3: K.I.S.S. (KEEP IT SIMPLE, STUPID) | 5 Trends That Will Shape Digital Services In 2013. At Fjord, we work across domains like media, health care, retail, education, and banking, and the work always involves an element of “new.” A new platform or technology, a new business proposition, or new target users. We work at the front edge of mainstream, where innovation meets mass-market appeal. The constant presence of “new” in our work feeds our curiosity, and makes exploration a necessity. In order to guide our work and inspire our clients, we constantly think about what tomorrow will bring. Each year, we ask teams at Fjord to predict the major trends that will impact businesses and society next year.
Here, we delve into five of our predictions for 2013 and share our thoughts on what designers should be doing to make sure they stay ahead of the curve. 1. Connected objects start to take their place--right by your side. The past 18 months have seen the beginnings of mass-market adoption for a select few connected objects, driven by the services that make them meaningful. 2. 3. 4. Who Needs Y Combinator, Anyway? Not These Two Dropouts. The words “entrepreneur” and “dropout” are often associated; think Mark Zuckerberg, leaving Harvard for bigger things, or the young people goaded and funded by Peter Thiel. It’s easy to imagine a college student planning to drop out of school to join Y Combinator; rarer, though, is the person who has gotten his startup into that famous accelerator, only to abandon it.
Yet that’s what Noah Ready-Campbell did. He and his business partner, Calvin Young, both ex-Googlers, joined the Y Combinator program in the summer of 2011. Within a week or two, they dropped out--becoming, so far as they’re aware, only the second team to ever do so. Not long after withdrawing their micropayments company from Y Combinator, the team decided to further pivot into a completely different business, a secondhand clothing marketplace for women called Twice. There was something else that irked them a little about Y Combinator. “No one dropped out,” Ready-Campbell says of their investors. In fact, yes. For Customer Experience, "Just OK" Is Not OK. Excellent customer experiences fuel growth, drive loyalty, are emotionally rewarding, and inspire people to become vocal champions of brands and the organizations behind them. In 2012, three out of every four organizations recognized this and told Forrester that their goal was to “differentiate on the basis of customer experience.”
In real life, most brands scored in the “OK” or “very poor” categories, according to Forrester’s 2012 customer experience index. Only 3% were ranked as “excellent,” a sharp decline that started in 2007 and is now at an all-time low. Going into 2013, we are finally at a place where despite nonstop and accelerating change, we have a better grasp of the ways in which people’s behaviors and attitudes continue to be reshaped by the digital age.
We also have tangible proof that the market rewards brands and organizations that prioritize a clear focus on their customers. We also know that getting started is often the key barrier. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Google snaps up Waterloo startup BufferBox. Parcel pickup kiosk operator BufferBox Inc. is moving on up to Google Inc., quite literally, after being acquired by the huge tech firm. That’s because home base for the team behind the Waterloo, Ont. -based startup is the VeloCity Garage inside the Communitech Hub startup incubator, located in the famed Lang Tannery building in the warehouse district — downstairs from Google’s regional office. We’re really excited to be able to build out that vision quite a bit quicker than we otherwise would have without them on side On Friday, Google announced it has acquired the not-quite-two-year-old startup for an undisclosed sum, which means the team at BufferBox will be moving their operations up a flight of stairs to join the Google team on the upper floor of the building.
“Being a small company and a startup, there’s obviously a lot of challenges,” BufferBox chief executive Mr. McCauley said in an interview. We think there’s a real exciting space beyond this amazing start with boxes. The Key To The Holiday Sales War? Winning The Social-Media Battle. With the holidays quickly headed in our direction, virtually every marketer realizes that, now, more than ever, social media MUST be an integral part of any campaign.
It’s no longer the trendy thing to do--it’s simply a necessary component of doing business. Consider the following 2011 statistics: * 66% of Black Friday purchases resulted from social media interactions. . * 52% of social media users are willing to pay more for brands that they trust (and brands who participate in social media are more trusted). When you combine those convincing numbers with the fact that 61% of holiday shoppers research their gift buying choices through social media, it creates a compelling picture that merchants ignore at their own peril: The holiday sales war can easily be won or lost on the social media battlefield. With every big company bombarding social media users with daily deals and requests to “like” and “follow” them, how do you make your holiday campaign stand out from the pack? The $1.3 Trillion Price Of Not Tweeting At Work.
On June 6, Larry Ellison--CEO of Oracle, one of the largest and most advanced computer technology corporations in the world--tweeted for the very first time. In doing so, he joined a club that remains surprisingly elite. Among CEOs of the world’s Fortune 500 companies, a mere 20 have Twitter accounts. Ellison, by the way, hasn’t tweeted since. As social media spreads around the globe, one enclave has proven stubbornly resistant: the boardroom. A new report from McKinsey Global Institute, however, makes the business case for social media a little easier to sell. Savings comes from some unexpected places. Companies are embracing social tools--including internal networks, wikis, and real-time chat--for functions that go way beyond marketing and community building.
Behind this laundry list is a more hefty benefit. Interestingly, the report suggest that tools like Yammer are the tip of the iceberg. [Image: Flickr user Vincent van der Pas]