Technology

A recently published business development analysis by research firm Gartner looked into social networks’ need for a more structurally sound revenue stream, and came to the conclusion that to maintain viability and competitiveness, they will soon enter the financial services industry. One Gartner analyst, Juergen Weiss, went so far as to predict that by the end of 2014, one of the major social networks – by implication, Facebook – would enter the business of property and casualty (P&C) insurance.

“Offering insurance products to their communities would be a natural extension of social media providers’ financial services strategies,” reads Weiss’ conclusions, “and would allow them to capitalize on their extensive set of information they constantly collect about their users.”

The predictions appear in the latest of a Gartner series of “Top Industry Predicts 2012″ reports, using data compiled late last November. The report’s editor, Kimberly Harris-Ferrante, cited “radical shifts in customer behavioral changes and buying habits… challenging many industries to reinvent their product development and sales and services processes to align with customer expectations and technology use.”

The train of logic begins with Gartner analysts Stessa Cohen and Peter Redshaw, who cite a rapid increase in the number of online banking transactions. This increase has already driven banks to accelerate the establishment of their social presences through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and yes, if you can believe it, Flickr. (Banks share their family photos with their customers. No joke.)

“Traditional banks risk being disintermediated by social media websites that are increasingly looking for additional revenue streams beyond advertising,” Redshaw and Cohen write. “This is a natural extension of the rise already seen in comparison and aggregator sites, especially for more commoditized products such as small loans, general insurance and credit cards. Examples of recent activity include the social payments startup Twitpay, the virtual currency Facebook Credits and the acquisition of the U.K. price comparison site BeatThatQuote by Google.”

This “disintermediation,” as Gartner’s analysts put it, includes the enablement of online debt management services and peer-to-peer loan pools, all of which happens by way of social networks more than by stand-alone Web sites. To stay competitive, traditional banks (Gartner cites Citibank as the leader here) have launched services that reach their customers through Facebook, and enable them to conduct transactions through a social network rather than a Web site.

Here’s where Juergen Weiss takes over. Weiss notes Facebook’s Timeline feature as conducive for users to share their everyday events – getting married, getting a new job, entering retirement. Financial institutions are already using tools like Salesforce.com’s Radian6 to search for these events as social net users share them. Weiss believes this could become the social net proprietors’ opportunity to pre-empt those institutions from stealing away their own customers. Within just the next few years, he predicts, the social networks themselves (again, implying mainly Facebook, though perhaps Google also) will offer banking services, and then “naturally,” insurance services as well, perhaps initially through joint ventures with existing financial institutions but not necessarily the bigger firms.

The Gartner analysts perceive this as a genuine threat to the existing insurance industry. In their report, they advise insurers to plan now for the commoditization of their products and services, implying that they should perhaps be sold through portals the way cloud service customers purchase bandwidth and virtual machines today. A ripple effect from this seismic shift could impact government regulators worldwide, whose inability to adjust to changing circumstances has already been blamed for such events as the collapse of the Central Bank of Ireland, and the sub-prime mortgage loan crisis in the U.S.

Twitter brand pages launched last month need to work hard to engage the user to be successful, according to an eye track study released Wednesday.

SimpleUsability studied four of the 21 brand pages that went live last month. While Twitter had previously allowed promoted tweets and corporate pages, but the brand pages launched in December more closely resemble brand pages on Google+ and Facebook with space for company logos and taglines, as well as space to embed videos and other media.

While some initially heralded Twitter brand pages as a “game changer,” that scenario may not play out. One of the major problems facing brand pages, as noted in the SimpleUsability study, is that once someone starts following a Twitter account or brand page, there is usually no reason for them to return to the page as all of the new and relevant information will show up as tweets in the followers own timeline.

The study used eye tracking technology to study how viewers used the Twitter brand pages for Coca-Cola, HP, McDonald’s and Staples. The best way to engage users, the study found, was to engage viewers with visual content in promoted tweets and in the brand pages.

Among the study’s other findings:

• Too much of a “corporate feel” will deter users, but it’s still important for companies to use their Twitter pages as an invitation for consumers to learn more about their brand.
• Contests and promotions help draw repeat visitors to a brand page and get them to stay on a page longer.
• Brand pages that come across as sales-heavy will lose visitors.

