New Year is a great time to look forward and to anticipate and prepare for what is to come.  So I thought I would use this blog to discuss a few important trends that I believe will impact the way we do business in the future.  This originated from a question asked of me on a fellowship application: “What do you think are the 3 most important trends affecting business, technology & communications?”  Below is my response.

1. Emergence of “Individual” Corporate Identity

As social media give companies an opportunity to step closer to their end customers, this new strategy also puts individual faces onto what used to be a collective corporate identity.  Two cases in point: Peter Cashmore for Mashable, Scott Monty for Ford, to name just a few.  While such corporate spokespersons have existed before, now they have a much more personal face that interact with consumers day in and day out. This new corporate “individual” identity can have important implications for corporate branding and even companies’ hiring practices.

2. Mobilization of communication via geo-enabled services and mobile devices

Foursquare, need I say more?  Undoubtedly this represents great business opportunities for many companies. But more than that, this finally arriving mobile market is going to create new consumer privacy concerns and will require new types of policy to regulate how consumers’ geographic information can be used and protected.  Coupled with the buzz on real-time search and interaction, business practice and public policy in this area can be complicated.

3. Real-time verbal and textual translation

Google recently added a real-time translation service that can be integrated into an online chat session or used via its new Google Wave service.  When the precision of this type of services improves, its impact on cross-cultural communication will be tremendous. With the help of the Internet and social media, individuals already collaborate in many areas such as R&D, open source applications, and cause advocacy.  Now only imagine magnifying this many times to a global scale.

In the spirit of this blog, I’d also like to refer my interested readers to the predictions made by a few other web and social media experts:

• Social media prediction for 2010 by Scott Monty (Ford social media expert)
• Trendspotting’s expert trend predictions in 140 characters
• Social marketing trends from reviewing 2009 by web strategist Jeremiah Owyang

What about you?  What do you expect to see in 2010? Whether you agree or disagree with all these predictions, I hope everyone has a happy and productive year!

Partly due to celebrity involvement, Twitter has quickly gained popularity in the last few months. According to eMarketer, various online metrics firms reported an approximately ten-fold increase in unique Twitter visitors from February 2008 to February 2009. With the rise in popularity, news broke out that quite a few major firms, including Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Newscorp, are eyeing to buy out Twitter.

Should Twitter sell out when it is still hot? My answer to this question is no. Here’s why. Twitter, just as Wikipedia and Facebook, didn’t start out as a major corporation. Rather, it is built over time through the participation and faith of its users. What makes Twitter precious in consumers’ mind is the community that it has created. The value of the Twitter brand name is not in the company itself, but in all the people who contribute fantastic and interesting content on the fly and in the way it is able to connect people with each other. Now adding a suit and tie image and a clear profit motive that is usually associated with large corporations, it will simply clash with Twitter’s current brand image and turn off the goodwill it has engendered among its users. Twitter from Microsoft (or Google or News Corp.) just doesn’t sound right.

One might argue that YouTube got bought out by Google and it is still popular. But that acquisition has yet to prove beneficial to Google money-wise. It is estimated that YouTube will lose $470 million in 2009, on sales of $240 million. Plus, it is also facing pressure from Hulu.com, another video website that has successfully struck business deals with major networks recently, including a stake taken by Discovery. Piecing these events together, the future of YouTube is quite uncertain.

Of course, Twitter is going to face the same question too in terms of how it is going to support itself financially if it were to remain independent. To answer that question, one has to look at the value and competency that Twitter possesses. At least two areas emerge. One is information. By millions of people feeding news, facts, and opinions into Twitter in real-time, Twitter has become an information network that is no less powerful than a major news network. This can be powerful knowledge to news organizations (for breaking news), marketers (for customer opinions) and the like. One way for Twitter to make money in this area is perhaps to develop as an information expert, helping these potential beneficiaries extract and analyze the useful data. For example, a platform can be established to combine tweets with Twitter traffic information to better understand what is on the collective mind. A second area that Twitter can explore is its technology expertise. Using the basic Twitter platform, it can develop customized platforms that satisfy companies’ internal messaging needs, similar to what Yammer is doing but perhaps in a more proprietary and customized fashion. Such customized platforms can facilitate efficient and secure communication within an organization (e.g., between salespeople).

Of course, the smart minds at Twitter might think of other ways of making money. But whichever way it ends up making money, I simply do not think it is a good idea for Twitter to sell to any of these large corporations. And the company seems to agree, when Twitter’s co-founder Biz Stone said “We Are Not For Sale”.

A little while ago, I wrote a two-part post on Microsoft’s irrational obsession with Google. Over the weekend, I watched a Science Channel program that detailed the background of Netscape and how it lost its battle against Microsoft. It was very interesting to observe the same kind of obsession and vengeance that Microsoft showed in that battle as it does today toward Google. That made me think: why was Microsoft able to defeat Netscape but not Google? Although Google does have plenty of Ph.D.’s as employees, it seems implausible that Microsoft simply doesn’t have employees smart enough to catch up.

There may be many reasons to explain this historical difference. For example, one may argue that Microsoft was distracted by its anti-trust case when Google was quietly gaining its strength. In my mind, however, one crucial reason was the fundamental difference between Google’s business model and that of Netscape.

As a traditional software business, Netscape relied on making money off its software. Therefore, when Microsoft offered its Internet Explorer for free, it immediately crushed Netscape’s fundamental business model. Google, on the other hand, offered its service to the average consumer for free and instead drew its revenue from businesses/advertisers. By doing so, it defeated the advantage Microsoft had: the deeper pocket. No longer can Microsoft use its free bundling and distribution power against Google. As its service is accessible over the Internet at no cost, Google was able to start on the same footing as Microsoft, and the deeper pocket Microsoft had could not help the company in this case.

The lesson learned from this is that, when businesses face a formidable rival, too often it’s easy to focus on what the competitor has that one does not have. But as Google’s luck shows, the best way to take down a larger rival is by rendering whatever advantages the larger rival has useless. Of course, this is built on the assumption that the company can still find sources of competitive advantage in an alternative area. What essentially happened in Google’s case was that they changed the rule of the game, and by doing so, it diminished Microsoft’s market power.