What’s happened this week:
- The final major console of the eighth generation, the Xbox One, was announced by Microsoft with a focus on integrated living room entertainment rather than core gaming.
- A tie up with the NFL illustrates future plans for sports coverage with a game layer on top of the live game feed.
- Quantum Break is both a TV drama and a video game that mutually interact.
- Nielsen has tied up with IBM’s Watson supercomputerto develop machine learning for media planning and measurement.
- Amazon announced a fan fiction store for Kindle in which fans can sell licensed works based on favorite TV shows.
What we have learned:
- The installed base of smartphones worldwide will be over 3bn by 2017, 3x the volume of 2012 from Enders Analysis: Mobile is eating the World.
- Google has discovered over 30 trillion unique addresses on the web and deals with over 3bn queries per day.
- Tablets are now driving over 10% of ecommerce traffic and smart devices in total over 20%.
Cool stuff:
- Top Charts is a new way to look at real time search trends from Google.
- Quantum Dot displaysare only one step away from full commercialisation bringing a huge leap forward in colour in all kinds of screens.
- Whilst colour is coming to e-ink displays via Qualcomm’s Mirasol.
- Record your favourite TV show with a tweet, an elegant piece of branded utility from a Brazilian broadcast platform.
Where to find more:
- McKinsey forecast that 12 emerging technologies will provide USD 14-33 trillion of annual economic value by 2025, Mobile Internet, Knowledge Automation and the Internet of Things head the list.
- TV content is evolving fast, as on-demand viewing scales, to become hyper-serialised.
- The Venture Capital community sees machine learning and wearable computing as the most impactful technology trends of the next few years.
