Razorfish: Five Technologies That Will Change Your Business

Interesting report from Razorfish predicting that…

Cloud services will be everywhere:

• Amazon will implement Facebook Connect on their site. See our message to Amazon about this.
• Facebook Connect becomes more powerful than Facebook.com. Fewer people will go to Facebook.com because it’ll already be on your site.
• Industry leading companies will leverage cloud services en masse in 2010.
• Brand managers will use the language of cloud services and APIs pushing their IT departments to help them take their brands real time.

The cloud will be a crucial business tool:

• Application partitioning (anyone remember Forte?) will make its return to technology architectures. Application partitioning and hybrid traditional/cloud solutions will enable more cloud adoption.
• More business will be conducted through the cloud. Perhaps even stock trading will go through Facebook and Twitter.

Multi-touch will transform retail:

• A nationwide retailer will have new multi-touch experiences in every store.
• Multi-touch experiences and seamless cross-channel integration are the future of retail.
• Windows 7 will enable more multi-touch rollouts in public spaces.
• Multi-touch experiences will be more fun, lift brand, engage customers and drive sales.

Mobile will continue its revolution:

• Geo-triggered SMS platforms will enable delivery of messages based on the user’s time and location, significantly increasing the relevance of message
• Cloud computing and augmented reality APIs will exponentially increase the amount and types of information that can be delivered through mobile devices.

Agile will boost innovation

• Agile will push businesses to think of software development as a solution to innovation.
• There will be greater Agile adoption by offshore development shops, enabling global distributive development.

It’s hard to argue the point against many of these predictions but, in my mind, the hardest one to achieve will be agile. With the sheer volume of information available to anyone in business today, the ability to find, analyse, approve and action communications in “real time” is almost impossible.

Unless people on the front lines of communications are empowered to communicate on behalf of a brand or organization, agile will be almost impossible to achieve. Which begs the question: do you want the people on the front lines empowered to communicate on your behalf? We hear cases every day where a consumer has been wowed by instant feedback from a brand but there are many more cases we never hear about where an employee has been reprimanded for acting above their pay-scale and for an inappropriate response. Just because we don’t hear about it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. Trust me on that one.

A fascinating report which is definitely worth a few hours of your time, my synopsis not withstanding.

Razorfish 5 Report Five Technologies That Will Change Your Business.