Which brings me to my 2012 predictions for Facebook, e-commerce, location and social networks, the four areas I've been watching closely since I joined the rad team at ReadWriteWeb this past October. Come along to the next page!

In the context of the 2011 social network battle of 2011, Facebook lost in the Identity category (you can't use pseudonyms on Facebook). In the Sharing category, however, Facebook came out as the obvious winner.

At the f8 developers' conference this past September, Facebook announced the launch of new Timeline profiles, frictionless sharing, Spotify integration and its vision for Facebook's Open Graph platform. A few months after f8, Facebook hired the engineers and developers behind Gowalla. (As a result, Gowalla will shut down.)

What Will Happen In 2012? In short: A lot. Facebook is aggressively hiring and is expected to go public in 2012 with a ridiculously high $100 billion valuation. I predict that frictionless sharing will continue to ramp up, especially in the areas of news and video-sharing. With the expert Gowalla engineers and designers onboard, I can see Facebook tweaking its Timeline so it's better at actually telling stories rather than just presenting people with a ton of visual information. The news feed will probably become more customizable and personalized, giving users some of the control they demand. I think Facebook will converge its UIs into a single platform, and everything will be optimized for mobile. In fact, mobile will be Facebook's number one focus. The long-rumored Facebook phone will finally come out, but it will bomb. By the end of 2012, I predict that Facebook will hit the 1 billion user mark.

E-Commerce

In 2012, I predict that Groupon and LivingSocial will scale back on employees. Then it will increase the frequency and personalization of its deals. In fact, I predict that personalization and time-limited, location-based deals will be key for the future of daily deals.

Social networking-turned-flash sale sites like Fab.com will continue to grow.

The Facebook-EBay integration will be Facebook's last attempt at f-commerce before it finally gives up.

Digital customer loyalty programs like Belly will grow as merchants realize that they need a way to keep their customers coming back. In 2012, I predict that mobile commerce and couch commerce will explode.

Next page: What Will Happen To Location and Social Networks in 2012?

Location

Social Networks

I predict that Facebook, Google+ and Twitter will grow and thrive in 2012. Pinterest, a relative newcomer to the social network game (it actually bills itself as a social bookmarking site) will also keep expand. I also predict that we'll start seeing more visually focused, tablet-friendly user interfaces like Delicious'. People will increasingly access social networks from their mobile devices and tablets.

What do you think will happen in 2012? Do you agree or disagree with my predictions? Let me know in the comments below.

Frictionless Sharing: Music

Spotify rolled out deep integration with Facebook shortly after f8, requiring a Facebook account in order to sign up. Usage shot way up, but that's not to say all are in favor of its frictionless sharing techniques.

In exchange for free music from Spotify, Facebook streams music tracks onto one's profile for their network to see. Spotify calls this the "soundtrack of your social life" - and it's all right there on the Facebook profile. Spotify is also centered around social discovery, hoping to increase music recommendations among friends. As with any free service on the Internet, users pay with their data though ultimately Spotify hopes to turn its free users into paying customers. Like Spotify, music streaming services competitors MOG and Rdio also dropped their fees.

Not everyone wants to tell their social graph about what they're listening to. In fact, our own music writer John Paul Titlow turned off his Spotify integration.

Spotify does add an interesting new social layer to the online music listening experience. And it opens you up to your friends' entire library of music. Through frictionless sharing, you might discover that you have the same taste in music as someone else you know - or you might find new tunes based on the social graph rather than through a music recommendation service like Pandora. In fact, this happened to me. I discovered that a friend was also listening to Katy Perry (because really, who in the world isn't listening to Katy Perry?) and we, like, totally and instantly bonded over that! For a moment on Facebook, anyway.

While these types of happenstance discoveries could bring about new interests and connection, the majority of Spotify streaming just feels like noise that's popping up in the news ticker. Facebook has not proven itself to be a one-stop shop for music like Pandora. But that's not what it wants to be, really.

The good news is that you can adjust the privacy settings for frictionless sharing apps like Spotify. If you really wanted to, you could just change to "Custom" so that only you would see what you post from the app.

