The emergence of this so-called big data phenomenon is also fundamentally changing everything from the way companies operate to the way people interact to how the world deals with outbreaks of infectious diseases. On March 21 and 22, GigaOM is throwing an event about the future of this big data ecosystem in New York, and for the occasion, we have highlighted 10 case studies illustrating how big data is changing the world.

The post 10 ways big data changes everything appeared first on Gigaom.

We asked 12 of them for their resolutions and published those from Dec. 27, 2011, through Jan. 7, 2012, on gigaom.com. We have bundled them together here in a single document for the convenience of our valued GigaOM Pro readers.

Be sure to check back over the coming months for further thoughts and advice from some of the tech industry’s most well-known names.

The post 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012 appeared first on Gigaom.

From a hardware product perspective, Amazon has a full lineup of Kindle devices differentiated by features and price points but always optimized for media consumption rather than aimed at general-purpose computing. Ironically, this consumer electronics product line approach comes from a retailer. At the same time, and without its controlling the operating system, Amazon is building a platform that makes a more logical use of a thin-client-to-cloud architecture than Google’s Chromebook.

Amazon may not have the variety in its ecosystem that Apple does, but it provides a rich environment for itself and its partners. Amazon’s existing retail customer relationships are an enticement for publishers, studios and record labels, and its data on customer tastes and buying habits will aid in promotions and merchandising. The Amazon Prime package has already evolved from a shipping option into an on-demand video package. It will further evolve, possibly into book rentals.

Like Barnes & Noble, Amazon can dabble in “razors and blades” trade-offs, where content and services subsidize hardware and, for Amazon, 3G access. But Amazon also has a budding advertising and daily deals business that both adds revenues and acts as a powerful promotional vehicle for content partners smart enough to take advantage of it.

Multiple authors have contributed their thoughts to this research note. Ryan Kim writes about how the Kindle is an optimized media engine, and Ryan Lawler calls the Kindle Fire the “gateway drug to wider Amazon Prime Instant Videos usage.” Mathew Ingram, meanwhile, notes that while book publishers should welcome another viable device, Amazon is the one in control of the relationship — and it has publishing ambitions of its own. And though Amazon is using an off-the-shelf OS, Barb Darrow shows how it is adding a browser and cloud cacheing to the platform. Darrell Etherington thinks the Kindle Fire kept its cost low with too many feature compromises to be a head-to-head iPad competitor.

But, of course, Amazon is not playing the same game as Apple. At the risk of oversimplifying, Apple uses its ecosystem to power its hardware business. Amazon uses hardware to accelerate and lock in its content retail and distribution business.

The post What Amazon’s new Kindle line means for Apple, Netflix and online media appeared first on Gigaom.

This report explores what the future holds for various segments of the mobile industry, from hardware devices to mobile cloud services and wireless networking. We discuss the roles of the major companies (namely Apple, Google and Microsoft) that have a recurring presence across sectors, as well as the smaller players that stand poised to disrupt.

Just as increased connectivity will fuel the growth of mobile data, so will the expansion of the cloud, which promises access to content from anywhere, anytime. Those undeniable trends will require the emergence of better ways to deliver content to users. The build-out of 4G networks will help, of course, but LTE alone won’t be enough to support demand. So carriers and their partners must increasingly look to off-loading technologies such as femtocells (which route cellular traffic onto fixed-line broadband connections) and Wi-Fi. Compression technologies that minimize the amount of data in applications must continue to evolve, and network operators will increasingly experiment with ways to minimize traffic and tweak their policies and data plans in an effort to maximize revenue while limiting network congestion.

Of course, the industry faces its share of challenges, too. New technologies will emerge for specific applications — many players are investing heavily in NFC-based mobile payments, for instance — but larger obstacles exist in creating the business models and infrastructure to support them.

And important questions remain regarding the operating systems that support all of this activity. Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android are clearly the two most important platforms in mobile; whether there’s room for another (or even several more) is still unclear. Microsoft hopes to change that with Windows Phone, which will get a huge boost from the tie-up with Nokia, but the OS has yet to make much of a dent since its launch last November. Meanwhile, Research In Motion’s BlackBerry line is floundering in advance of the company’s first QNX handsets, which are expected early next year. And it’s not too early to ask how long iOS and Android can continue to dominate the market: History suggests that incumbent mobile operating systems are vulnerable to a six-year cycle of dominance. In other words, the landscape is likely to look very different in five years than it does today.

As discussions of entire industries often go, this one is not exhaustive, nor does it encompass every single segment in mobile. Rather, it offers viewpoints on the state of some of mobile’s most-talked-about areas today and explores where they will be tomorrow.

