Expepctedly, Facebook is by far the No.1 social networking platform and had 206.9 million unique visitors in December 2009 – this is 67% of all social media users in the world (jesus…). Time spent on site is also impressive – the average time of a user is almost 6 hours a month… maybe mostly spent in farming and in viewing your friends’ photos.

On average time spent, social networks and blogs are the most visited online platforms. Right behind them are online games and instant messaging.

In the United States Twitter remains the fastest growing social network in terms of unique visitors – with 579% year-over-year increase, by 2.7 million uniques in December 2008 to 18.1 million in December 2009. Month-over-month, however, unique visitors deflated with 5%.

The United States continue to be the leader in terms of social networks and blogs usage, charting a 142.1 million unique visitors with an average time spent of 6 hours per month. The States are followed by Japan, whose unique visitors total 46.6 million for December with an average time spent of nearly 3 hours per month.

While the UK, Italy and Australia are with smaller user numbers (which is normal, because the US have much more citizens in comparison) all of them chart an average time spent between 6 and 7 hours.

What do these results mean?

From this year on, we will see more earnest efforts by marketers to penetrate Facebook and Twitter. If you can not be strategic, however, or if these websites do not fit into your existing marketing strategy – better don’t even try.

There is something else, too, that many people these days fail to notice – businesses offering development of corporate/personal/etc websites are about to face “extinction”. It is much easier, profitable and cost-effective to just go and create a profile on an already existing platform where your audience already is. Consider Basecent, Etsy, Linkedin, Shustir…

And here is the visual data:

“Augmented reality” is rather a new phrase for quite an old idea – ubiquitous computing (ubicomp). Mark Weiser coined the phrase “ubiquitous computing” back in 1988 (21 years ago!) and referred exactly to what we call “augmented reality” today – a post-desktop model of human-computer interaction in which information processing has been thoroughly integrated into everyday objects and activities. In the course of ordinary activities, someone “using” ubiquitous computing engages many computational devices and systems simultaneously, and may not necessarily even be aware that they are doing so.

Many people foresaw AR to be an important new trend for 2010, but in Japan, the cradle of many innovations, this is nothing new. They have embraced AR to their everyday lives years ago and are now coming up with an amazing AR experience.

The N Building is situated in a shopping district near Tachikawa station and is now covered top-bottom in a QR Code – a two dimensional code that holds information and can be read by digital cameras with the right software.

QR codes have great and creative applications for advertisers – you can put them on your posters, business cards, on your websites, etc, and users can decode it to instantly access more information. This practice is widespread in Japan, but in US and Europe we are still new to this.

The QR Code building facade was created by Qosmo Inc. and Teradesign. Qosmo also released an iPhone app that enables users to instantly “decode” the N Buidling. You can get store information, make reservations and – here is the craziest thing that scares people – read real-time tweets by inhabitants with their GPS feature enabled. Here is a video showing how it works.

N Building from Alexander Reeder on Vimeo.

The thing is that it does not matter how we find this – amazing or terrifying (i guess it can be both), because this is the future. If you happen to know japanese, you can read more about it on Qosmo CEO Nao Tokui’s blog. And if you live in Japan or are about to visit, you can try the app itself – don’t bother going to iTunes, just request it by emailing to “info [at] qosmo [dot] jp”.

I think that the Blue Ocean strategy can be very useful to both beginner and professional entrepreneurs. As entrepreneurs we are fighting competition harder and harder every day, but there is a way to change this. With just a slight change of focus and with a bit of clever initial planning we can have more and easier profit.

The Blue Ocean Strategy Concept

The metaphor of red and blue oceans describes the market universe.

Red Oceans are all the industries in existence today—the known market space. In the red oceans, industry boundaries are defined and accepted, and the competitive rules of the game are known. Here companies and entrepreneurs try to outperform their rivals to grab a greater share of product or service demand. As the market space gets very crowded, prospects for profits and growth are reduced. Products become commodities or niche, and cutthroat competition turns the ocean bloody. Hence, the term red oceans.

Blue oceans, in contrast, denote all the industries not in existence today—the unknown market space, untainted and untapped by competition. In blue oceans, demand is created rather than fought over. There is ample opportunity for growth that is both profitable and rapid. In blue oceans, competition is irrelevant because the rules of the game are waiting to be set. Blue ocean is an analogy to describe the wider, deeper potential of market space that is not yet explored.

The corner-stone of Blue Ocean Strategy is ‘Value Innovation’. A blue ocean is created when a company achieves value innovation that creates value simultaneously for both the buyer and the company. The innovation (in product, service, or delivery) must raise and create value for the market, while simultaneously reducing or eliminating features or services that are less valued by the current or future market. This is totally opposite to the widely popular idea that successful businesses are either low-cost providers or niche-players. Instead, the Blue ocean strategy teaches finding value that crosses conventional market segmentation and offering value and lower cost.