On the actual data collecting side, does Facebook really need this much information about anyone's music listening habits? If Timeline is a curated version of your life, then the answer is yes. But not everyone is as interested in lifestreaming as Facebook seems to believe.

Next page: Frictionless sharing for news, and how this trend will play out in the coming year.

Frictionless Sharing: News

The three big Facebook social news apps come from the Guardian, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. Install the app onto your Facebook account, and everything you read will automatically show up on your Facebook profile (Timeline). All articles that you read through the app will be done inside Facebook itself.

Does your Facebook network care about what you read? If so, social news apps might be useful for starting discussion. If your network is more focused on friends and family, then social news will just end up feeling like noise.

Of course, there are pros and cons to every new product that Facebook launches. But really, I think this once again comes down to better segmentation of Facebook friends. In this instance, Facebook could learn a thing or two from Google+'s Circles.

Conclusion: Frictionless Sharing Needs Some Serious Tweaking

Facebook has a history of launching new products, altering privacy settings and doing whatever it pleases without the user's consent. The FTC settlement should change that, but of course Facebook will continue to innovate.

Facebook needs to figure out how to help users share to niche segments of their friends. For example, the new Facebook Subscribe button for websites, which went live last week, makes it easy for fans to subscribe to public posts. Previously, the subscribe option was only available within Facebook. What's bothersome about it, however, is that every public post still has to go through the user's Facebook profile (or Timeline), meaning that Facebook friends who may not care will still see it. And by the way, whatever happened to the "watch" aspect of Facebook's read/watch/listen?

The same problem occurs with frictionless sharing. On the initial launch, Facebook sharing definitely felt wrong. Facebook seems like it's redefining sharing, but is it really? It's just launching something new, then tweaking it.

Facebook should ask its users how they'd prefer to use frictionless sharing and with whom they want to share endless streams of information. I doubt the answer is "everyone."

The results are not hugely shocking, but contain some interesting tidbits nonetheless. The list is broken down into three rankings: overall usage, male usage and female usage. The top half of each list is littered with the apps you'd guess were popular: Facebook, Gmail, Maps, YouTube. Pandora, Words With Friends, Twitter and Amazon's Kindle app all make expected appearances in the top 20 as well.

In addition, only 8% never buy local deals, up from 28% who said they never buy them just a few months ago.

Still, that describes a large swath of the Internet-connected U.S. population today, and especially those participating in the local deals space. Simply put, the trends occurring within this audience are notable for the deals industry.

Increased Sharing

Since Q1, JiWire found that sharing local deals is up 21%. Now, 75% of the on-the-go audience are sharing deals regularly, the company says. The most popular way to share deals is email (35%), but word-of-mouth (19%) and Facebook (18%) are also regularly used.

Demand for Deals Up, Too

Demand for deals has also increased over last quarter, says JiWire, with 28% of consumers now buying deals once per month, up from 20% in Q1. As noted above, only 8% say they never buy deals, a decrease from 28% a few months ago.

Women Prefer Less Expensive Deals than Men

78% of people spend an average of less than $50 on local deals these days, but when comparing trends between the male and female audiences, there are some differences. Women are more likely to spend less than $25 on deals, JiWire notes, while men will spend $25 to $50 on a deal.

Image credits: Lead image, Hudson Horizons; Charts: JiWire

However, Apple is the top manufacturer of smartphones. This claim is mainly due to the fact that Apple ships its own phones, while Android is spread out across a number of OEM's, including leading manufacturers like HTC, Motorola and Samsung.

We thought this "Android is #1" headline sounded vaguely familiar, and it is. In March, Nielsen reported the same thing. So the news today is not so much about Android moving into the number one spot, as it is an update on where things stand now. Yep, Android's still there at #1. And it has even a bigger market share than before.

To compare, in March, Nielsen reported that Android had 29% consumer market share in the U.S., while Apple's iOS and RIM's BlackBerry OS were a close second at 27% each. Today, those numbers are 39%, 28% and 20%, respectively. In other words, both Android and Apple are gaining here at RIM's expense.