Users ultimately want brand pages to show a “more human side” to the company. The HP site, for example, scored well in the study because it did not emphasize sales and advertising, and even made an effort to respond to individual followers. A portion of the tweets on the page were also used to respond to customer complaints, which improved transparency and credibility as viewed by page visitors.

Jon Mitchell has a bone to pick with Google+. This and more in today’s Daily Wrap.

Sometimes it’s difficult to catch every story that hits tech media in a day, so we wrap up some of the most talked about stories. We give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ as well.

Google+ Is Going To Mess Up The Internet

Jon Mitchell details the problems he’s found with Google’s social offering, Google+. Beyond a few little things that may make the site a pain to use for some, he takes issue with the heavy search integration and the way Google+ posts are prioritized, often above links to the content Google+ conversations are referencing.

This one is a hot topic, with many in agreement, and almost just as many who are calling for Jon’s head on a platter. Jon says that Google+ Is Going to Mess Up the Internet… Agree or disagree?

From the comments:

Chad von Nau – “This article touches on some thoughts I’ve had recently about G+. Google’s strength was indexing the public internet. Then Facebook came along and became a massive, important walled garden. Google can not access Facebook’s data, and so the more data Facebook has, the farther away Google gets from being able to access ALL the world’s data. Google+ is their “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” response. A semi-walled garden that seeks to own people’s data instead of just indexing it. Gmail arguably has the same origins, in that they saw email as a vast, untapped mine of information and wanted a piece of it. The key difference is that no one else ever sees your email, Google only uses it to serve ads (I trust them on this).

Before G+ launched, I had hopes that it would land much closer to where Disqus is today. A way to connect existing data on the internet and add rich functionality and semantic information, rather than creating yet another restricted bin for people to pour their consciousness into. This would have been consistent with what I originally loved Google for, strengthening the public internet. The point this article brings up about Google prioritizing G+ over public websites exemplifies their new competitive strategy.

I’m sad to watch the internet devolve into something more like loosely-connected intranets. We have the chance for universal information, and we’re blowing it. It’s not Google’s fault, it’s is all of ours. Google is just doing their best to stay relevant.”

More Must Read Stories:

Chrome Extension Warns You When You Browse A SOPA-Supporter’s Website

Worried about whether or not your favorite Web site is supporting the Stop Online Piracy Act? A new Chrome extension seeks to lift those fears.

After installing No SOPA, users get a warning message reading “SOPA Supporter! This company is a known supporter of the dangerous ‘Stop Online Piracy Act’,” every time they visit a SOPA-supporting Web site. (more)

Android Ice Cream Sandwich Running On Less Than 1% of Total Devices HOT TOPIC

Android Ice Cream Sandwich has made its first appearance in Google’s fragmentation numbers for the platform. Android 4.0.x is now running on less than 1% of all devices that have accessed the Android Market in the last two weeks, coming in at 0.6% overall. (more)

Internet TV In 2012: Roku Streaming Stick & Smart Televisions

Who needs a big, expensive Web-connected television when there are so many other ways to stream content from the Internet to your living room? There are a variety of boxes and plug-ins that users can acquire to get the Web running on their TVs. One of the leaders in the space, Roku, has taken the notion a step farther. Roku is throwing out the notion of the box. Instead, stream movies and shows to your TV just by plugging in a stick. (more)

New Models for Web Publishing

As we begin a new year, I thought I would take a moment to review where Web publishing has come and where it seems to be going. We certainly stand at a crossroads, as we move from the “golden age of blogging” into whatever we are going to call things this year or this moment. I tend to think of this as the post-blogging era. (more)

New Form of Online Banking Fraud

If you thought you had your online banking security situation under control, along comes this chilling blog entry from security vendor Trusteer about some really nasty stuff they observed over the holiday break. And especially for those of you that have chosen paperless statements, you want to read it carefully and understand the exploit. (more)

Iowa Tested Social Media’s Ability To Make Political Predictions

Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney won last night’s Iowa Caucus by eight votes, and the consensus on what role Twitter and social media played in the contest may be just as evenly split.