Blue Ocean Strategy vs. competition based strategies

The authors of the Blue Ocean Strategy – Kim and Mauborgne argue that traditional competition-based strategies (red ocean strategies) while necessary, are not sufficient to sustain high performance. Companies need to go beyond competing. To seize new profit and growth opportunities they also need to create blue oceans.

The authors argue that competition based strategies assume that an industry’s structural conditions are given and that firms are forced to compete within them, an assumption based on what academics call the structuralist view, or environmental determinism. To sustain themselves in the marketplace, practitioners of red ocean strategy focus on building advantages over the competition, usually by assessing what competitors do and striving to do it better. Here, grabbing a bigger share of the market is seen as a zero-sum game in which one company’s gain is achieved at another company’s loss. Hence, competition, the supply side of the equation, becomes the defining variable of strategy. Here, cost and value are seen as trade-offs and a firm chooses a distinctive cost or differentiation position. Because the total profit level of the industry is also determined exogenously by structural factors, firms principally seek to capture and redistribute wealth instead of creating wealth. They focus on dividing up the red ocean, where growth is increasingly limited.

Blue ocean strategy, on the other hand, is based on the view that market boundaries and industry structure are not given and can be reconstructed by the actions and beliefs of industry players. This is what the authors call “reconstructionist view”. Assuming that structure and market boundaries exist only in managers’ minds, practitioners who hold this view do not let existing market structures limit their thinking. To them, extra demand is out there, largely untapped. The crux of the problem is how to create it. This, in turn, requires a shift of attention from supply to demand, from a focus on competing to a focus on value innovation—that is, the creation of innovative value to unlock new demand. This is achieved via the simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and low-cost. As market structure is changed by breaking the value/cost tradeoff, so are the rules of the game. Competition in the old game is therefore rendered irrelevant. By expanding the demand side of the economy new wealth is created. Such a strategy therefore allows firms to largely play a non–zero-sum game, with high payoff possibilities.

To make this clear, in the next post, which I hope I’d be able to post soon, I will share few casestudies on applying the Blue Ocean Strategy.

Should you have any questions or need some advice, do not hesitate to leave a comment or contact me.

Since it is again the end of the year, hear is an interesting presentation by Luckie and Company about their prediction on internet trends in 2010.

Out of the trends mentioned in Luckie and Company’s presentation i mostly agree with and believe in: Augmented Reality, 2D Barcodes, Social Media Storefronts, App World, Niche User-Generated Humor.

Augmented Reality – it is already happening with travel guide applications for iPhone.

2D Barcodes – i have predicted that 3 years ago, but back then mostly the Japanese used it. I got to know about Sema Codes by accident while doing research for ubiquitous computing. There is big future for 2D codes in internet marketing and brand experience. An year for now, my boss will feel sorry for not having invested in my business idea which i offered him then.

Social Media Storefronts – this is a fact already – check Shustir, check Etsy… both of these platforms have been reviewed here. These are unique, user, community, brand recognition, oriented platforms. I also guess that maybe not this year, but yet in the near future, Ebay will be dethroned.

App World – since iPhone got into the market, this has been an easy-to-predict trend. This fact has resulted in swift increase of budgets invested in mobile internet marketing. However, i think that we are yet to be surprised.

Niche User-Generated Humor – let’s just say that the more people the Internet shelters, the more the humor : ) This is inevitable.

Let’s say that this is an outbreak of Dassault Systems experience and innovative technology resulting in a virtual reality based service which has the real potential to change the ways we think about presentations – Forever.

It is a well supported assumption that virual reality is about to become an inseparable part of our lives in the near future and Dassault Systems and their investment approach are yet another proof of that.

It is surprising that Dassault decided to take out this technology out of its industrial context and make it available to the large Internet audience, but is not it a great surprise?

Here is a short demo of this 3D video presentation service:

(In the begining of the video there is a view of an older page design.)

As you can see Tvnima gives you the opportunity to create your own high-personalized 3D shows/presentations (future of vidcasts, why not?). The online application includes a “text to speech” module, which converts text into audio, but it is also possible to upload an mp3 file with your speech. You can insert a variety types of media – sound, video, image; direction is totally customizable and there are numerous camera angles and avatar movements to pick from. Tvnima is still in Beta version, but invitations are available upon demand directly on the site. I had requested an invitation yesterday and i got it by yesterday night.

Now as a member i have 10 spare invitations for people who would like to join Tvnima, so if you are interested in being invited by me – drop me a line!

Tvnima is about to become a powerful media tool. How would you use it?

I am going to review the platform further and will keep you updated with my finds.

Check it out, if you want:

http://tvnima.com

The newly launched (Jan 19) Google Annihilation has a backdoor and i found it! You can get in for free though the software sells for 37$ a month.

Some of the people (affiliates) who reviewed the product wrote that this product would have Google kneeling in the corner are far, far from correct. Let’s say, however, that Google is so good at indexing that a poorly organized website fails its purpose (selling in this case).

If you want to get in for free you dont have to do anything illegal. If you want to know how i found out about this backdoor, drop a comment and i will send you an email.