It's also interesting to see how the smartphone manufacturers have benefited from the Android surge. HTC's Android market share is up from 12% in March to 14% in June. Motorola  went from 10% to 11%, and Samsung went from 5% to 8%.

Of course, these manufacturers put out other phones besides Android phones, and those trends are pictured here, too. Wow, does that show HTC's Windows Mobile/Phone marketshare dropping a percentage point from March to June? And webOS dropped, too?

March 2011

June 2011

But here's an interesting side note to that data: When broken down by device, iPhone users see more video data traffic than those on Android, or even on laptops.

Because of the capabilities of today's smartphones, the video consumption behavior on these devices now mimics that of laptop computers, says Bytemobile. On the networks analyzed, video accounted for 52% of the data consumed on laptop and Android devices, but it was even higher on iPhones (58%).

This doesn't mean that an iPhone user watches more videos, necessarily.

As Bytemobile's Anna Yong, Mobile Analytics Manager, explains, "the volume by video data generated (bytes) is a function of both number of videos being watched, the quality of the video being watched (higher quality video generates more bytes) and the length of video. (1 video could be 1 minute long and low resolution, and another video could be 5 minutes long, and high resolution and thus generate very different data volumes.)"

That means there's not a direct correlation between number of videos and data volume, she says.

However, it does seem to speak to at least a slight difference between the way people are using these devices, we think.

High-Res Videos Eat Up Data

Speaking of high-resolution videos, although only requested by 29% of users, they account for a disproportionately high percentage of the data volume: 45% of the total, as you can see in the chart below.

YouTube Video Consumption Trends

Traffic from YouTube, as the source of many of these videos, was examined closely. When users watch YouTube via the browser, they're served more higher resolution videos than through the app, regardless of the network or device type. iPad users, however, while still tending to use the YouTube app (73%) more than the browser (27%), use the app less frequently than iPhone users.

This data comes from Bytemobile's Smart Capacity Mobile Analytics platform, which is deployed with over 125 operators in 60 countries, including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Vodafone, Orange, China Mobile, China Telecom, Telefonica, Telecom Italia Mobile, Bharti Airtel and others. The data traffic is measured anonymously using a cross-section of Bytemobile customers' wireless networks.

Some of the biggest gaps between customer demand and the current offerings included the following:

• 23% of consumers download a branded shopping application, 50% plan to do it the future, but only 12% of retailers offer one.
• 54% of consumers want barcodes and smart tags in magazines to link to store catalogs or websites, but only 12% of retailers offer this feature, too.
• 62% of consumers want to shop using mobile apps or websites, but only 32% of retailers offer this option.
• 38% of consumers want to check product availability using their mobile phone, and 52% expect to do it in the future, but only 29% of retailers provide this option now.
• 51% of consumers want to add items to their carts via mobile phones and then complete the transaction later using a PC or tablet, but only 23% of retailers allow this now.

It's interesting to compare these shortcomings with additional data from Forrester's latest Mobile Commerce Forecast, which found that only 2% of retailers' Web sales will come from mobile devices in 2011. Mobile commerce, says the research firm's analyst Suchartia Mulpuru, will remain a small portion of a retailers' business. Although mobile commerce is expected to grown 40% each year for the next 5 years, it will only reach 7% of Web sales penetration by 2016, she notes.

This is due to a number of factors, explains Mulpuru, one being that tablets (which Forrester doesn't include in its definition of mobile) are preferred over smartphones for online commerce because of their larger screens. Also, shopping as an activity has never been one of the more popular Web behaviors, always ranking below things like "reading news" or "using social networks." Finally, consumers often use the Web and mobiles to do product research or compare prices, but complete transactions in a physical store.

That doesn't mean that mobile has no role to play in the mobile commerce revolution, however. Mobile commerce will "transform retail," Mulpuru says, because it empowers customers and makes pricing much more transparent. Big box stores will be forced to become much better merchants, Mulpuru concludes, "or die."

How People Use Social Networking Sites and Facebook

According to Pew, out of the 79% of American adults using the Internet, nearly half (47%) use at least one social networking website. 92% of these social networking users are on Facebook, 29% on MySpace, 18% are on LinkedIn and 13% use Twitter.

