The worldwide web has altered society
The worldwide web has altered society, but unbelievable future developments will totally "rock the boat", says the web's creator on its 20th birthday.
British scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee made the remark on Friday at his former place of work, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or Cern, in Geneva.
While speaking of his fond memories of his time at Cern - "an excellent place to start a new idea" - Berners-Lee stressed the importance of looking to the future of the web.
"The rate of creative new designs and development and innovation on the web is getting faster and faster all the time," he told the 500-strong audience in his keynote speech.
Today there are upwards of 80 million websites, with many more computers connected to the internet, hundreds of millions of users and billions of web pages.
"The web is not all done; this is just the tip of the iceberg. New changes are going to rock the boat even more. When we get new data out there on the web things will happen that will change the world, as things will be processed on our behalf by machines which are much more powerful," said Berners-Lee, who is director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), that guides its technological development.
Another key future development is web-to-mobile phone initiatives, he explained.
"Getting the web onto phones is very important, as there are many more browsers on phones than laptops, and in developing societies it's really exciting as that's the only way people use the web," he explained, who added that 80 per cent of the world's population still doesn't surf the web
Subject: Online display advertising is expected to go from $7.83 billion this year to $16.9 billion in 2014 - a 17% annual growth rate More bad news for traditional media outlets. A new survey of business marketers from Forrester Research says that 60% of those surveyed intend to increase their interactive marketing budgets by shifting money away from traditional media. According to a Research Brief article at MediaPost.com, direct mail is the category the largest percentage of marketers planned to cut, with 40% of them saying they would make reductions there. Newspapers were the #2 target on the hit list, named by 35% of respondents. 28% said they would spend less with magazines and 12% cited television as the medium where they were most likely to cut back.
The study says the biggest winners among interactive platforms will be social media and mobile marketing platforms. Over the next five years, social media is expected to enjoy a 34% annual growth rate (compounded annual basis) with mobile marketing increasing by 27% a year. That means social media would explode from $716 million in 2009 to $3.11 billion by 2014. Mobile marketing would zoom from $319 million this year to $1.27 billion by 2014.
The revenue drain at traditional media outlets is accelerating as advertisers shift their marketing dollars to the web.
Online display advertising is expected to go from $7.83 billion this year to $16.9 billion in 2014 - a 17% annual growth rate. Today's 800-pound gorilla, search marketing, is expected to grow more slowly, but still a very healthy 15% annually, which would take it from this year's $15.39 billion to $31.59 billion five years from now. Email marketing is projected to go from $1.25 billion to $2.08 billion - an 11% annual rate of growth.
To show just how bad things are going for the traditional media platforms, a a corollary report from Forrester says budgets for old standbys like television, print, radio and magazines, along with staff and training expenses and branding/advertising expenditures have been slashed by two-thirds from last year's levels. When it comes to media and advertising, the Internet is obviously where you want to be. |
