Once again, futurist Marian Salzman has set the tone with her annual trendspotting report for 2012 where she predicts the big trends in shopping that needs retailer attention. The year ahead will no doubt bring innovation from retail pioneers so lets take a look at a few of her predictions that could have big implications.
2011 is wrapping up as another banner year for mobile adoption and Apple continues to sit in the center of it. Even though tough economic conditions are credited with a slight drop of their marketshare in Europe and Amazon's Kindle Fire is starting to rip into the lower end of their tablet market, Apple is still expected to move over 40 million mobile devices this quarter, setting another company record.
How we use these devices is also continuing to evolve. IBM just released some very impressive benchmarks, showing that 13.4% of online buyers on Christmas Day made their purchases from Apple iPads and iPhones this year. This is on top of a general 16% growth in online sales from Christmas Day 2010.
As Android continues to scoop market share from RIM and Nokia, screaming up to ~48% market share globally, another tablet is poised to hit the retail shelves this holiday season that will extend the platform's reach. Amazon's Kindle Fire will be sold at a price point that will bring apps like Angry Birds, streaming video, and eBooks into even more households.
Whether you are a Kindle enthusiast or not, it is easy to see that the price will be very appealing to those unwilling or unable to shell out $500 or more for an iPad. While not seen as a heads on threat to Apple, Amazon is likely to capitalize on some niche market segments, like college students. For app developers and marketers alike, Android's ongoing growth and additions of new devices further cements the importance of building apps for the platform.
This is the second in a series of blog posts by Kevin Long, Janrain Technical Product Manager, to introduce the new Janrain Engage Social Login Widget and provide detail on how to use the new enhancements. Read other posts within the Janrain Technical series.
We’re pleased with the response to our advanced Janrain Engage Social Login Widget and the excitement its generating. Last time we covered the new style and layout features. This time we will focus on Mobile support and take a look at the features in the new Janrain Social Login Widget that address mobile needs.
The explosion of mobile web usage has thrown marketers for a loop. Forrester recently reported that more than 20% of US website visitors use the mobile internet at least monthly - and it is more than double that in China and Japan.
And when mobile users connect to the web, they are looking for social experiences. In just one example, people who use Facebook on mobile devices do twice the amount of activity on Facebook as their non-mobile counterparts.
Clearly there is a strong need to integrate social media into your mobile experiences.
69.5 million people in the U.S. owned smart phones during the three months ending in February 2011 and Google Android strengthened its #1 position with 33.0 percent market share according to a recent comScore MobiLens report. In March 2011, Amazon released the Appstore for Android to tap into the platform’s growing popularity in games and applications. While the iOS and Android platforms continue to vie for market share in the smart phone and tablet markets, brands will need to continue to invest in building engaging applications on both platforms.
At Janrain, we believe strongly in giving our customers a choice of providers and platforms to power their user acquisition initiatives. In 2010 and Q1 2011, we released social login and sharing support for iOS based devices (iPhone and iPad). Today, as reported on TechCrunch, we announced that we are expanding our mobile platform support to include a social login and sharing SDK for the Android platform.
Last month, we shared a video demonstrating how social login using Janrain Engage works on the iPhone. GO TRY IT ON, a fashion community site that lets users upload photos and get feedback on their favorite outfits, deployed Janrain Engage on its website and mobile application to help transform its site visitors and mobile app downloads into vibrant community members.
In October, as part of our ongoing feature enhancements to Janrain Engage for Mobile, we released the ability for iPhone Apps to enable sharing to social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others. Janrain’s iPhone SDK was released as a beta to give our customers and the mobile community an opportunity to test drive and provide input in areas such as ease of implementation, comprehensiveness of feature set, and customizations offered.
Go Try It On, a great new fashion community site, is using Janrain Engage for iPhone to enable mobile visitors to quickly register or login to its mobile app using their existing social identites. Check out the short video below to see how easy it is to sign-in to Go Try It On's mobile app from an iPhone, upload a photo of yourself and rate the photos of other members.
In a recent survey of over 1900 smart phone developers published by Appcelerator and IDC, 65% of those surveyed cited the need for social networking APIs on mobile platforms. Janrain, the user management platform for the social web, is happy to extend its support for the iPhone platform to meet this need and offer a native iPhone SDK for sharing content and activity on your apps to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yahoo!, MySpace and other social networks.
In April, we launched native iPhone support for social login and today, we have extended Janrain Engage for iPhone to enable a user to share directly from an iPhone app to multiple social networks simultaneously. Imagine you’ve just hit your highest score on your favorite iPhone game. Now with an easy click you can share your good news with friends on Facebook, Twitter, and other online communities.
Posts
Once again, 
2011 is wrapping up as another banner year for mobile adoption and Apple continues to sit in the center of it. Even though tough economic conditions are credited with a slight 
As Android continues to 
This is the 
The explosion of mobile web usage has thrown marketers for a loop. Forrester recently reported that more than 20% of US website visitors use the mobile internet at least monthly - and it is more than double that in China and Japan.
69.5 million people in the U.S. owned smart phones during the three months ending in February 2011 and Google Android strengthened its #1 position with 33.0 percent market share according to a recent 
In October, as part of our ongoing feature enhancements to 
In a recent 