While those percentages seem to imply popularity, that's not the case. By measuring engagement alone, Facebook and Twitter come out on top, with 52% and 33% of users logging on daily, respectively, compared with 7% who visit MySpace daily and 6% who do the same on LinkedIn.

On Facebook in particular, participation, as opposed to passive consumption, appears to be a common trend. 15% of users update their status on an average day, 22% comment on another's post or status, 20% comment on others' photos, 26% "like" another user's content and 10% send a private message to a friend.

Results of Regular Use: Real Friendships, Emotional Support

This daily use and engagement leads to generally positive feelings among Facebook users, specifically in how they perceive their relationships with others, and the world around them. Facebook users who use the site multiple times per day are 43% more likely than other Internet users to be trusting of others - that is, they feel that most people can be trusted. It's your typical "glass half full" outlook on life.

Regular Facebook users are also, on average, 9% more close to their friends than other Internet users. And they score higher when it comes to social support than other online users. Pew says they are 5 points higher in total support, 5 points higher in emotional support and 5 points higher in companionship than Internet users with similar demographics. (More study details can be found here).

The study also showed a general increase in the use of social networking services to stay in touch with close friends. In 2008, only 29% of users said they had friended all of their core "confidants." Today, that number is 40%.

Users tend to revive their "dormant" relationships (high school friend requests, anyone?), too, and these can become important sources of information, even though they're not active relationships.

Finally, Facebook users are more engaged with politics, no doubt thanks to the numerous political conversations that occur online via status updates and political cause pages.

Conclusions

What this study shows, says Pew, is that there is little validity to claims that people who use social networking sites have smaller social networks, less closeness with others or are exposed to less diversity. In other words, your Facebook friends are real friends because Facebook allows you to mirror your offline connections via the Internet, it does not isolate you from them. It may even enable you to have more close ties, with frequent use.

That said, the study fell short of concluding that it's Facebook itself that's actually causing people have these types of close relationships, support networks or impacting their engagement levels with various causes. Americans with deficits in these areas, and who are closed off to other viewpoints, untrusting of others and disengaged with their community and society are not like this because of how they use technology. Instead, these deficits may stem from other factors, like lower educational attainment.

This news comes alongside a second report, which states that Facebook's growth is slowing down in certain key markets, including the U.S.

The CNBC article cites "people familiar with the matter" when making its claims, but Facebook declined to comment to news outlets pursuing the story. However, we've known for some time that an IPO was in Facebook's near future. Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said at a meeting last month that an IPO was "inevitable," notes CNBC.

Even as far back as September 2010, Facebook board member, venture capitalist and early investor Peter Thiel told reporters that Facebook was likely to go public in 2012. He, however, had pegged "late 2012" as the time frame for that.

Reports of Growth Slowdown

Facebook was also making news this week due to a separate report from Inside Facebook which states that the social network's growth has slowed down in the markets where it has been available the longest, most notably in the U.S. Here, a drop of nearly 6 million users was seen over the month of May, going from 155.2 million users to 149.2 million by month-end. Canada also fell by 1.52 million users, down to 16.6 million, while the United Kingdom, Norway and Russia all lost over 100,000 users each, during the same time.

Facebook responded to these claims, saying that:

From time to time, we see stories about Facebook losing users in some regions. Some of these reports use data extracted from our advertising tool, which provides broad estimates on the reach of Facebook ads and isn't designed to be a source for tracking the overall growth of Facebook. We are very pleased with our growth and with the way people are engaged with Facebook. More than 50% of our active users log on to Facebook on any given day."

In light of Facebook's response, Inside Facebook also compared its findings (which do come from direct measurements using Facebook's advertising tool) to other third-party services. While nothing matched up exactly, the general trends showed that in some of the social network's early adopting countries like the U.K. and Canada, gains and losses started in 2010, but growth up until then had been steady. In the U.S., fewer monthly users were seen at the beginning of the year by most of the third party services, and only one showed any growth in the disputed month of May.