The post The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro appeared first on Gigaom.

The growth of the Internet’s most popular services at the hands of a relatively small circle of companies is provoking concerns about how open the Internet is and will remain, and how closed it is to proprietary systems and companies. Facebook and Twitter, meanwhile, are launching new innovations that will tie their services more deeply into the social fabric of the entire web.

As Internet users continued to embrace online social networks, they struggled increasingly with shifting norms of personal privacy and identity, reacting suspiciously when those shifts coincide with the business imperatives of social network providers. Federal regulators and legislators, in turn, are beginning to act on those concerns. Twitter hit an inflection point in the second quarter that signaled the next phase of its life: Its adoption of a bona fide business model began when it embraced advertising. And its shift toward adding more in-house functions prepared it to sever the umbilical cord to the independent developer community that helped Twitter get where it is today.

Meanwhile, the advance of location-based services, one of the hottest topics in the sector, seemed to pause tenuously in the quarter. Geolocation startups like Foursquare and Gowalla began to seem less like fun games and more like serious businesses, with serious subscriber bases and acquisition offers from big names. At the same time, Facebook has yet to enter this fray; its potential role is just one of the question marks hanging above geolocation services in the second quarter.

The post NewNet Market Overview, Q2 2010 appeared first on Gigaom.

There were innovations in the hardware space as well. TVs have been a significant topic early in 2010, with a variety of initiatives bringing new features to TV sets such as 3-D, Internet connectivity and video conferencing. Another prominent hardware news item this quarter was the introduction of Apple’s large-screened iPad, which many speculate will revolutionize online media consumption, from print publications to online video.

Online video viewership is growing and the market ecosystem around it is maturing. Among significant milestones is one forecast that predicts YouTube will become profitable for the first time in 2010. The transition of this market into mainstream has been further evidenced over the quarter with traditional hardware and distribution players becoming increasingly enmeshed in the space.

However, despite this growing maturity, online video advertising struggled a bit in the first quarter. Several studies pointed to the lasting impact advertising has on it audience, with many intended recipients clicking away before viewing ads. Advertising companies are realizing that in order to survive they must differentiate and offer more targeted and compelling services. Ad supported sites are suffering, as ad spending declines. Veoh, for instance, recently filed for bankruptcy after failing to make a business out of its video destination site.

TV Everywhere initiatives were relatively quiet during the first quarter, but traditional broadcasters were far from idle. Cable and the broadcast companies spent much of the first quarter battling over fees. First, a clash between Cablevision and Scripps over higher retransmission fees resulted in Scripps cutting off Cablevision’s access to the networks on Jan. 1. Then it was Fox and Time Warner Cable, with Fox threatening to cut off Time Warner as part of a transmission fee standoff. In a final episode, ABC threatened to cut off Cablevision, again over disputed retransmission fees.

The post Connected Consumer Market Overview, Q1 2010 appeared first on Gigaom.

Google also made news in the first quarter when it kicked off 2010 with the launch of its Android-based Nexus One. The Google-branded phone sold roughly 20,000 units in the first week (compared to 1.6 million iPhone 3G units and 250,000 Droids sold in their first week of sales). The phone was introduced for sale through Google’s own web store, an attempt to disrupt the traditional carrier-to-customer model of handset sales.

Google boldly took on China’s censorship laws in the first quarter in a move that may negatively affect its Android partners as they try to introduce devices in the massive market. Google also generated a great deal of “buzz” with the unveiling of Google Buzz, a social feature built into Gmail.  The service has a similar feel to other social media tools, but is unique in that it is inherently tied to e-mail — a quality Facebook and Twitter do not share.

In other mobile apps news, location-based services (LBS) and Voice over IP (VoIP) services continued to dominate the news, as in quarters past. Gowalla and Facebook continue to square off in the location-based arena and Yelp joined the fray in the first quarter, too, with the launch of check-in functionality for its iPhone app. Mobile VoIP has achieved steady growth over the past several years as economic pressures have encouraged traditional telephony users to switch to less expensive, Internet-based offerings. Skype, the leader in VoIP services, is building on this success through new partnerships, such as the relationship with Verizon announced in the first quarter.

As expected, mobile data traffic became an increasingly important issue during the quarter as well.  The FCC is attempting to ease congestion by freeing up 500 MHz of spectrum as part of the National Broadband Plan, but the strategy faces considerable challenges.  Carriers also continue to turn to Wi-Fi as a mobile offload alternative, continuing to fuel the hotspot resurgence.  Of course, 4G offers more mobile bandwidth and the network operators have reaffirmed their commitments to next-generation technologies in the first quarter.  The debate between LTE and WiMAX continues, however, in a twist on past discussion the cable operators are now factoring in on this debate.  While cable operators Comcast and Time Warner support Clearwire’s WiMAX service, Cox has begun trialing its own LTE network.

