At press time we have not had a chance to try out Six Apart's new free, open source plugins but Wordpress users can read more about them and try them out here.

The concepts behind alternate reality (or augmented reality) interactive gaming are futuristic in themselves. Gamers are freed from their PCs and permitted to roam the face of the earth like normal, social human beings while remaining in-game. Adding mobile and social aspects to the mix pushes the oeuvre into mind-blowing territory. Adventures are location- and proximity-based, IRL interactions spring from in-game teamwork: The mind reels. And don't let's get started on revenue streams, which will occur to you at a rate of one every half minute from the time you read this post until well into next week.

Stump has likewise given his notice to Digg and will apparently be couch-surfing his way across Europe through July.

Once the wunderkind duo have settled back down, Crash Corp's work will begin in earnest. Although the team is currently operating in super-stealthy hush-hush mode, we've been frieNDA'd enough to whet our excitement and can't wait to see what the startup will bring.

According to interactive game developer Brooke Thompson, whose site we now quote because its definition of the term most closely approximates what we've heard from the Crash Corp team, "Alternate reality gaming is a growing genre of pervasive games in which participants interact with an imaginary world within a real world space, uncovering a story through multiple means of communication and media. The games tend to be highly collaborative which make them excellent alternatives for team building exercises, viral marketing events, and promotional entertainment."

A mild example of a mobile augmented reality game would be the award-winning Ghostwire, which adds a basic overlay of a "ghost" into the environment as seen from a mobile device's camera:

Other examples of the tech can be seen in this Games Al Fresco post on augmented reality for mobile.

Of course, the better the tech gets, the more imaginative and exciting gaming possibilities become. From the afore-referenced Wikipedia article, "Advanced research includes the use of motion-tracking data, fiducial markers recognition using machine vision, and the construction of controlled environments containing any number of sensors and actuators."

In a word, the Crash Corp team are ignoring the fine line that separates technological realities from science fiction, and we applaud their ambition and wish them the best success.

Bluetooth 3.0

This is one of the no-brainers on the list. The Bluetooth 3.0 specification will be released this year and devices will start to hit the shelves by 2010. At this point, it's expected that the 3.0 spec will include faster speeds, reportedly transferring files at 480 megabits per second in close proximity and 100 megabits per second at 10 meters. It will also feature an ultra-low-power mode that Gartner predicts will enable new peripherals, sensors, and applications, such as health monitoring. The technology will be backwards compatible, allowing old devices to communicate with new ones, so there's no reason for it not take off in the upcoming years.

Mobile User Interfaces + Mobile Web/Widgets

Mobile user interfaces and mobile web/widgets were listed separately, accounting for two items on the list, but we think they can be lumped together. They all point to how mobile computing is rapidly becoming a new platform for everything from consumer mobile apps to B2E (business-to-employee) and B2C (business-to-customer). (Gartner did not include B2B on their list.) Modern day smartphones like the iPhone, Android, Blackberry, the upcoming Pre, and others deliver better interfaces for browsing the web, thus making it accessible to more people. Widget-like applications, including those that replicate thin client technology, will become more common especially in B2C strategies. Yet the mobile web still has challenges ahead. For example, there are no standards for browser access to handset services like the camera or GPS, the report notes.

Location Awareness

Location sensing, powered by GPS as well as Wi-Fi and triangulation, opens up new possibilities for mobile social networking and presence applications. Technology's earliest adopters are already familiar with social networks like Brightkite and Loopt which let you reveal your location to a network of friends. But we're still on the tip of this iceberg. Take for example, the iPhone IM client Palringo, they're just now adding location services to their application. This allows users to see how far away their contacts are, introducing a whole new dimension to mobile communication. Over the next year or two, this sort of technology is expected to become more commonplace, but it will also raise questions about privacy. Will you want your network of online friends and acquaintances to really know your exact location? Will turning off location awareness signal that you're up to something sneaky (so asks the suspicious wife, husband, boss, etc.)? As a society, we will have to answer these questions and more in the near future.