Facebook Hasn't Peaked

Still, it's far too soon to say the social network has hit its peak, some experts say. In a report on PEHub, for example, social media analyst Lou Kerner of Wedbush Securities noted that the Inside Facebook report doesn't include data about increasing page views or frequency of visits, both of which help gauge the "vibrancy of a website." (Note: Kerner owns shares of Facebook).

And digital media analyst Greg Sterling said that he would need to see "at least three more months of hard, detailed data, to suggest that Facebook's best days are now behind it."

That said, Sterling still thinks the site may be vulnerable. "[Facebook CEO] Mark Zuckerberg has characterized Facebook as a utility -- a communications utility -- but I'd argue that it hasn't yet made itself into one the way that Google has," Sterling told PEHub. "In the same same way that we joined Facebook because our friends did, we're likely to leave if those same friends become less engaged," he says.

The data pointing to slowdowns is definitely questionable, we think. Even Inside Facebook reports that "a person close to the company" says the site is still growing in the U.S. And Facebook is on track to reach 700 million users, thanks to growth in newer markets.

Plus, there is still China, population 1.3 billion. Facebook may be planning to enter that market through a relationship with Chinese search company Baidu in order to launch a new, separate and more tightly controlled social networking service, which may or may not connect with Facebook as it exists today.

To reach its conclusions, SocialNuggets monitored over 12,000 social media mentions, blog posts, forum postings and other online mentions. The results are not surprising. For the most part, the reaction to nearly all of Apple's announcements, from iOS 5 to iCloud and beyond, was overwhelmingly positive.

Below are a few major takeaways from the SocialNuggets data.

• iOS 5, iCloud and Mac OS X Lion had a strong Share of Voice and positive perception, and were the three most talked about topics.
• Twitter integration was the least discussed topic.
• iMessage scored well in terms of Share of Voice and perception, but Trailed iOS 5, iCloud and Lion on both fronts.

Comparing WWDC Day 1 and 2

• The top three discussion topics were the same on both days, but iOS 5 was talked about more than Lion on Day 2. This indicates a shift in Apple's Developer community, says SocialNuggets, where iOS is a more popular topic (and perhaps platform) than Mac.
• Lion, however, still stayed in the top 3 both days, indicating the Mac's developer community remains strong.
• iCloud gained on Day 2, as people learned about it in more detail and began to understand how it worked. Lion lost steam on Day 2.
• iMessage was the 4th most popular topic, after iOS 5, iCloud and Lion.  MobileMe's death was 5th.
• It was surprising how few conversations were about the Twitter integration.

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It also found that these consumers are heavily engaged with local deals services like Groupon and LivingSocial, for example, and had a high demand for tablet computers.

According to the study, 50% of the on-the-go audience reported being confident making purchases of over $100 and 20% were comfortable with purchases over $500.

They're also using their phones and mobile devices to do research prior to purchasing an item online (40%) or in the store (31%) at a later date. 20% both researched and purchased the item from their mobile phone.

This statistic is particularly interesting, given the rise in barcode scanning applications on mobile phones, such as those from eBay's RedLaser, Amazon, Bing, ShopSavvy and others. Big-box retailers have typically hated these apps, because they effectively turn their stores into showrooms where consumers can view or try out their products in real life, before purchasing online. Apparently, that fear is somewhat justified.

Groupon is Hot with On-the-Go Market

This audience is heavily engaged with local deals too, with 72% having purchased. 44% of this group said they purchase local deals once a month, and 62% say they share deals with their friends. The report found that local deals shoppers did not represent the typical early adopter demographic (i.e. young mobile users), but consisted of half of "Gen Xers" aged 45 or older.

High Interest in Tablets

The on-the-go audience, not surprisingly, reported a high level of interest in tablets, with 71% saying they either own or intend to purchase one. The tablets will be used by 71% for both work and personal reasons, while 25% say the tablet will be for personal use. Only 4% say the device will be used solely for work.

More details from this report are available from JiWire's website.

Photo Credit, barcode scanning: ShopSavvy

Although not part of the press release, a Twitter-based location-based alerting service is in the works too, according to reports. This service will involve harvesting tweets to alert Twitter users about local events and places, among other things.