Jenn Deering Davis of TweetReach, a social media analytics service by San Francisco-based Appozite that tracks Twitter mentions and reach on a wide range of subjects, said Tuesday afternoon that volume about the Iowa caucus was “pretty low.” (more)

SOPA, GoDaddy and the Bottom-Up Democracy (or Mob Rule) of the Web

It used to be that large companies could pretty much do as they pleased in their ongoing quest to maximize profits and please shareholders. It was only when the harm done to workers, consumers, the environment or a firm’s own self image got particularly bad that anything changed. This isn’t to say that all big companies do bad things, but some do and in the industrial age, they could often get away with it pretty easily. (more)

The Clincher: Multitouch Ultrabooks Still Reliant on Touchpads

The promises from Intel on the week before CES 2012 in Las Vegas speak of a device that’s as lightweight as a tablet, but that has the full keyboard users require to do real-world work, and the Windows 8 operating system they need for their everyday software. It’s a “tablet plus,” if you will. But will you really be able to touch an ultrabook’s screen the same way you would a tablet’s screen? (more)

Yahoo’s New CEO Pick Actually Seems Right

Yahoo named PayPal president Scott Thompson its new CEO today. Scott who? Exactly. I’d never heard of him either. But with a technical background – and a need to prove himself, and no crazy Silicon Valley persona to stroke – he might actually be the right guy for the job. (more)

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Discuss

Google is making incremental improvements to the Android platform to ease the burden of fragmentation on developers and original equipment manufacturers. While still allowing manufacturers to create custom skins, Google is doing its best to standardize the rest of the of the Android development environment with version 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.

Themes are a big part of standardizing the Android experience. Android has instituted a requirement in ICS that that the “Holo” family of themes be implemented into devices unmodified. This will mean that widgets, apps buttons and menu screens will be much easier for developers to integrate.

In a blog post on Android’s developer site, framework engineer Adam Powell writes: “For developers new system themes mean more design targets for their apps. Using system themes means developers can take advantage of a user’s existing expectations and it can save a lot of production time, but only if an app designer can reliably predict the results. Before Android 4.0 the variance in system themes from device to device could make it difficult to design an app with a single predictable look and feel.”

What the Android engineers are trying to do is make a common set of code that will be the basis for design and theme elements in Android. If a device has Android Market capabilities, it will have Holo themes as “originally designed.” That could complicate matters for companies like Amazon that does not inherently allow Market access and thus will have trouble implementing ICS updates to the new software or hardware updates to the Kindle Fire.

Google is tightening control on the ecosystem by making these Holo themes a compatibility requirement for Android 4.0 and future updates. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The source code remains open, there are just a few more design-based guidelines to adhere to. This is what many in the Android ecosystem have been waiting for, Google to take a little bit more control of the platform to streamline the experience and give developers better guidelines for creating apps for the platform.

“We have no desire to restrict manufacturers from building their own themed experience across their devices. In fact we’ve gone further to make this even easier. In Android 4.0′s API (level 14) we’ve added a new public theme family to complement the Holo family introduced in Android 3.0: DeviceDefault. DeviceDefault themes are aliases for the device’s native look and feel. The DeviceDefault theme family and widget style family offer ways for developers to target the device’s native theme with all customizations intact,” Powell wrote. “Formally separating these theme families will also make future merges easier for manufacturers updating to a new platform version, helping more devices update more quickly. Google’s Nexus devices alias DeviceDefault to the unmodified Holo themes.”

Apps designed to run on older versions of Android will not necessarily have this Holo requirement. Android 4.0 will pick out a theme based on the SDK level to “maintain the app’s original expectations.” That will work for any apps designed for Android 3.0.x Honeycomb (or, any API level above 10, with ICS the top at the point at level 14). To support themes on apps running Android 2.x devices, Powell suggests using the platform’s resource system to automatically detect themes for the appropriate API level.

Holo themes are just one aspect of Ice Cream Sandwich intended to make it easier for developers to navigate the tricky waters associated with coding for Android. We noted in September the early efforts that Google was making with Ice Cream Sandwich to easily support a variety of screen sizes by creating several stopgaps that developers can use to make sure their apps work on a variety of screen sizes.