Near Field Communication (NFC)

NFC is a technology that provides a way for consumers to use their mobile phones for making payments, among other things. It's something that has taken off in many countries worldwide, but certainly not all, and definitely not in the United States just yet. Unfortunately, Gartner predicts that the move towards mobile payment systems will still not occur this year or the next in mature markets like the U.S. and Western Europe. Instead, NFC is more likely to take off in emerging markets. Other uses of the technology, such as the ability to transfer photos from phone to digital photo frames, will also remain elusive to more developed markets.

802.11n & Cellular Broadband

802.11n, a specification for wireless local area networks (WLANs), initially gave us pause. Although not ratified as an official standard yet, the technology is already commonplace. However, until it "goes gold" so to speak, it won't really infiltrate the mobile world. Even the ubiquitous iPhone only supports 802.11 b/g at the moment. 

On the flip side, the other internet connection technology, cellular broadband, has the potential to make Wi-Fi almost unnecessary, at least for achieving high speeds. In addition to mobile phones, laptop makers will likely continue to incorporate this technology into their netbooks and notebooks using modern chipsets that provide superior performance to our current crop of add-on cards and dongles.

Display Technologies

Display technologies will also see improvements in the upcoming years. New technologies like active pixel displays, passive displays and pico projectors will have an impact. Pico projectors - the tiny portable projectors we saw being introduced at this year's CES - will enable new mobile use cases. Instant presentations in informal settings could become more common when there isn't large, cumbersome equipment to set up. The different types of display technologies introduced in 2009 and 2010 will become important differentiators between devices and will impact user selection criterion, says Gartner.

For more information on these above technologies, you can read through the full report available here on Gartner's web site.

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments on how you think the mobile space will be impacted in the future.

Still, let's face it, playing what are essentially online computer games where the "fun" is in interacting with random strangers may have been an interesting experiment, but now that the hype has died down, we can see that they only attract a niche crowd. These worlds will not deliver the promise of the 3D web that we had once imagined they would.

Where 3D is Useful: Mapping

When 3D technology is implemented for more practical purposes, though, it can be incredibly useful. Some of the most innovative developments in 3D technology involve advances made in mapping. The newly redesigned Google Maps' Street View is a great example of this. Their recent update lets you drag a figure (the "Pegman") over any street to get a preview of Street View for that location. When the Pegman lands, the whole map turns into a Street View viewer. Google Maps with Street View has also been delivered to our mobile devices where it helps us navigate unknown areas of our world when we're away from our computers.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has also integrated 3D into their mapping platform, only in a different way. They launched their Live Labs project Photosynth in August, which lets you stitch together photos to create detailed 3D environments. Last month, they integrated Photosynth with Live Maps, letting you explore various landmarks and cities in 3D as well as share your own "synthed" photo collections with the other users of Live Maps.

Where 3D is Cool: Browsing

Also this year, we've seen some developments in the use of 3D to deliver better visual browsing experiences. Amazon launched their 3D Winodwshop site which lets you virtually browse through the company's top products.

We've also seen other web applications integrate this 3D visual browsing technology including ManagedQ's semantic Google-based search, Photo Stream's visual newsroom as well as newer search engines like Viewzi and SearchMe. Although none of those have hit the mainstream, they all are interesting experiments.

However, one of our favorite 3D browsing tools is the technology from Cooliris, a browser plugin that lets you transform the web into an immersive 3D experience. With Cooliris, you can surf a "wall of content" from sources like Google, Flickr, Yahoo, SmugMug, and DeviantArt. In October, the company also launched an iPhone application that does the same.

Similar to Cooliris's iPhone app, Microsoft took Seadragon, the technology that supports Photosynth, and released it as an iPhone application callled Seadragon Mobile. With this mobile app, you can browse several image collections including the Library of Congress maps from the TED demo, NASA images, a two-billion by two-billion pixel map of the world, and you can also load custom content via an RSS feed.

3D's Future: Shopping?

