Today most people have their mobile connectivity running in parallel with their home or office connectivity, including parallel networks for voice, video and data that cost a handsome sum for most people using them. Yet with one of these mobile network hub devices, it's easy to see how all but the most demanding uses for voice, data and video can funnel through a mobile broadband connection that can stay on our desktop or follow us on the go. Our smart phones, our eBook readers, our netbooks, our desktops, our in-home phones and our home entertainment devices can all be brought together on one seamless wifi-based communications medium.

This is likely to accelerate the move in voice communications away from traditional point-to-point circuit networks and towards an era in which voice communications are a feature of integrated voice, data and video services. It also means that we're more likely to overcome some of the global connectivity issues that exist for mobile devices: be it CDMA or GSM networks underlying mobile broadband connectivity, if you're near a hotspot of some origin, you should be able to get voice and data communications. Services such as Skype will certainly prosper in the process, but other services such as Google Voice, which help voice communications to get routed to any number of devices, are also likely to prosper as voice communications become more identity-centered rather than phone number-centered.

The bigger picture, though, is of a world in which inexpensive broadband hub devices can be placed easily in small communities and used to power local communications with both the outside world and with people within the community. Today we're seeing these devices powering personal communications, but I think that the larger potential is for devices that can connect communities with one another first and foremost with a minimum of technology. If you are living in a community in which each person cannot afford a mobile phone, that community may be able to afford collectively one connection to the outside world which is shared with a MiFi-like device that can make its connection available to the community in a reasonable scope, say a kilometer or so. People in that community could then use their mobile devices to communicate with one another and with the world, with very little ongoing cost to any one person beyond the initial cost of their own device. Most importantly, you could set up these local communications networks with or without direct connectivity to the outside world. You could have your own local Web of sorts, perhaps even with services such as Google Wave being used on a federated basis to facilitate content collection, communications and collaboration.

In turn, these individual communities could cooperate with other local communities to build "bottom-up" communications networks, developing regional communications systems that may be centered around local languages and dialects, connecting to more commonly used languages found in the "outside world" through a handful of communications access points. Every kilometer or so you could poke a solar-powered hub device into a convenient spot to keep the influence of a particular network growing. All of this would be developed on global communications standards, of course, enabling new ways to connect to the world over time, but regional communications would thrive, with or without help from the "outside world."

While the more than 1.4 billion people already using the Web are certainly a significant marketplace, I do believe that much of the future power of Web-based communications will be found in the expansion of more "bottom-up" networks amongst the five-plus billion other people in communities that find themselves on a different economic and cultural playing field than the rest of the world. We talk sometimes about the "dark Web" of content unavailable to search engines on the Internet, but there's a far greater "dark Web" of knowledge and culture that's beyond the Web altogether. The "top-down" Web will penetrate this arena only so far, as it tends to be in the hands of people who have, in their own way, a great deal of autonomy, in part because of their economic isolation. But as the "bottom-up" Webs begin to meet the world of the Web as a whole, it will be exciting to see how both economic and culture opportunities for people on both sides of this divide develop.

Fortunately there are devices coming along that should help to accelerate this convergence. The One Laptop Per Child organization is targeting the release of a $75 device called XO-3 that is a bone-simple tablet equipped with wireless communications. As technology tends to push towards such visionary price points sometimes more rapidly than the pioneers, I think that it's safe to say that within a few years the convergence of such devices with localized broadband networking will enable communities around the world to join the Web age in ways that may surprise the rest of the world. So if you're looking for great new opportunities in content markets, I think that "going local" may take on a whole new range of meaning shortly. We'll keep you posted on these trends throughout 2010. Have a happy new year celebration and best wishes for a prosperous 2010!

As with terrorist networks, many publishers and technology companies are dealing with rapidly shifting client behaviors, with lots of asymmetrical behavior that's difficult to analyze using tradional research methods. In traditional research, one formulates a hypothesis to test using quantitative or qualitative research techniques. In quantative studies, for example, someone interviews subjects and then filters down the results into a cohesive picture. In quantitative research, a questionnaire asks specific questions that requires people to respond to specific possible responses. These are both good techniques if you want to filter out a lot of possible answers that may not be your focus. But as good as that can be, many of the opportunities and threats that our clients face lie beyond this type of pre-determined focus.

An analogy as to why this is important was used in our client presentation today. We asked the people in the room to look at a short video of six people passing basketballs to one another, three wearing white shirts and three wearing black shirts, and to count the number of times that the people with white shirts passed the ball to one another. There was some disagreement on how many times the white shirted people passed the ball, but surprisingly several people missed another key input - a person in a black gorilla suit walked in and out of the scene during the passing. In other words, our ability to filter and to concentrate on specific goal not only may not give us exact anwers but may also ignore or focus on interesting phenomena that could be potentially important or a actually just a distraction.

