Wednesday Evening Technology Trends
There are three core areas that I’ve been looking at recently when it comes to technology and trends. This all started when I was compiling my uber 2008 trend forecast and has been a wild ride since uncovering all different data points and predictions across the world. The three areas that I’m looking at are digital natives, digital immigrants and technology for women.
Digital Native: digital natives for all intensive purposes are people who have born into technology. Technology isn’t scary to them, it’s actually a part of their lifestyle. When something new and innovative comes out, whether they are an early adopter or not, eventually the technology platform finds a way into their life. When digital natives start to penetrate the higher ranks of the corporate world, technology and digital media will be a common place.
Digital Immigrant: digital immigrants are people who didn’t grow up using digital media but they have adapted their life to it in some capacity or another. Whether jumping on the email bandwaggon at age 34 or learning how to text message at 55 years of age, digital immigrants want to make the transition into utilizing digital media. They generally have a longer adoption process as technology and digital media usage doesn’t come naturally to them.
If you’re a marketer, think about your target audience. Are they mostly [digital] immigrants or natives? Marketing to these folks should be handled very differently and make sure you’re using the right message. The next 5-10 years are going to be a huge transition time for the digital immigrants and lots of entrepreneurial endeavors will be setup around this.
Technology For Women: I’m not going to lie, Sherri brought this to my attention with a blog posting over at HermanWeb.us. For those of you who do not know too much about HermanWeb, it essentially started as a wedding site for the two of us to connect with our family across the world but has evolved into Sherri’s blog that is getting quite the following. In less than one year, Sherri’s evolved the site and posted dozens of intelligent postings about life in Westchester and recently, had a business skew to her postings.
Sherri knows that I’ve been talking about CES lately because some folks in my company are out there and that lots of my friends are promoting their products on the show floor. Many times, technology can be dominated by males and many products are designed for this audience. To Sherri’s point, technology and the related products surrounding gadgets and systems can be designed for women… and that’s begun. It’s certainly been happening for quite some time now but accessories and systems geared towards women are becoming mainstream. Sherri took a nice peek into CES and talks about it. Check it out… and certainly leave her feedback.