As The Guardian reports today, there are many people who think that online shopping is the next frontier for the 3D web. In particular, they make mention of a company called ExitReality, who is developing a 3D plugin that can transform any 2D web site into 3D. Visitors using ExitReality's plugin can change into avatars to wander through web sites and chat with other users. Says ExitReality founder Danny Stefanic, who has been working with virtual reality since 1994, "it's not a replacement for viewing the 2D page - that is still the best way to consume that content - but it gives everyone a 3D space that they can utilize if they want to. And what we have found is that instead of the two- or three-minute session times of 2D websites, when we are in 3D and exploring and chatting to people with similar interests, we spend 20 to 30 minutes there." He notes that sites implementing 3D could offer online sales agents that could chat to visitors or demonstrate products.

In other words, 3D for marketing and sales. Sigh.

Is There Nothing Else?

Last year, we had once wondered if 3D interfaces were useful or just a novelty. We think the jury is still out on that. Besides mapping of course (which extends to new developments in Google Earth, too), the majority of the 3D launches we've seen over the year are fun...even cool...but not incredibly life-changing. In fact, the newest uses of 3D are even more kitschy and even less useful than those that we saw earlier this year. The most recent 3D sites actually backtrack to 3D's beginnings and require you to break out your nerdy red-and-blue glasses to view them. For example, a site called Snowdin.com, is a new holiday Flash production by Colle+McVoy that's entirely in 3D.

For even more mindless fun, we just discovered that you can create your own red-and-blue doodles at the new Neave Anaglyph site.

Sure, we may have rushed out to the car to retrieve our glasses left over from the weekend showing of "Bolt 3D" to view these sites, but we don't imagine that 3D glasses will ever become the new must-have accessory for internet surfing. So where does that leave 3D technology for consumers browsing the web? Fun, games, and virtual worlds? Yes, that seems about right. Although some businesses will find 3D technology useful as we noted before, we did not see this technology become the most ground-breaking innovation of 2008...unless you count the pinching and zooming that took place on our iPhones.

Image credit: 3D images above courtesy of Adverlab; main image: ny3d

Jott moved to a paid model following a successful free beta. I spoke with Jott CEO John Pollard to learn how they did it and how it is working out for them.

Jott still has free service, but it's been put together such that if you are a frequent Jott user, you'll be very tempted to upgrade. The upgrade itself is less than $4 so I suspect many people will go for it. Jott has a variety of plans to choose from including free, basic, pro, pay-as-you-go, etc.

The company based these plans largely on user behavior and lots of data. When they started the company, they knew they would ultimately have a free and paid version, but had to learn the rest along the way. For example, they had to find out if their customers were home makers, road warriors, students, professionals, etc.

Some of the factors they experimented with during the beta program included turnaround times, length of recordings, and features. By collecting data around user behavior and usage, they were able to model scenarios and identify trends. They then used focus groups, the Jott user group, and conjoint analysis (a very cool survey technique requiring users to make trade-offs on product features versus price) to come up with the different packages. They were very confident that some professionals wouldn't want an ad-supported service, and the research confirmed it.

As you can imagine, they overcame significant challenges along the way. While many users understand that Jott has to put food on the table, there were users who were shocked that a company dare ask for money. Personal note: this is both a common and ridiculous sentiment that has grown as more "free" things pelt us, but that is a conversation for another day.

John and company decided to be extremely transparent about the process and spent significant time in their forums, hitting the blogs, and using other marketing mechanisms to tell their story and let users know what was going on. John admitted they could improve on the communication front, but they did a solid job. The communication philosophy was to tell the users what was coming, tell them when it was coming, and explain why - as many times and in as many places as they could.

The company is very pleased with the conversion process so far. They are apparently hitting their goals and on plan. One pleasant surprise according to Jott is the percentage of people selecting annual plans; John said they are getting 10 times the number of annual subscribers that they expected. I'm not surprised as I'm sure a large percentage of Jott users are business customers, and this is the most efficient way to get something expensed; although this is pure speculation on my part.

