Emerging Trends: Activity Corner; V2 Issue 2

Are you keeping track of these emerging trends?

Listed below are descriptions of different products, services, technologies and practices that are representative of the different trends that we are seeing today. Some of them are in areas that can improve workplace effectiveness. See how many you can identify.

1. It is a free service that allows users to send "updates" text-based posts, up to 140 characters long. Updates are displayed on the user's profile page and instantly delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. The sender can restrict delivery to those in his or her circle of friends.

2. This is a portable device for storing and playing audio files. It can hold anywhere from a few hundred to ten thousand songs.

3. Initiatives related to this help companies make profits without sacrificing the resources of its people, the community and the planet.

4. This device supports push e-mail, mobile telepone, text messaging, internet faxing, web browsing and other wireless information services. It has a built-in keyboard, optimized for "thumbing" (the use of only the thumbs to type).

5. This is a website, usually maintained by an individual, with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important aspect.

6. This is a collection of web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content. They are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites.

7. These are web applications that draw upon content retrieved from external data sources to create entirely new and innovative services. They are popular because of the emphasis on interactive user participation and the manner in which they aggregate and stitch together third-party data.

SOLUTIONS:

1. Twitter. Media such as CNN use Twitter to break news. The American Red Cross uses Twitter to exchange minute-to-minute information about local disasters. In May 2007, there were 111 such "Twitter look-alikes" internationally. Most of these have emerged due to Twitter's success.

2. iPod. In addition to playing MP3 audio files, the iPod plays AAC (Advanced Audio Coding). AAC’s principle difference from MP3 is its ability to support Digital Rights Management (DRM). DRM is a response to the type of song sharing first enabled by websites like Napster. By encoding legally purchased songs with digital signatures, it increases the difficulty of sharing them inappropriately.

3. Sustainability or Being Green. Companies are doing this by developing greener products and services (designed to have less adverse effect on the environment), and by being more focused internally on operating with greater energy efficiency, cutting their own costs and reducing the "carbon footprint"(carbon emmissions) they leave.

4. Blackberry. It was first introduced in 1997 as a two-way pager. Today, they are popular with some businesses, where they are primarily used to provide e-mail access to roaming employees.

5. Blog. Political consultants, news services and policital candidates have began using them as tools for opinion forming.  The emergence of blogging has however also brought about legal liabilities and unforeseen consequences. In India, blogger Gaurav Sabnis resigned from IBM after his posts exposing the false claims of a management school, IIPM, led to management of IIPM threatening to burn their IBM laptops as a sign of protest against him. As of December 2007, blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 112 million blogs.

6. Wiki. The collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia is one of the best known wikis. Wikis are used in businesses to provide affordable and effective intranets and for knowledge management. The open philosophy of most wikis, allows anyone to edit content. Wikis tend to take a soft security approach to the problem of vandalism; making damage easy to undo rather than attempting to prevent damage.

7. Mashups.The ChicagoCrime.org Web site is an example. It mashes crime data from the Chicago Police Department's online database with cartography from Google Maps. Users can interact with the mashup site, such as instructing it to graphically display a map containing pushpins that reveal the details of all recent burglary crimes in an area.

So which category do you belong to?

a. You were not aware of them
b. You have heard of them
c. You knew about them
d. You use them

References

1. en.wikipedia.org
2. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-mashups.html
3. http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/080307-sidebar-companies-of-allsizes.html?zb&rc=dc_desktops