The nature of Android will never allow it to fully escape the fragmentation of the platform. The goal though is to make the baseline code as easy to institute as possible with certain requirements that will give the platform a streamlined approach while also allowed OEMs, carriers and developers the ability to build on top of it. Holo themes are a good step in this direction.

Today Facebook announced open registration for its second annual Hacker Cup, a competition for the best hacker.

Programmers from around the world will race to accurately solve algorithmic problems, advancing through five rounds of challenges. The winners will walk away with prizes. Only one programmer will take home the title of world champion and the Hacker Cup trophy.The competition commences with a 72-hour online-only qualification round that starts on January 20, 2012 at 4pm PT. If a developer advances, he or she will move onto three more online rounds. The most grueling round is the first one, which will last 24 hours straight, beginning at 10am on January 28. Only the top 500 competitors will move on to round two, which lasts from 1-4pm PT on February 4. A total of 100 competitors will advance to round three, which lasts from 1-4pm PT on February 11.

The top 25 competitors who advance will receive an email. Facebook will fly them out to Menlo Park, California for the last round on March 17, 2012. Facebook promises to reimburse the finalist for a visa application fee and up to $100 USD if it was incurred while obtaining the visa. Facebook does not reimburse for passport-related expenses. Finalists will all receive cash and other prizes, but only one will win the Hacker Cup trophy. Here’s last year’s trophy.

Facebook held its first-ever Hacker Cup in 2011. First place went to Russian Coder Petr Mitrichev, who also won the Google Code Jam in 2006. Second-place when to Anh Tuan Mitrichev. The third place winner was Tiancheng Lou, a third-year PhD student whose research is focused in combinatorial algorithm design.

Developers, will you register for the 2012 Hacker Cup?

For most print publishers, the transition from ink to pixels has been at least somewhat painful. Over the last few years, the industry has seen widespread layoffs, furloughs, bankruptcies and newspaper closures. The Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News are no exception. The company that previously owned the two daily papers filed for bankruptcy in 2009 and ended up selling them the following year. The new owner, a company called Philadelphia Media Network, has since been trying to reposition its publications for the twenty-first century.

Today, PMN fulfilled a promise it made last year by doing something few would expect a newspaper company to do. Project Liberty, the company’s tech startup incubator, is now open for business.

Project Liberty is launching with three hand-picked local startups, all of which are recent graduates of the DreamIt Ventures accelerator program. The companies will be housed in the same building as the Philadelphia Inquirer, Daily News and Philly.com for the next six months. During that time, each company will receive free office space and access to resources within the building. The products they’ll be building all have a potential future home at PMN, but there are no guarantees.

Digital Tools Fit For a News Publisher

CloudMine, one of the companies enrolled in the incubator, is a mobile backend-as-a-service provider for developers. It offers a pay-as-you-go API that hooks into their hosted server-side platform, freeing developers up from having to code custom backends. Why would a newspaper company have any interest in the success of such a tool? In PMN’s case, a service like this could aid the company’s ongoing efforts to bolster their mobile products and tablet strategy. Last year, the company made headlines by offering a $99 Android-based tablet with specialized news-reading apps for the Inquirer and Daily News. It was a bold move for a print media company, even if its earliest iteration was largely based around print-to-digital shovelware.

An even more obvious choice for a newspaper is SnipSnap, a smartphone app that lets consumers scan printed coupons to save and redeem later. SnipSnap CEO Ted Mann, a veteran of the newspaper industry, left his position as Digital Development Director at Gannett New Jersey last year to launch the startup. Today, Mann returns to the newspaper world, however temporarily, as he and his team set up shop in the Inquirer building. They will work alongside the newspapers’ digital sales team, although SnipSnap is not officially a product of PMN.

Those on the editorial side will have the opportunity to collaborate with the folks working on ElectNext, a Web app that helps voters choose the best candidate in an upcoming election on the local, state and federal levels. The app works by asking users a series of questions about social and political issues and then matches them with the appropriate candidates.