John has good advice for other companies embarking on this journey. First, talk to your customers as much as possible. Really talk to them and understand the problem you are trying to solve and how they use the product or service. Second, utilize web-based tools like conjoint analysis to gather quantitative information to make decisions. Finally, try to be transparent and don't surprise your customers; they hate that. If you build something that people want and value, you can ask them for money and it is good business.

Conclusion

What is your position in the Enterprise 2.0 market. Do you work in IT in a large Enterprise? Do you work for a large incumbent Enterprise IT vendor? Do you work for a startup that is going to change the Enterprise world? Are you writing about this rapidly emerging market? Do you have unique insights or research to share? We would love to hear from you in the comments and maybe as a Guest Author. Email us if you're interested in writing for ReadWriteWeb's Enterprise Channel.

You can subscribe now to our special RSS feed for the Enterprise channel.

This is a big story. That is why ReadWriteWeb is dedicating a new "channel" to Enterprise 2.0. I will be editing this channel and we are looking for part time writers to contribute. More on that later.

Peter Drucker, the greatest management thinker of all time, pointed out that the "firm" is a relatively recent innovation, designed to do the things that individuals cannot easily do on their own. Ronald Coase later created a theoretical model (Coase's Theorem) to describe why firms exist, based on the difference between internal and external transaction costs. If the transaction cost was lower internally, then it made sense to organize that work internally. If the transaction cost was lower externally, then it made sense to organize that work externally.

Coase's Theorem underlies countless management books on subjects around reengineering, outsourcing, core competency, spinoffs, spinouts and so on.

Enterprise 2.0 - first innings of a new game

This is a fascinating story for me. For 20 years I worked in traditional IT enterprise vendors selling to large enterprises. It was a great game for a while, based on the fact that you could get license fees for copying a tape, effectively 100% margin. At scale, after paying for a base level of R&D and sales, it was fantastically profitable.

Around the turn of the century, it became clear that this game was in the final innings. Larry Ellison, one of the masters of that game, announced that it was game over. Innovation in enterprise software was over, the problems had all been solved, the only thing left to do was sell to Oracle and let them restructure you. Ellison may actually believe this, but mostly it is self-serving. He, and other big incumbents would like start-ups and their investors to believe that the enterprise market is worthless. Leave it to the big boys. That is clearly self-serving.

And wrong. As Salesforce, Basecamp, Google Apps, Zoho, LinkedIn and countless other start-ups that we cover here on ReadWriteWeb, prove every day. One game is over, a new one is in its first innings. This is the best time to be a start-up in enterprise software. We will profile the vendor landscape and the opportunities for new vendors in the next post. For now, I want to focus this from the point of view of the enterprise, the buyer.

Large enterprises and globalization

The fundamental restructuring of enterprises is mostly a developed world story. In developing countries such as India, Brazil and China, huge new companies are being created. They have totally different challenges and a different opportunity. They are still in the phase of organizing scarcity, which requires the deployment of large resources - scale is an advantage. America and Europe did this in the years after the Second World War, the Asian tigers (Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore) followed a few years later with a similar strategy. Now China is doing the same and, to a lesser extent India, Russia and Brazil.

We will write more about the emerging giants from the developing world and how they are impacted by social media in future posts. This post is focused on the challenges faced by large enterprises in the developed world. They don't need to organize scarcity, they need to organize for innovation. Nobody really knows how to organize for innovation, certainly not within traditional organizational structures. But we do know that scale is not an advantage and is often a disadvantage when the prize is innovation.

The perfect storm hitting large enterprises

Large enterprise face a "perfect storm". These are huge challenges. Start-ups that help them navigate these challenges in real and fundamental ways will do very well:

