• Cloud services and open APIs will become essential for social brands, making it easier for businesses to tap into the consumer’s social graph.
• Reliance on the cloud’s infrastructure will continue to grow as the need for real-time scalability becomes increasingly critical for survival.
• Multi-touch technology, which has already become mainstream in consumer devices, will infiltrate retail and business environments so extensively that it will become expected.
• Improved hardware and connectivity will help mobile make the final transition into cloud-based data that allows the user to learn the world around her in real time.
• Agile and iterative Web development will open new doors for innovation by allowing developers to innovate and adjust products based on immediate customer feedback.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the report:

Writers/Contributors
Shiv Singh
Tobias Klauder
John Cunningham
Steve Dawson
Luke Hamilton
Paul Gelb
Mike Scafidi
John Ewen

Marketing & PR
David Deal
Lauren Nguyen
Katie Lamkin
Crystal Higgins-Peterson
Heather Gately
Jennifer Li

Cloud services are defined as technologies that provide a virtual service either through and Open API or through a user interface. Examples range from the classic Salesforce.com to cloud email like Gmail or Twitter and the Twitter Open API, and Facebook Connect. There are lots others, and it’s growing at a frantic pace. Open API’s like Facebook Connect and the Twitter API are incredibly powerful for driving traffic and getting your product, brand, and service out there. In the past we would build a social network from scratch for a web site, that would mean custom application development and maintenance, now we use Javascript and REST to interface with Facebook Connect and we are up and running in a fraction of the time it used to take in the past.

Cloud infrastructure is defined as the virtual and physical infrastructure powering web and digital applications. Cloud infrastructure was strongly enabled through technologies like VMWare that made it possible to make one physical server into 10 or more virtual servers. This coupled with low cast storage created an elastic scalable platform to enable us to do things that weren’t feasible using the old cost models. These services are metered and you only pay as you go, which is a drastic departure from the buy a server, manage and drive it all the time whether you use it or not. While it used to take weeks to get a server up and ready now takes minutes and all you need is a credit card. Companies paving the way include Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, with traditional hosting companies like Rackspace, Savvis, Terremark and others also making these infrastructure services available.

We believe the cloud and it’s ability to scale at a lower cost point will enable more innovation like never before.

One of the awesome new features that’s in recent versions of Safari, Safari Mobile (iPhone browser), Chrome, the Android browser, and in Palm’s webOS is CSS transitions. Transitions work by smoothly interpolating between two states of a CSS property over time. For example, using the simple style rules below, you could have a link gradually change from yellow to red when the user moves the mouse over it:

a {color: yellow; -webkit-transition: color 1s linear;}
a:hover {color: red;}

In a more complicated example, you could use CSS transitions to slide an element off-screen when a replacement element is introduced, like the way that the “pages” slide off-screen when you click through an iPhone’s contacts.

This introduces a problem: What if you’re using JavaScript to add the new element, and you want to remove the old element after it’s off screen, and you need to support multiple browsers?

You need to be able to detect that the browser supports CSS transitions so that you know not to remove the element until it’s done animating, and so that you know that it’s OK to remove the element right away for browsers that don’t support CSS transitions. Here’s how you can detect support using JavaScript:

var cssTransitionsSupported = false;
(function() {
    var div = document.createElement('div');
    div.innerHTML = '<div style="-webkit-transition:color 1s linear;-moz-transition:color 1s linear;"></div>';
    cssTransitionsSupported = (div.firstChild.style.webkitTransition !== undefined) || (div.firstChild.style.MozTransition !== undefined);
    delete div;
})();

The variable cssTransitionsSupported will be set to true when transitions are supported, or to false when transitions are not supported.

You can then either use the webkitTransitionEnd (or mozTransitionEnd) events to detect when the transition is finished, or else immediately perform the action when transitions aren’t supported.

For example, the Microsoft Sync platform in Ford cars will enable application development. Imagine an application to count how many times I hit the brake on my commute home or my favorite and application that tracks my various different routes home and tells me on average which is fastest.

Now HP have gotten into the mix with applications for your printer. One of the first being an Fandango application that lets you print your movie tickets right from your printer. If you need to print it anyway, skip the computer or portable device.

CNN had a great writeup on why it’s the year of the app. I forgot to mention what’s happening in TV’s. With Yahoo TV, a bunch of manufacturer’s are making it easy for basically Konflabulator desktop gadgets to end up on your TV. Samsung is encouraging folks to build apps into their TV’s and blu-ray players.

• Cloud Options:We will see further movement towards cloud solutions, and more vendors providing SaaS alternatives to their existing technologies. It ties into the need for flexibility and agility, and the cost savings are important in the current economic climate.
• APIs and SOA:Functionality will be shared across many web properties, and the proliferation of mini apps and widgets will content. APIs are becoming a critical element of any succesful solution. This is also driven by the increased complexity of the technology platform. Solutions we now develop frequently incorporate many different technologies and vendors, ranging from targeting and personalization to social capabilities.
• Open Source:Not only in content management, but in many other areas, Open Source will start to play an important role. Examples are around search, like Solr, or targeting with OpenX. Cloud computing also further drives the expansion of Open Source. As companies are looking to leverage cloud solutions for agility, the licensing complications with commercial solutions will drive further open source usage.

What do you see as additional trends?

In my new role as CTO of Razorfish one of our first big events is the technology summit currently planned for the first week in February 2010. Publicis is clearly excited, as are we, to bring out deep technology skills to the large client base at a company the size of Publicis. Change is always change and very exciting. Below are some of the thoughts on the technology aspects of the acquisition coming out in the press and from Publicis’s executives.

Here’s what Harley Manning from Forrester has had to say..

The firm has much stronger design capabilities, both for user experience and what we call “brand image”. Plus – and this is just my opinion because we did not evaluate them on this – it[Razorfish] has stronger technology capabilities as well.
The latter is important because there are some agencies out there with very strong tech chops, including IBM Interactive and Sapient. And it will become even more important as interactive moves to high function multi-touch mobile devices, or even stationary multi-touch devices like the way cool Coke vending machine Sapient displayed at Forrester’s recent Customer Experience Forum. Because ultimately, a great design has to actually work in order to deliver a great customer experience.

Brandweek captured some quotes from David Kenney

We got it at good terms,” said David Kenny, managing director of VivaKi, Publicis’ digital unit. They bring much more technology. I think that’s important. Their clients think very highly of them in terms of being able to technologically deliver, and that’s stronger than anything we have, including Digitas.”

In an interview with paidContent, Kenny pointed to Razorfish’s technology as well as its extensive global reach as key reasons behind the merge.

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