. Thankfully, we are also beginning to see companies that have created QR Code campaigns in the past come to us for advice on how to better use them in the future. In reality, it’s not the code but, rather, the device that we focus on when we create mobile strategies at Print 2D.”

QR and 2D bar code campaigns are really only as good as the mobile content behind them, i.e. the success of a campaign is not only reflected in the novelty with which the QR Code itself is rendered; it is as much about the mobile content on the back end. The most successful QR Code/mobile campaigns follow these simple rules:

  • Mobilize the landing page
  • Use a short URL
  • Make the mobile content valuable

The expansion of QR Code use is part of the mobile revolution and the transformation of the way people all over the world consume information and media. Anyone doubting that mobile technologies will impact their business should consider the following (data from ITU):

  • There are more than 5.3 billion mobile subscriptions in the world today (77% of the world’s population)
  • 90% of the world now lives in a place with access to a mobile network

Meanwhile, explosion of mobile access worldwide—especially the adoption of smartphones—is being taken note of by marketers and advertisers. According to Gartner, the world’s leading information technology research company, worldwide mobile advertising spending will reach $3.3 billion this year and grow by a factor of more than six times to $20.6 billion by 2015. As with other forms of online advertising, the funds for these initiatives are being taken from budgets for traditional channels such as print and broadcast media.

Fortunately, the QR Code revolution is enhancing the value of print because it provides a link between offline media and that of the online, wireless world of mobile devices and instant information. The QR Code is one means print media has to maintain its relevance as a critical component of any integrated marketing and communications campaign.