Innovation Everywhere - Mobile, Gaming, Social! Oh My!
Tuesday, August 3, 2010 at 11:34AM Recently there has been a flurry of innovative advances on a variety of fronts that while not new in concepts, they have definitely started to make their make in the market.
Mobility is one of the most obvious forms of innovation that has fundamentally changed the game. Apple and Google are new yet they have had such a deep and meaningful influence that one can scarcely have discussions in the local conferences without coming across a conversation about these devices and advances in the mobile marketplace. Also it's not just the developers and handset manufacturers looking at this market with a new eye. Even the American carriers such as AT&T and Verizon are doing so with services such as smartphone payments and others. It is clear that businesses small and large are looking at this market much more differently than they did a mere 5 years ago.
Gaming is another major area of innovation. While traditional games such as Starcraft 2, World of Warcraft, Red Dead Redemption and others have legions of faithful followers, it is the changes as a whole in the gaming world that offers studies in innovation for other industries. Companies such as Valve's Steam gaming service is an excellent model demonstrating what people expect for paid software deliveries. Gaming platforms such as Microsoft Xbox whose ability to include services such as Twitter, Facebook and NetFlix demonstrates a greater diversity of offerings for existing platforms while at the same time fundamentally challenging long held views of what consumers expect platforms to be. Even games such as Zynga's Farmville who came onto the Facebook scene not too long ago has done well in demonstrating what casual gaming can do on a non-traditional platform.
Finally another area of innovation happens to be growing era of social networking. I simply call it social innovation. These are the various ways of discovering and engaging others along various dimensions of interest whether it be personal interests, professional interests, political interests, hobbies, news, or any combination. In this emerging area it is clear that consumers desire and expect to be able to consume what they want, when they want, and interact how they want to in a manner that they personally deem safe and secure. What one person thinks is perhaps too public may be considered highly restrictive to another. In this new digitally-based socially connected network, who you know is really a powerful factor. After all, it's not a site you are necessarily visiting, as opposed to people that individuals find interesting or value that drive the activity.
While there are certainly many other areas of innovation, all of them represent some universal truths about the marketplace: they are new ways of looking at old problems, the entrepreneurs in these areas are bold, brave and fast, and the consumers they are tapping into are not brand new generations but rather existing generations. These new innovations are really about how to reach people in ways that they understand, in meaningful and valuable ways, and simplifying significant degrees of complexity.
It is certainly a wonderful and exciting time!
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Gaming is extremely popular activity for today as I can see!