The location-based alerting service will involve the collection of public Twitter updates, but with the personal information removed. Twitter will be responsible for anonymizing this data before turning it over to the NTT DoCoMo. The software involved, expected to launch this winter, will initially run only on phones from the carrier itself.

This is an important partnership for Twitter, which is a hugely popular service in Japan at present. There are currently around 17.57 million Twitter users in Japan, and as we reported back in April, roughly 25% of all tweets now come from Japan alone. The service is more popular than Facebook in that country, The New York Times reported last year. One Japanese operator, SoftBank, even offers some phones with a dedicated Twitter application pre-installed on the home screen.

How NFC is Being Used with Twitter in Japan...and Elsewhere

Of course, the piece of this news we're most interested in (and extremely jealous of) is the NFC-enabled "tap to follow" functionality which will soon arrive in Japan.

NFC, or near field communication, is a short range wireless technology that allows for the exchange of data between two devices. It's an enabling technology for the many upcoming mobile payment systems which will allow users to pay for purchases at point-of-sale, instead of with a credit or debit card. Just this week, Visa announced the launch of a digital wallet service that will use NFC.

But NFC, which is now arriving on modern smartphones like the Google/Samsung Nexus S, Samsung's Galaxy S II, Nokia's Astound, RIM's BlackBerry Bold 9900/9930 and more soon, is not just for mobile wallets. It can also be used to facilitate simple tasks or data exchanges.

For example, Foursquare experimented with NFC-based check-ins at this week's Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco, Rovio is experimenting with NFC in its new Angry Birds Magic game and DoubleTwist is allowing Android users to share MP3's with each other using NFC.

The only notable service in the U.S. that's looking at NFC's use with Twitter, however, is Hashable. Its Android application was updated this week to allow NFC-based contact sharing. Simply tap phones with another Hashable user on Android to exchange contact info via email or "check-in" with that person on Hashable. Although automatic Twitter following is not supported at present, Hashable says the feature is in development now.

Sadly for we early adopters, there are only a handful of NFC-enabled Android applications at present, and fewer still that involve any sort of NFC-enabled Twitter functionality. Most are more targeted at the geek/experimental community, not mainstream consumer. In time though, as more NFC phones ship, that situation should change.

Not biting? Well, you're not alone.

Too Many Prototypes, Unfinished Products

Android tablets aren't selling well. The Motorola Xoom, specifically, may have bombed. Windows Phone isn't selling well. And the PlayBook? Too soon to tell. Meanwhile, Apple is pulling in record-breaking numbers. Unlike much of its competition, Apple doesn't launch prototypes or unfinished products. Not surprisingly, it's a strategy that seems to work.

This thought occurred to me as array of gadgets crossed my desk over recent weeks.

Windows Phone 7: Waiting for the Big Update, New Hardware

For starters, HTC's HD7, a Windows Phone 7 device which I've painstakingly adopted as my primary phone in order to thoroughly test it and understand the end user experience. (Short conclusion: it's not ready).

Microsoft touts its numbers - registered developers, downloads of its development tools, number of applications. But it won't say how many phones have been sold. Not because it doesn't know, but because it's a number not worth bragging about yet.

Tech-savvy early adopters may be see the roadmap ahead for this platform - the planned updates, the apps on the horizon, the new hardware  - and get excited about what Windows Phone could be. They can also piece together what the Microsoft/Nokia partnership means for future devices. The combination of Nokia's hardware design, great cameras, Microsoft's attractive and innovative operating system design and a big bang of a software update ("Mango," due out this fall), and Windows Phone has the potential to one day be an important player in mobile, if only the king of the second tier.

Whether the two companies can effectively combine their resources, leverage the appropriate assets and generally make things work is another thing altogether.

Honeycomb: Where are the Apps? The Sales?

Then you have the newly launched Android Honeycomb tablets from Motorola, Samsung, LG and others.

Honeycomb, Google's tablet-optimized version of its Android mobile operating system was built so quickly that the code base that powers smartphones (Gingerbread) still exists separately from that which powers tablets. Unlike with Apple's iPad, all Android smartphone apps don't "magically" work on Honeycomb at present. There are only 100 or so apps that do.

