According to this report, PC penetration will reach its saturation point by 2013, though a growing number of households will continue to install home networks.

Interestingly, Forrester found that young families are the most enthusiastic consumers when it comes to adopting new technologies. They are more likely to own a Blu-ray player, for example, than any other group, including young singles. They are also more likely to own a game console (especially a Wii) or a mobile phone that can play music and videos.

Older singles and couples without children get left behind here. They are less likely to own any of these gadgets and only 73% of them actually own PCs.

In many ways, it makes sense that young families are leading the charge when it comes to adopting new technologies. After all, the parents are likely to have grown up with the Internet and mobile technology as essential parts of their daily lives. As Jacqueline Anderson, the author of this report, points out in an interview with the New York Times, this group is also more likely to buy digital camcorders and cameras so that they can chronicle their children's early years.

Online

When it comes to the Internet, young singles and couples, according to Forrester, are still the most connected group. They represent about 49 million adults in the US and 87% of them are online. They also spend more time online than any other group (16.6 hours). At the same time, these young singles and couples are also more likely to bypass regular TV service and home phone service altogether.

We would have expected older families (over 40 with kids younger than 18) to be somewhat less connected, but 84% of these families are online and 2 out of three have a broadband connection at home. As expected, however, these families tend to spend more time with traditional media sources than younger families, which probably explains why this group is more interested in purchasing high-definition TVs than others.

Internet users over 40 who are either single or empty-nesters - a total of 101 million adults - use the Internet and new technologies less for entertainment. Instead, this group focuses on using services that provide immediate and obvious benefits, including online shopping.

A few more stats from this report we found interesting:

• only 4% of US households plan to get a DVR in the next six months
• 83% of those who own a camera phone also own a digital camera and 26% of those own more than one camera
• for older couples and families, traditional media still remains important, but for families and singles under 40, new media use (in terms of hours spent per week) has now surpassed traditional media
• more than 70% of older singles and couples without children read local newspapers in print or online; only about 45% of young singles do so
• young singles and couples without children are 25% more likely to buy Apple laptops and 15% more likely to purchase an Apple desktop than other groups

Methodology

All of this data is based on a survey Forrester conducted by mail in February and March 2009. In total, 53,668 households in the US and Canada responded. The data was weighed by age, gender, household income, household size, education level, region, and market size.]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/young_families_are_now_the_early_adopters.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/young_families_are_now_the_early_adopters.php News Wed, 02 Sep 2009 09:30:56 -0800 Frederic Lardinois A new report put about by consumer and media research firm Scarborough Research has revealed some interesting information about the section of the U.S. population that's being called the "digitally savvy." These are the consumers who are more likely to own high-tech items like DVRs, satellite radios, and VoIP phones and are more likely to engage in Internet activities that include blogging, downloading music, and other web 2.0 activities. In other words - they're us.

What might be the most surprising reveal to come out of this report are the locations of the most digitally savvy cities in the U.S. Austin, Texas was number one, where 12% of the surveyed respondents were classified as being digitally savvy - nearly twice as likely as the national average. San Francisco, on the other hand, only came in at #10, beat out by other California cities like San Diego and Sacramento, as well as other large U.S. cities like Las Vegas (#2), New York (#9), and D.C. (#5), among others.

Who They Are

Additionally, the report found that the Digitally Savvy were a luxury-oriented group - more likely to own second homes, shop in high-end stores, travel more often, and drive expensive cars. This is probably due to the fact that they were 132% more likely to have a household income of $150K or more. They also skewed towards being young (77% under 44) and male (56%).

These figures also seem to jive with the earlier reports on today's iPhone owners. Like this "Digitally Savvy" group, iPhone owners were also richer than average - 40% higher than the U.S. median.

Both groups tend to be early adopters of new technology, mainly because they can afford to do so. Unlike the general population, who needs to wait for prices to come down before purchasing newer technology, this group has no problem dropping hundreds of dollars to obtain the latest gadget.

Looking Beyond the Digitally Savvy

According to Gary Meo, SVP, Print and Digital Media Services at Scarborough Research, this is an important group to monitor because their shopping patterns could "presage behaviors of consumers across the country."

While that may be true to a point, simply watching the behaviors of a group of rich, predominantly male, young adults for the latest trends would be mean missing out on other important trends that could also be capitalized on by those looking to tap into the currently unmet needs of a particular group. This is how the Wii became a big hit, for example - by introducing a platform for casual gaming that didn't focus on primarily guy-centric, intensive, and often violent titles.

If the technology industry was to look beyond the early adopters - a group clearly not representative of the whole population - would there be an opportunity here as well to come up with the next new revolutionary idea or service? Unfortunately, we may not know, as a good portion of the industry itself is the early adopter crowd, developing for the early adopter crowd, blogging about the early adopter crowd, and selling to the early adopter crowd. In fact, the apps that have broken through and gone on to mainstream success have some decidedly un-early adopter-like features - like MySpace with its cut-and-paste HTML backgrounds or Facebook's lack of RSS for the News Feeds. In fact, it seems that the key for mainstream success is to not cater solely to the most digitally savvy of users, after all.

Image credits: Fast Hands by laffy4k; Steve Jobs by DuneChaser

But let's back up a second. Press attention doesn't always translate to success. When Yahoo! Photos closed in favor of Flickr last May, Flickr was actually the smaller of the two sites, even though it got the lion's share of press mentions. We noted recently that MySpace takes 75% of social networking traffic, but according to Technorati they only get about half as many mentions as Facebook on high authority blogs.

On the other hand, for a service like Mugshot that appeals mainly to early adopters, the TechCrunch 53,651 (now more like 950,000) is a vitally important. Technorati says that Mugshot has only been linked to 917 times -- only a couple of times by a top-tier blogs, and never in a dedicated post over the past year that we could find. FriendFeed, meanwhile, has been linked to over 14,000 times, and nearly every top-tier blog has written about the service multiple times. Techmeme reports 137 headlines about FriendFeed, for Mugshot: just 3, and all came around the project's launch two years ago.

The reason blog mentions matter less for sites like Facebook and Flickr are because, let's face it, social networking or photosharing aren't as hard to sell to the mainstream as say lifestreaming, so early adopters aren't necessarily technology geeks (for Facebook it was college students, for Flickr it was photographers). Other factors matter more to driving adoption of sites targeted at the mainstream. For sites that target tech and web early adopters, however, that's less true, and mentions on blogs like this one become a lot more important to building early inertia.

It would appear that the tech blog echochamber has the potential to work against new services targeted at early adopters. If a new service relies on early adopters, it appears that it will only have a chance if it can get love from early adopter blogs. Even though Mugshot seems like a very capable lifestream aggregator and predated FriendFeed -- and it is open source to boot -- it has not had much of an impact because FriendFeed has dominated the new media news cycle. The echochamber effect of the tech blogosphere only served to make that news domination more pronounced and make it that much harder for competing services to gain traction.