Narrative research addresses this key gap in human perceptions in interpreting information about markets by enabling people to tell and to code unbiased stories about how they use or make decisions relating to products and services and then have them passed through software that relates their responses to key themes. When patterns emerge from this process, research sponsors can then refer to the original, unbiased stories and find new ways to analyze them. Instead of being "locked in" to specific biases or ideas that formed the information, you can refer back to the original unbiased stories and find new ways to interpret them individually or in aggregate. When you get enough stories to draw statistically significant conclusions, the result is an extremely powerful database that can answer different questions again and again over time on a very cost-effective basis. If you add more stories over time to that database, the results can be even more powerful, as you can begin to track changes in perceptions that you would not have been able to detect if you had had to form a specific idea ahead of time for testing via traditional research.

The net result for "New Rules" subscribers will be a rich, reusable resource of hundreds of stories from executives and implementers in enterprises telling how they use and make decisions on obtaining information services that they use to perform their jobs. In today's volatile economy, being able to hear unbiased stories from these complex and shifting decision makers and to analyze them quickly and effectively can be a critical factor in responding to the many changes in organizations that are compelling new and accelerated approaches to buying and implementing enterprise information services. Combined with the on-site workshops what we will be conducting for the core research subscribers I expect that "New Rules" will be the core element of many company's strategy planning efforts this year. I encourage you to investigate our prospectus and to see if you're ready to take advantage of this ground-breaking approach to market research that can power the marketing of your information products and services.

Ticking the clock ahead to today's world, it would appear that Apple may have had a similar passing of the market mojo moment at this year's Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. Steve Jobs failed to deliver the event's keynote address, presumably due to health issues, but it may also have been because Apple's usual razzamataz had few blockbuster announcements off of which to leverage. The news from WWDC was about incremental changes, all good, but mostly about trying to deal with the challenges of positioning Apple as a premium brand in a world that is pushing pricing down on many bright, shiny objects.

By contrast, bright, shiny objects were found everywhere at very reasonable prices at the recent Computex Taipei event across the Pacific from WWDC. Computex featured an abundance of netbooks and thin client desktops and tablet panels running many different kinds of operating systems software, including Google's new Android O/S that was seen running alongside smart phone and netbook versions of Microsoft Windows. Windows was the first cross-platform operating system to start driving down the cost of content delivery electronics, and Android is following in its footsteps with an open-source operating system that helps to drive down the price of a smaller, cheaper and more portable generation of electronics significantly.

Apple has always managed to create a unique niche for its products by focusing on highly appealing designs and features. For example, at WWDC announcements included a slot for SD memory cards in some of its lighter new Macbook laptops - perfect for the photo and graphics afficionados who form a strong core of Apple's support. Great stuff, but ultimately still the stuff of niche brands. Call it the BMW approach to content delivery: ultimately, a Macbook or even an iPhone doesn't do much that a Windows or Android-equipped device won't do similarly, but dang, it just makes some folks feel so, well, you know..."in." Some people will always pay a premium price to be a part of that club, whatever is on the inside of it, so Apple-branded devices are not going away any time soon.

From a content industry perspective, though, the Apple wave queued up by the soaring success of the iPhone is about to gain a new sense of perspective over the next several months as netbooks and tougher competition from newer smart phone models begin to elbow into the limelight. The real star of the show is the Web, with cloud computing resources the co-star. Yes, mobile applications are helping to fuel up excitement about smart phones and other devices, but when a device with 1GB of memory can handle virtually any multimedia content display requirements, it's not realistic to think that proprietary hardware or operating systems are going to enable publishers to have technology partners that can help to buffer them against the competitive forces of Web publishing. You can increase storage for downloads to enjoy when you're not Web-enabled, but for most people the content that they want resides in the cloud and appears on whatever standards-compliant device makes it useful. Toss in the increasing availability of wireless broadband Internet connectivity and the "why" of platform-captive content makes less and less sense.

More and more inexpensive appealing devices to deliver content are pouring out of Taipei, China, South Korea and other low-cost producing markets every day, many of them aimed at global markets that have participated only marginally in the Web experience so far. While many premium content producers continue to focus on the upscale content platforms as their salvation, already more than a billion YouTube videos are viewed daily around the world. A premium strategy will work if you can attract people's attention well, but at this point in time there are really not enough fundamental technology differentiators in Apple or any other existing technology platform producer's products to justify a strong reliance on premium platforms as a buffer for intellectual property licensing. In short, the battle between the Web and platforms is over, for now, and you can put the crown securely on the virtual noggin of the Web.

If content producers want premium platform barriers to entry for their products they will have to have technology partners that are investing much, much more heavily in breakthrough innovations that deliver real differentiating value. The iPhone was merely the first in a wave of devices that are providing incremental improvements in performance in what was already a marketplace headed towards commoditization of mobile technology platforms. In the meantime, a floundering world economy is pushing more people towards cost-effective content technology solutions. Dear publishers, say goodbye to your love affair with the iPhone - before it's too late. Learn to love netbooks, a galaxy of smart phones and any other device that can get you people who whant your content on the line, and then prove your value from there.