I do  not write this post in order to encourage you to “trick the system” and get in for free. As i mentioned, i have been wondering since yesterday whether it would be ethical to expose that Google Annihilation has a backdoor.

I woke up today with the thought that most of the people who sell online ebooks/software for the get-rich-quick audience oftenly are so much in a hurry to lay their hands on their 6-7 digit check, that they miss an awful lot of things while making/uploading their sales websites.

To all the GURUs out there – people, if you are selling crap anyways, why dont you at least make your sales pages a little less crappy?

I would not do it, because it is against the law, but if it weren’t i would compile a pack of every material (ebook/software) sold on the internet for the last 3 years and give it to people for free.

Infomillionaire consists of a 192-page manual and a dvd with 20 videos. As of now the offer is that you just pay for the products’ shipment. In addition to the book and dvd you receive a copy with Infomillionaire monthly – a newsletter with CD containing useful software to support the techniques and concepts described in the newsletter.

These materials consist of as well basic as advanced marketing advice, know-how and particular techniques. Since i have not yet sneaked a peak on the actual texts, i can not give you much details, so you better check out Frank talking about it in detail here:

http://infomillionaire.com

If you take the offer you’ll need to pay a small amount of money every month in order to cover the costs for the following newsletters. This is why Frank offers you a 30 day free trial and you dont have to pay for this month’s newsltetter. In case, which i doubt, you do not like his newsletter you can simply cancel your subscription and that’s it – money is never charged.

In my opinion Frank Kern is definitely a man whom i can trust and i took this offer. Now i am impatiently waiting for my copy of Infomillionaire.

FYI i am not affiliating this product, i just recommend it.

http://infomillionaire.com

Since i have not yet used this platform – because for now access is only granted with an invitation which i dont yet have* – my comments and overview are based on my intuition of Veritovracy’s potential and, of course, on the Veritocracy’s on-site demo.

In order to be more specific i am following their demo. What Veritocracy can give you is “the best perspectives on any topic”:

“Veritocracy brings together different perspectives on the topics in the news. Dive into a topic on Veritocracy and find the best ideas and analysis from the mainstream media, the blogosphere, and readers across the web.”

Further – Veritocracy is personalised for you!

“Veritocracy uses everyone’s input to find the highest quality articles on the topics that interest you. Each time you vote, Veritocracy learns how effective you are at choosing content for others, as well as how effective they are at choosing for you.”

Veritocracy provides you with Better News:

“By bringing together the best perspectives on the topics that interest you, Veritocracy delivers the highest quality (and most personally relevant) information. To get started, just read and vote on the articles you see.”

And lastly, you can publish on Veritocracy!

“Submit an article, or syndicate your entire RSS feed, and Veritocracy will instantly start feeding your content to new readers. As an author, you can also vote on other people’s articles to help train the system to feed your work to interested readers.”

So, If you’ve been following me till now, it should have dawned to you that this platform holds a great potential for YOU and your work’s exposure. Let’s say that on some term you register there, you link your RSS feeds, your blogs and websites. Once you get a reader from Veritocracy it would mean highly targeted traffic for you, because the system, with users’ help (feedback) evaluates which article published on Veritocracy is suitable for a particular user (the system adapts to every single user individually) and it suggests it to them : ) If you have used Pandora this surely makes sense to you. Veritocracy does the same, but with articles, not music.

Beside high potential exposure for us, the invention of this system means something else as well – value of content is more crucial than ever. Nobody likes spam and scam and nobody likes poor content. The Internet, however, is full of it. Thus, the inventions of such “filter” platforms are welcomed not only by expert publishers, but also by humble readers : ) Since, however, we are at our readers’, far from humble, judgement, we cannot afford to provide them with mediocre content – otherwise we are doomed : )

I have no patience till Veritocracy opens free sign-up access. And i shall wait : ) While waiting, you can go and check these articles about articles : )here – http://articles.psykoid.com

* 01.01.09 EDIT: Well i already have an invitation. And i am just about to start using Veri. Will be publishing further detailed reviews and impressions soon

You know, i have 2000 readers for less than a month (not that this is much), but this is quite a new blog, and i get almost no comments and hence no feedback. So in order to stimulate you and make you a present for Christmas i promise i would buy access to this service http://dominateadsense.com/ to ANYBODY who comments on this post and sign-up for my RSS feed. Dominate Ad Sense is merely a 50 bucks, but who knows, there may be a hundred commenters here so i may have to spend 5000$ for all of them. It does not matter, however, because i value your feedback a lot! And i want to make this place a really social place.

In a nutshell you can get 50 $ value service just for 2 minutes of your time : ) No big deal.

The topics they talk about are the following:

How they started with a mere $50!

How to get completely set up and open
for business in 24 hours!

How To Make Massive profits with
No Website, No Product and No List!

Why every major guru flocked to Las
Vegas to LEARN from Aymen, and why
they were all left speechless

How to get around major roadblocks
that prevent most marketers from
making BIG DOLLAR income

If you missed what the Arbitrage Conspiracy is all about, you can check it HERE