Of course, with Honeycomb, mobile industry insiders can see the potential here, too. When Google launches its next version of Android, the one code-named "Ice Cream" (or "Ice Cream Sandwich"), Android's smartphone code base and tablet code base will merge and become one. That means it will be easier for developers to make apps that work on both the smartphone and tablet platforms. And Android has a large enough developer base, thanks to its dominating smartphone market share, that many of these developers will do just that. But right now, it's just too hard. And there's not an established market for Honeycomb apps as of yet.

That hasn't stopped companies like Motorola, Samsung and LG from preparing Honeycomb tablets, though, and it hasn't stopped them from putting those tablets out in the market tied to long-term cellular contracts. And it hasn't stopped comments like these, from Samsung's VP of Mobile Lee Don-joo, from making the rounds in the press. "Samsung will have to improve the parts that are inadequate," he said of the company's new Honeycomb tablet.

Steve Jobs never called the iPad inadequate.

And we're surprised that these Honeycomb tablets don't fly off the shelves?

Bizarre Prototypes

Another product that recently landed in my confused hands this week is Kyocera's bizarre, two-screen wonder called the Echo. Yes, a dual-screen Android phone.

While I sort of want to applaud a company that tries to think differently about mobile, there's no other way to describe this phone but to call it, simply, a prototype.

The Echo is a concept device made real. It's heavy and thick. A brick when shut. There's a large bezel in between the two screens that, when opened, makes even the two-screen optimized applications hard to fully enjoy. That's not to say there aren't some interesting choices, like the YouTube queuing and viewing app, VueQue, or the fun Jibe Social Messenger, both of which have already made themselves two-screen ready.

In practice, however, I don't love two screens. Not like this. It's an unfinished product. It's...well, it's just weird. And yet, strangely, it's available for sale now from Sprint. A prototype! It's shocking. There's no software update that can fix this phone's issues. It needs better hardware. It may even need hardware that doesn't exist yet. Or maybe the core idea is a mistake. Maybe that's why Microsoft killed its dual-screen Courier tablet. Maybe having two screens is a terrible, terrible idea.

PlayBook Shipped Before Finished

Finally, there's the BlackBerry PlayBook.

Decent enough hardware, easy to pocket thanks to its 7-inch size. A good Web browser that doesn't default to mobile views (thank you!). But it has very few applications. And no email client, no contacts, no calendar. What is this thing?

What it is is an unfinished tablet computer. RIM completed the hardware design then shipped, with plans to roll out everything else the tablet needs via software updates, including core applications like email and calendaring. RIM also plans to add support for Android applications at a later date in order to fix the "app problem." But instead of running any Android app using virtualization techniques, developers will have to take their Android applications and repackage them for the PlayBook.

So will they? It's hard to say. If RIM hasn't arrived too late in the years-long trend that has been "the consumerization of I.T.," there may still be a chance to persuade its enterprise customers to throw the PlayBook into the mix, alongside BES installations and BlackBerry smartphones. Plus, RIM's "BlackBerry" name may still be just enough of a consumer-trusted brand that non-enterprise customers will buy the tablet, if not in record-breaking numbers, at least at a steady enough pace to give it a chance to grow.

If that happens, then there's a market for apps. And if there's a market, developers may then decide to repackage their Android apps for the PlayBook or even build native ones. But even tech bloggers, journalists and analysts can't foretell the future here. The tablet received mixed reviews in the press, then surprised analysts with not-as-horrible-as-we-thought day one sales (nearly 50,000 units sold). Still, long-term, what chance does the PlayBook have against the iPad2 in the consumer market, a tablet so popular that Apple literally (I'm not being exaggerative here, I mean it literally) can't make enough?

Why iPad 2 is Winning

The point is, each of these companies is asking consumers to take a risk, to place their bets on what may or may not be the next big thing. But while we lived in a modern, gadget-obsessed world, we still don't casually throw away hundreds of dollars on what still amounts to a very risky gamble.