1. The demographic time bomb of retiring baby boomers. They have mastered the rules of the traditional enterprise and, with only a few years to retirement, they will tend to resist fundamental change. When they leave, they take with them accumulated decades of experience, knowledge that is not easily codified for handing down to the next generation.
2. The difficulty of bringing in Generation Y. This generation has grown up in the fluid world of social media. GenY are not enticed by rigid command and control structures controlled by a generation that does not want to hand over power. This is a big problem for enterprises. Ask a random sample of GenY how many view Fortune 500 companies as their ideal employer. If large enterprises don't get the best and the brightest in this generation, they will be in deep trouble from the start-ups and global challengers who do.
3. Enterprises are all about secrecy, structure and control. Social Media is exactly the opposite. Secrecy, structure and control have served real needs for a long time, they work. When the irresistible force of social media hits the immovable force of a traditional enterprise, it makes a loud noise. The strategies are not obvious. "We will make social media technology bend to our rules" will lose a lot of the real value. "Blow up all the rule books, let self-organizing networks evolve" may work out brilliantly, or it may blow up catastrophically; the risks are unlikely to be easily contemplated by existing management and investors.
4. Figuring out what is core and what is non-core is hard. Implementing that is even harder, when careers and power rest with the current definitions that assume that most activities are core and should be done in-house.

Historic opportunity

This is a massive shift. A bit of historical perspective helps. In 1955, 1/3 of the US GDP was controlled by Fortune 500 companies. By 2000 that share had tripled to 2/3. Within that cold statistic lies thousands of human stories of family farms, Mom & Pop stores and other small businesses trampled by WallMart, Agribusiness and other large companies. The drivers mentioned above may reverse that trend. It is not written in stone that large companies should control 2/3 of the economy.

That is huge opportunity for a lot of start-ups. There has never been a better time to be an entrepreneur. It also a huge challenge for the incumbents. Big companies need to re-define themselves in fundamental ways to find new ways to be big in a meaningful way.

Adoption of social media will be the central theme in that story.

The next post will focus on the Enterprise 2.0 market landscape and the opportunity window for start-ups. At a time when advertising is challenged and the VC window is a less open, this is a vital area of opportunity for start-ups.

Tell us what you think? Tell us where you sit - within the large enterprise trying to figure out how to manage this huge wave of change? Within a start-up or VC looking at the opportunities?

You can subscribe now to our special RSS feed for the Enterprise channel.

UPDATE: Part 2, 11 Things Startups Should Know About Enterprise 2.0, is available now.

Qik received a nice share of coverage today from First Congressman John Culberson when he used Qik to interview House Republican lawmakers and gain some insight on the discussion about rising energy costs and gas prices. The livestream was embedded on the CSPAN homepage with plenty of comments and discussions going on in the video's chat. You can view the video here.

Social Media and the Government

First Congressman John Culberson actually has a nice selection of livestreams from various political personnel. Culberson also has a Twitter account, where he is active with a host of followers and followings. However, the question at hand is whether or not parts of the government tinkering with social media is a good thing. Let us know your thoughts in the comments area!

Marketing guru and blogger Seth Godin is also known for his Web 2.0 Traffic Watch List on Alexaholic. This list tracks the changes in Alexa traffic for about 1000 Web 2.0 companies. For example, MySpace and YouTube are numbers 1 and 2 respectively (although check our previous post, which has YouTube in the top spot). While there has been a lot of skepticism about the precision of Alexa ranking, particularly because the ratings can be bought or gamed, for a large pool of popular web sites it can adequately be used as a relative measure of popularity.

Here is the latest Seth Godin Alexaholic top 10 list:

How we looked at the data

Seth Godin's list shows only companies, but not trends. As the first step, we labeled each company with a category such as Video or Social Networking. Next, we calculated additional information needed to determine growth. For each company, we calculated the % Change in Rank. This is the number which indicates relative change in the ranking of each company. The reason for using this percentage change instead of the actual change number is to take into consideration that fluctuations at the top of the list are much smaller than fluctuations at the bottom. Here are the first 10 entries from the new list:

Trends for top 100 companies

We then labeled the top 100 companies with the categories and calculated the common values for each category. Here is what came out:

Green = Growth; Red = Decrease

Important Note: lower figures mean more popularity

There is a lot of interesting information. First note that Photo is the most populated category in the top 100, with 10 companies falling under this category. It is closely followed by other usual suspects: Search, Video and Social Networking. 