The post Mobile Market Overview, Q1 2010 appeared first on Gigaom.

How much would that be? About $4.85 billion, according to figures from Greentech Media — or about 64 percent of the record-setting $7.6 billion raised in 2008.  So goes a stellar year in a terrible economy. At long last, though, cleantech appears to be getting its fair share of attention as the best and brightest hope of patching up the teetering structure of a fossil fuel-fired global economy. Global investment in cleantech totaled $145 billion in 2009, down just 6 percent from 2008’s peak of $155 billion, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance — not bad for a year that saw most other industries take nosedives. Still, orders of magnitude more investment are needed to achieve even the modest energy-production and carbon-reduction goals that governments around the world have set.

Amidst a general collapse of private debt and equity financing, government support has played a guiding role in 2009’s cleantech successes. About $436 billion in government spending was directed toward renewable energy, energy efficiency and smart grid technologies last year, or some 16 percent of overall stimulus spending, according to HSBC. In the United States, the Department of Energy has directed some $60 billion in stimulus grants and incentives toward these areas this year, including fourth-quarter jolts of $4 billion for smart grid projects at both commercial and demonstration stage and $151 million for its new open-sky research fund, ARPA-E. Elsewhere, funding entities such as the European Investment Bank and BNDES of Brazil have also taken up the slack, and China is spending hundreds of billions of dollars to boost renewable energy and smart grid development.

But DOE’s stimulus funds will run out eventually, leaving open the question of what funding sources will take its place. And the end of 2009 also saw several high-profile policy disappointments, including Congress’s decision to put off work on climate and energy legislation and the failure to deliver binding rules on cutting greenhouse gas emissions at the United Nations’ summit in Copenhagen. The industry and investors had wanted clear and enforceable regulation to guide their decisions, both in the United States and around the world, and didn’t get them.

Perhaps these setbacks dampened investors’ animal spirits over the holiday season. Cleantech venture capital investment totaled $817 million, down from $1.9 billion in the third quarter of the year, according to Greentech Media (Cleantech Group put third-quarter investment at $1.4 billion). Investors also pulled back on their bets a bit, with only one $100-million-plus round — that of smart-grid darling Silver Spring Networks — and less money spread across more deals.

While clean energy production continued to garner the largest share of venture capital investment, saving energy has emerged as a focus for investors as well. Solar power kept its No. 1 slot for VC investment in 2009, though its share of the overall pie shrank from about 40 percent in 2008 to about 21 percent, or $1.2 billion, according to Cleantech Group and Deloitte. But transportation and batteries, energy efficiency, biofuels, smart grid, energy storage and water management also saw respectable showings.

In the public markets, companies with a focus on saving energy — whether through making its use more efficient or storing it — picked up steam. The WilderHill New Energy Global Innovation Index of 86 clean technology stocks showed energy efficiency stocks rising 8.6 percent and power storage shares rising a whopping 25.4 percent in the fourth quarter, while solar stocks fell 8.1 percent and wind stocks dropped 4.4 percent in the same time period.

Of course, the cleantech sector also produced the hottest IPOs of 2009: the $380 million debut of lithium-ion battery maker A123 Systems in the United States, and that of China Longyuan Electric Power Group, a China-based wind power producer, which raised $2.2 billion in its fourth-quarter public offering. Those, in turn, have opened hopes for more to come. Solar module encapsulant maker STR Holdings raised $123 million in a late fourth-quarter public offering, and thin-film solar module maker Solyndra and biocatalyst developer Codexis filed much-anticipated IPO papers in December, setting the stage for a revival of the moribund public markets as a funder of green companies.

At the same time, corporate giants are acquiring their way into the cleantech revolution, and the deals are getting larger. The $418 million acquisition of solar thermal power company Solel by German giant Siemens in the fourth quarter set a good example, as did the $200 million bid for solar project developer-financer SunEdison by China’s MEMC. Of course, the biggest corporate acquisition will be the $4.6-billion takeover of Sanyo by fellow Japanese giant Panasonic, combining the two companies’ strengths in batteries, solar cells and a host of consumer electronics and appliances.