Many consumers wait for a company to tell them, "this is the answer, this is beautiful, this is perfect." Apple's messaging does exactly that, and while, on a personal level, the increasingly pretentious commercials drive me a little batty at times, ("when technology gets out of the way...that's when you leap forward...iPad2"), at least Apple isn't asking for us to believe in a prototype.

The everyday consumer doesn't buy a product based on its "potential." They buy based on what works, what they can afford and what they're told is good.

Sadly, there's no way around the fact that companies have to rush to ship in order to have a chance at catching up to Apple's already dramatic lead here, but it's also the very thing that's causing these products to either fail, stagnate, or just barely hang on as the companies quickly try to ramp up behind-the-scenes.

Wouldn't it be great to see something finished, polished, complete, perfect and downright disruptive, from someone else besides Apple? I'd welcome the change, but even as Windows Phone-using, Android-loving, PlayBook-testing, iPad-owning gadget fan, I don't believe that day has arrived yet. What we have instead is a lot of spaghetti thrown against a wall, and some that will stick.

What will your next gadget be? Choose wisely, you have a lot of money riding on that bet.

Image credits, Nokia phones, Kyocera: Engadget, and Engadget

For those who grew up before the era of mobile phones, these type of "mom  and dad are your Big Brother" services may strike you as a bit disconcerting with the level of access they provide. But for mobile operators and the service providers, that access has proved both valuable in retaining customers, as well as quite lucrative (to the tune of a $50 billion personal securities market, no less.)

According to the CEO of one such service provider, Tasso Roumeliotis, founder and CEO of Location Labs, there's a high willingness to pay for "Family Locator" services like AT&T's FamilyMap, T-Mobile's FamilyWhere and Sprint's Family Locator, for example.

Carriers like selling such services, too. When a mobile operator is able to convert an account to a family plan, it reduces its churn rate by 75%, Roumeliotis says. Currently, 65% of subscribers in the U.S. are on this type of plan. Within this market, there are now millions of users who are happy to pay for Family Locator solutions at a cost of $5 to $15 dollars per month, generally speaking.

While there's much debate over the future of location-based "checkin" services like Silicon Valley darling Foursquare or Facebook's Places, there's no question that families are finding the real value of location-based services in tracking their family members' movements. To put these numbers in perspective, Roumeliotis says there were more "paid-for locates" last year than there were Foursquare checkins. And according to Foursquare's own data, there were 381,576,305 checkins in 2010, to give you an idea.

Parental Controls and Access Baked Into Handsets

But while location-based tracking and alerts (child arrives at school, spouse left the office) have been available for some time, other types of services are now on their way to users' handsets, too.

Location Labs is now providing solutions that address the texting-while-driving problem, via partnerships with both Sprint and T-Mobile at present, and more are on the way. Unlike smartphone applications, these services reside deep in the phone's firmware and cannot simply be switched off by closing an app or turning off GPS. Instead, the service, provided by Location Labs' security platform called "Sparkle," works by using APIs (application programming interfaces) that provide developers access to location, velocity plus controls for data, voice and text. And it works on both smartphones (iPhone, Android and BlackBerry) and select feature phones (Brew Mobile for now).

In addition to being able to track where a family member is located, or turn off the ability for someone to text while the car is in motion, this service also provides access to other data and activity taking place on the device. For parents, this means that they'll soon be able to observe and control more aspects of how their children are using their phones.

Parents will be able to preview photos before they leave the device, read the content of text messages, stop kids from downloading apps or games, restrict Web searches, restrict when apps or other features of the phone can and cannot be used, whitelist or blacklist specific applications, restrict who can contact kids (and vice versa) and much more.

And unlike some of the Internet "net nanny" solutions from days past, those being tracked on their mobiles are never unaware. The service sends out messages at intermittent (but for security reasons, random) intervals, alerting users that they are being located or monitored.

While these advanced features are not available on phones today, their arrival is just around the corner. Location Labs says it will make an announcement related to this technology in Q3 2011 involving at least one major carrier here in the U.S. And in two years time, says Roumeliotis, ubiquitous parental controls like this will be the norm on all carriers.