A number of interesting headlines streaked the blogosphere this morning that pertain to major developments in mobile and video technology.
Facebook and Twitter Access via Mobile Browser Grows by Triple-Digits in the Past Year.
- This latest study from comScore reveals that 30.8% of Smartphone owners log in to these social networking sites. This represents a significant leap in just one year, up from 22.5% in January of 2009. Broken down more precisely, comScore reveals that mobile log-ins to Facebook grew 112 percent, and Twitter mobile log-ins leaped 347 percent.
Importance: Social networking sites hold increasing relevance for web users, whether at their desktop or not.
Google: Desktops Will Be Irrelevant in Three Years’ Time
- Is it so far-fetched to assume that stationary desktops will be undesirable and simply unusable in the coming years? Mashable’s Stan Schroder reports that Google’s European Director of Online Sales thinks the desktop is on its deathbed:
“In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant. In Japan, most research is done today on smart phones, not PCs,” he said
Given the significant advancements in mobile technology, could it be that the smartphones, iPads, and netbooks offering much of the utility and visual aesthetic as desktops will soon replace them entirely? Perhaps, but I’m not sold on the three year timetable. New technology requires an adoption critical mass before it replaces dated technology, and while mobile has accelerated at a compelling rate, it’s yet to encompass an overwhelming, comprehensive offer that would allow it to dethrone the mighty desktop.
Importance: Small business owners would be wise to keep apprised of mobile developments. At some point, their customers will make a monumental shirt.
YouTube Launches Auto-Captioning For Videos
In a live event today at YouTube headquarters a team of speakers and technology developers from Google, YouTube, Stanford, Berkeley, and the California School for the Deaf assembled to reveal the latest advancements in video voice recognition technology and transcription.
We wrote about this development while it was in Beta testing in November, and it appears that the kinks are still being worked out but major progress has been made. These transcriptions will make video accessible to the hearing impaired, and will allow for translation across languages (slowly but surely). And as it become more prevalent, video-search will become increasingly more refined – the reliance will no longer be just on external tags, but eventually on the actually words and quotes within the video.
Importance: This could represent a major breakthrough for marketers and small businesses looking to make an SEO splash via video (an increasingly popular medium). A trend to watch out for across 2010 is for a transition from text to video, and video that can maintain a certain SEO credit will hold the same benefits of crawlable text, with the added appeal of visual stimulation.