Another big acquisition was the $539 million purchase of solar panel manufacturing line maker Apollo Precision by RBI Holdings, a Hong Kong toy company — a move underscoring China’s growing might in clean technologies. Last year’s cleantech investment figures would have been a lot worse without Asia’s big push into renewable energy, particularly wind energy in China, according to the Cleantech Group and Deloitte. Another report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance reported that Asian cleantech investment, at $37.3 billion, outstripped the $32 billion invested in North and South America for the first time in 2009, although Europe, Africa and the Middle East led the pack with $42 billion invested.

The post Cleantech Was a Market Leader in Q4 appeared first on Gigaom.

Hardware manufacturers were gearing up for holiday shopping and cashing in during the fourth quarter. HDTVs were the big consumer electronics item for the holiday shopping season. According to research from Retrevo, 30 percent of Black Friday shoppers were looking to buy a new TV, compared to 22 percent buying a computer and 14 percent buying GPS and Blu-ray devices. Roku also rocked Black Friday shopping with a half-off sale on its high-end HD-XR (regularly priced $129.99, discounted to $64.99 for Black Friday). Only 500 devices were available at the low price point and Roku sold out of the discounted boxes within 20 minutes of opening sales on Black Friday.

The success of the Roku Black Friday sale, aside from being an excellent deal on a newly launched product, is an indicator of the growing popularity of online video viewing. This trend is being evidenced in numerous statistics being reported. For instance, according to research from One Touch and the Praxi Group, 62 percent of Netflix subscribers have used the company’s streaming service since its launch and roughly 54 percent of 1,000 users surveyed in October say they watch at least one movie or TV show a month. Both Nielsen and ComScore research shows a significant increase in video streams viewed in October 2009 vs. October 2008. However, there was a slight dip in the number of online video viewers in October from September levels (however total streams, streams per viewer, and time spent per viewer were all up).

Facebook had a strong quarter as it jumped to the No. 3 position in total streams viewed, according to Nielsen. YouTube, however, still dominates the market with 6.6 billion streams, as compared to the next leading competitor with 633 million streams in October. However, being king has its costs. YouTube found itself entangled in multiple lawsuits during the quarter, with several cases surrounding copyright infringement. YouTube continues to battle Viacom on this front, and during fourth quarter, evidence that YouTube managers were aware of unauthorized content yet choose to keep the material up weakened the web video pioneer’s case.

The cable operators continue their pursuit of TV Everywhere. Comcast formalized its product with a new name, “Xfinity” which replaced the temporary name of OnDemand. The initiative is also making its way to Canada, with Rogers Communications launching its version of TV Everywhere in late November. Apple also intends to launch a mobile version of TV Everywhere and will charge $30 per month for the service. Disney also vocalized its preference for a fee-based TV Everywhere, arguing that the service provides a better consumer experience, one for which users should pay.

The online video market appears to be gaining strength, regardless of lawsuits and the general uncertainty that accompanies forging into a new frontier. This is evidenced in the growth of viewers as well as growth in funding. While the total number of funding deals in the fourth quarter was similar to third quarter activity, the value of individual raises was significantly higher in the fourth quarter, indicating the beginning of a freeing up of capital to invest in this burgeoning market.

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While the iPhone continues to dominate smartphone usage in the U.S., Android is gaining market share and imparting competitive pressure on the iPhone. Many new Android phones were introduced in 2009, with roughly 15 phones on the market at the end of the year. Among the most remarkable of these releases is Motorola’s Droid, launched on Nov. 5 and available on the Verizon network.

In addition to new device releases stimulating wireless data consumption, the growing list of apps available is also driving data usage. Among the most news-generating app categories in the fourth quarter were location-based services, mobile social networks, and music. In terms of location-based services, a variety of startups introduced offerings in the fourth quarter, but Google was also active in introducing new location apps, including Google Maps Navigation, which is poised to compete with the lucrative carrier-branded navigation offerings.

The mobile music market has also been abuzz in the fourth quarter, as growing usage is ramping up competition. The various players in this space are working to carve out both an audience and a sustainable business model. Similarly, social networks have been actively evolving their services into mobile apps. Specifically, there have been a variety of product announcements and apps released in the fourth quarter that feed off of Twitter. The micromessaging service broke in to the Japanese market early in the fourth quarter, marking the first local language version of the service.

However, as such services proliferate, pressure on the network escalates, and the financial benefit that wireless data service has delivered to carriers is being tempered by degrading network performance. Growing pressure on the network is pushing 4G upgrades to center stage. However, investment in 4G is difficult to support given the still unstable market. In an environment where layoffs still loom large, the investment to upgrade the network may be difficult to sell. Nevertheless, 2010 is likely to present stronger market conditions that will better support the investment needed to make the mobile network upgrades needed.

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