THE BIG THREE

Winning in business today is the game of three:

1.  Using social media as part of your communication tool box

2.  Incorporating new technology into the equation

3. Making sure your business is up to speed and that you understand how to best use 1 and 2

In some ways, it's a tougher game. Just learning all the right social media moves and what tech tools will help keep your business floating above the near drowning overflow seems like a job in and of itself. But the good news is that now there is so much more access to information, which helps make the job easier.

I'd like to share an article I found online the other day. It discusses how emerging technologies can help businesses gain greater insight and new customers (Emerging Tech Trends). The article cites several trends that will quickly impact how we do business, including social, next-gen mobile, cloud, consumerization, and big data. I'd like to focus on smart mobility and HTML 5, discussed in this worthwhile post, since we're presently considering these two for customers.

Mobile phone apps as an enterprise tool are quite common today. But you may be surprised to hear that up to 96% of enterprise tablet activations in 2011 were iPads.  And that's just the tip of the iceberg. According to this Emerging Tech Trends post, "Social business efforts must make platform an equal citizen, and in many, if not most, cases go mobile first.  Oncoming rapidly however are technologies such as near-field communications or NFC, which will make location-context, payments, and gamification much easier. In terms of social media, NFC is going to make check-ins on location-based social networks like FourSquare even simpler, enable single-gesture product comparisons in stores, and even make friending each other less of a hassle by simply tapping smart devices together."  Right now, we have customers getting ready to take mobile apps to the next level. Are you ready?

The second big thing everyone's talking about is HTML 5. It almost makes the web competitive with the current crop of proprietary mobile platforms such as iOS, Android, and Blackberry OS. It does this by adding much of what is missing from a common browser, such as location, local storage, video and audio streaming.  In the near future, those of us building or acquiring social apps will likely have to deliver them in HTML 5 to reach the widest number of users with the richest form of functionality. Ready yet?