The weekend review: social networks, Q4 in mobile, and cloud-adoption strategies
The weekend review took a brief winter holiday break, but now we’re back with a recap of the most popular pieces of research content from the first half of January. This year started out strong on GigaOM Pro as readers focused on the social network landscape, our latest batch of quarterly wrap-ups, and the cloud computing marketplace.
First, Mark Mulligan takes a look at the social networking landscape in “Social networkers survey: how to compete with Facebook in 2013.” While Facebook continues to dominate the market, with 94 percent of all U.S. social networkers using it and over 1 billion users worldwide, there’s an active and crowded second tier of both general and specialist social networks dominated by Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+. Mulligan analyzes the results from GigaOM Research’s consumer survey to look at online user behavior and to determine what these second-tier and specialist networks must do in order to gain greater traction within their own sphere.
Next, Colin Gibbs looks back at the biggest news, trends, and technologies to emerge during the last quarter of 2012 in “Mobile fourth-quarter 2012 analysis.” While Microsoft’s Windows 8 Phone continued to struggle, Apple and Android both enjoyed continued growth; meanwhile mobile shopping, mobile maps, and photo-sharing apps all had a tumultuous quarter, with Apple’s Maps and Instagram’s TOS snafu leading the fray.
And last, in “How direct-access solutions can speed up cloud adoption,” Larry Carvalho provides a primer for companies interested in adopting a cloud computing solution, focusing on challenges and concerns around network, cost, and security. Carvalho provides a brief overview of the cloud market as well as guidance for both enterprise and startup clients.
Also popular this week:
Connected consumer 2013: how 2012 laid the groundwork for change
The 2013 task management tools market
Cleantech fourth-quarter 2012 analysis