Looking at the Average Rank column gives us the current average standings. Since lower Alexa ranking implies more popularity, Photo and Music hold the lead, followed by Blogging and File Sharing (note that File Sharing includes storage, like Box.net). Among the worst rankings we find Search and Video. Search is probably is not surprising, because Google has a strong grip on this category. The reason that the Video average is not great is because the players in the top 100 are at the bottom, with the exception of course of YouTube and DailyMotion.

Perhaps the most interesting information is the Average % Rank Change, because this information indicates growth. Remember that the lower the figure, the more growth it indicates. We were somewhat surprised to find that the six players in the Social Bookmarking space saw the most substantial growth in the last six months. This indicates that social bookmarking is heading towards the mainstream. It is not surprising to see big growth in video, but interesting to see Meebo contributing strongly alongside Skype to the Communications category.

The data also reveals more bad news for the Search category, as it experienced an overall drop in the last six months of 3% points. Again, fighting Google is no easy thing. Finally, the Blogging category had the biggest drop of 9% points. Perhaps this can be attributed to people blogging on their social networking sites, but this is not obvious - although Xanga, Livejournal and SixApart all decreased in popularity. It could also be that more people are using Wordpress, which is on the rise (but not on the list).

Conclusion

It would be interesting to expand on this research and look at the trends for the entire 1000 companies. It would also be interesting to see what companies are influencing the trends the most. Surely the MySpaces and YouTubes of the world, but what other companies? The information on Seth's list can be analyzed in a number of different ways, to gain insights into what is happening in our fast changing Web 2.0 world. 

You are welcome to use the spreadsheet we created to do more analysis. Of course the only catch is that you have to share the results with us :-)

Update: There was a slight error in the original spreadsheet, so we have amended that. Thanks Dermot for pointing it out.

Source: Mary Meeker presentation, via CacheLogic

I followed up by checking out the CacheLogic webpage, which has an interesting research presentation on its homepage entitled True Picture of P2P Filesharing. Also note that there is an updated 2005 version of the report on the site.

The larger trends at play here (as outlined by CacheLogic) are:

• P2P is not in decline, in fact it is growing at a sharp rate (see Meeker's slide above).
• The "vast majority" of P2P traffic is of files > 100MB. While most of this is video, there are other things such as CD images for open source software (see graphic below).
• CacheLogic says that a "significant proportion of the user population" is using P2P, not just a few heavy users.
• They call it the "killer application for broadband"

Source: Mary Meeker presentation, via CacheLogic

Do you use P2P?

Read/WriteWeb would love to know from our readers if you use P2P, and if so:

a) What do you use it for? (music, movies, etc)

b) What P2P network and/or application do you use?

Please leave a comment, because it'd be interesting to see what Web-savvy people use P2P for.

Lloyd Sakazaki has written a good overview of recent trends in global websites. It is based on Alexa data, a stats source which comes under regular fire for its faults (most recently ex-Netscape boss Jason Calacanis took aim). Nevertheless, there are some interesting underlying trends in the Seeking Alpha article. Not new trends, but well stated.

Over a two year period (Nov 2004 - Nov 2006), there have been 5 new websites enter the top 15 of Alexa in reach - myspace.com, live.com, youtube.com, orkut.com, wikipedia.org. Two of those are now owned by Google, which of course has shown significant growth of its own accord over the past two years.

The overall trend is that user-generated content is the defining feature of all of the new top 15 sites - except maybe live.com, which is basically just a replacement (sometimes a duplicate) of other microsoft properties in Alexa. So whether you call this current era of the Web the Read/Write Web, or Web 2.0, or whatever - the proof of how it is different is right there in those alexa stats. Also as Sakazaki nicely points out, the success of search in this era is derived from the growth in user-generated content - since there is so much content nowadays.

Anyway, back to the high level trends. Seeking Alpha also notes that many of the fastest-growing websites are localized Google properties - showing two clear trends, the importance of Google and the internationalization of the Web. The former gets plenty of press and blog coverage, the latter less so. But both are of equal importance in my view.

Pic: Orli Yakuel (who got it from scifi.com)