Rebranding the “Newspaper”

Beyond the nature of the companies being incubated, there are few other obvious reasons for a newspaper company to make a move like this. For one, it serves as a marketing tactic to help rebrand a print publisher as a forward-thinking, tech-savvy multimedia company. By selling news-reading tablets and housing tech startups, PMN can paint itself as a media organization of the future rather than a soon-to-be relic.

Another formerly bankrupt news company, the Journal Register Company (now known as Digital First Media), is taking a similar approach this year by launching a tech incubator of its own, which will be geared toward startups specializing in advertising, editorial content and audience development. Like PMN, this move helps Digital First Media find innovative potential future partners and fits in with a larger strategy of rebranding itself for the twenty-first century.

PMN’s experiment may be the first of its kind at a big city daily newspaper, but its not the first time that any publisher has tried incubating startups. Hearst and Conde Nast have both launched digital products built by in-house startups, some of which have nothing to do with the publishers’ traditional businesses.

A few years ago, moves like this would have been seen as particularly revolutionary and forward-thinking. Today, they’re still smart, but are more about survival than thinking ahead. As print revenues continue to decline, traditional news publishers desperately need to find new ways to both build their audiences and monetize their efforts in a way that can make up for the cash they keep hemorrhaging on the print side. The Web has made the former significantly easier than the latter.

Incubating tech startups may not lead to an explosion in revenue overnight, but it’s a smart step in the right direction. As PMN CEO Greg Osberg said during a presentation at Temple University last year, “I want us to find the next Foursquare and house it at Philly.com.” In time, revenue growth is more likely to come out of innovative efforts like these than from clinging to print and milking hideous Web banner ads for every last nickel.

Newspapers and Startups: A Two-Way Incubation

The intimate relationship PMN is establishing with local startups serves not only to fuel the growth of those new companies, but it may also help adapt the culture within the host organization itself. A lot of “future of news” types like to talk about how old media companies should adopt a startup culture if they want to survive. As anybody who’s ever worked at a legacy media organization knows, that’s far easier said than done.

Having had no other choice, PMN has already started the process by making moves like this, merging its newsrooms and demoting a top editor that they saw as not being digital-savvy enough. What better way to encourage a startup culture than by bringing startups down the hall from the newsroom?

Today Zynga launched Hidden Chronicles, a new Facebook game all about discovering hidden objects in an abandoned estate. It’s sort of like “Where’s Waldo?” in that users click on an image still over and over again until they finally find the objects within. Perhaps not-too-surprisingly, Hidden Chronicles is Zynga’s first foray into the world of hidden-object games, and it’s strikingly similar to Playdom’s Gardens of Time, which was the number one Facebook game in 2011 based on both number of users and highest recommendations.

Zynga is trying to win the top five Facebook apps, especially the first one. So it’s no wonder that Hidden Chronicles and Gardens of Time look and feel so similar. Both games begin in the same way: You arrive in another world and are asked to uncover hidden objects. The only real difference is that Hidden Chronicles has more of a Beauty and the Beast feel to it – you end up in your deceased Uncle Geoffrey’s mysterious estate, and an assistant helps guide you through object-finding. In Gardens of Time, there’s a bigger task at hand: You must travel through time to find objects that have been misplaced. In both hidden-object games, should you complete your mission, the society will be at peace.

Zynga’s Creative Director Cara Ely, who has a strong background in hidden-object game development, told the blog Games.com that Hidden Chronicles is similar to the The Da Vinci Code. “There’s this thread line of a mystery throughout,” she says. “I think the storyline is certainly a bit more sophisticated.” Hidden Chronicles is a departure from popular Zynga games like FarmVille and Words With Friends, which were played lots over the holiday break.

Hidden Chronicles is available in 15 languages: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portugese, Turkish, Swedish, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

For now, the game is only available on the Web-version of Facebook. Ely says that as of right now, there are no plans to bring Hidden Chronicles to Android or iOS.

Zynga went public at the end of last year, and is continuing to expand its game offerings.

Will adding this new hidden-object game help bolster its rankings, eventually overtaking rival game Gardens of Time? Tell us what you think in the comments.