In chatting with a friend in the game industry, we discussed how the game industry is torn with two directions, seemingly irreconcilable:

“We’re between the super evolved all out $10,000 hologram vs the virtually ‘free’ easy to use-anytime game on your phone.” said my friend.

God of War, is one of the top PlayStation  franchises that is definitely one of the top sellers takes a good 3 years to develop and hundreds of artists, developers, etc. and probably +$200MM to produce… Sony has to sell quite a bit, but how many games can be blockbusters like this? The challenge with this is similar to movies, the cost of production are so high and it’s all upfront investment, that studios are naturally very careful about investing and taking risks. So tried-and-true formulas like point and shoot and fast-skill based games just come out over and over with different, cooler graphic skins.

Then you have Zynga, who produced Farmville in something like 5 weeks and 6-10 guys. And now more than 64MM people play it. However, I constantly hear from friends that don’t play it, that Farmville is utterly annoying… so Social games have a virtue of being difficult for those who don’t get into it because it invades the social space of others. Is it enough to make Farmville less popular? I don’t think so…

If history serves us, low-end production will not substitute high-end… the industry will continue to push in innovations and offer new experiences that consumers (not all consumers, but some) will deem as  valuable enough to pay significant $ for it.

For example, at E3 last week, 3D games were all the rave… and if 3D is already here, and more motion-based gadgets are becoming more common (see Microsoft Kinectic, formerly Project Natal) then that 10K hologram is not too far away. And if the movie industry is any model, we’re seen major crisis in the business model and yet we still get over-the-top expensive Blockbusters like Avatar.

One of the best things about my job is that I come in contact with all kinds of cool technology and start ups, whether they are direct clients or partners of clients I work with. I just started to work with Tableau Software a data visualization company who’s been in the enterprise BI business for a while.

This got me interested in the field and I’ve been looking around to figure out the ‘who’s who’ of the data viz industry. What’s been fantastic to see is the merger between design and data (information) and while I had a peripheral view of this, now that I’m diving into it I find it endlessly fascinating. In the world of penta-bytes we absolutely need data visualization to understand. And there are two key dimensions that I see:

One is the INTERACTIVITY of the data (see example below). What’s up with flat graphics hat only show one POV? How fun is to interact with graphics and have your own view. As my client says, this will become the new standard. We will all expect that when we see a chart online we can play with it.

Second is the DESIGN of the data. The use of sign and signifier can take a simple chart into an entire new level. designers that do this, go beyond know Photoshop they truly need to understand the content of the data itself to produce designs that communicate in seconds a level of complexity.

So next time you are dealing with a daunting excel spreadsheet, know that in there somewhere a BEAUTIFUL visualization is hiding. And no longer, Apple can claim spreadsheets aren’t cool.

Check out this INTERACTIVE World Cup graphic on Tableau:

It’s always fun to navigate around checking what the pundits decide to predict in the coming year. This requires being up on trends and having a bit of imagination of how the factors will collide to develop into the momentum needed for new technologies or trends to emerge. So taking a survey of my own favorites: ReadWriteWeb, IDC, Jeremiah Owyang, Mashable and Wired, here’s a summary of my picks for top 10 trends/predictions for 2010.

1. The year of the Mobile: many agree the numbers are there. Smartphones have reached market share that justify more investment. Everything from GPS based services and new social networks (that capitalize on Facebook backlash on privacy and the advantages of Yelp). Google phone will become number 2 in the market, but new (and cheaper) smart phones will flood the market.

2. The end of FREE: Brier Dudley from The Seattle Times wrote a very persuasive piece on this, he was referring to media and online TV, but in general I think this trend applies to other web services. People will still give away ‘free’ tastes, but full services and a come-back to business models will be an imperative to surviving the new decade.

3. Open, the new Black: We’re already seeing open social graphs like MySpace, but this is a space that not only will heat up, but it will become an imperative to integrate and survive. The player here will be Facebook who will open up thei graph with much more public resistance. This will also play into whats some are calling the death of the login, so your social graph follows you everywhere in the web

4. Backlash year: The darlings of the tech world: Apple, Twitter and Facebook will face increased criticism as they move into more aggressive monetization models, continue to test the limits of non-privacy tolerance and improve over-crowded digital spaces like the app store. These companies have grown so fast they are now big enough that they will face some of the challenges of big-fat companies. Scale is a bitch.

5. Living in the Cloud: Both on the enterprise and the personal side, browsers will become the true new OS having your data accessible backed up in the cloud will become mainstream. enterprises will be more comfortable with moving their data to the cloud, but security will be the big issue of this year.

6. Real-Time Service: the unstoppable train of flash-fast, relevant, personalized and timely services will result from the ability to process real-time data. That world already exists, we can produce content almost as-it-happens thanks to Twitter and others, but the responses are still slow. Mostly because we lack the software to process and interpret this data. But there’s lots of start-ups that are tackling this problem which will get embedded in organizations and enterprises, beyond their marketing/PR departments into their servicing capabilities.

7. Social Media Guru= Photocopier Guru. I love reading this analogy at PC Mag - do you have a photocopier ‘guru’ in your office?, social media has been one hot business card title in the last year. But as the technology matures an integrates in the existing systems, people will move beyond the gargle talk of blogs, tweets, FB pages etc and tackle the deeper challenges of information flow, organizational structures, business models and acquisition and retention of customers in the era of real-time web and digitally networked society.

8. The year of the e-book: remember when we laughed at Bezos on The Daily Show when he came out to showcase his new kindle? Well, 2.5 million sold Kindles after, many analysts are predicting a boom in e-books sales. The market will see many competing devices, but none will offset the Kindle. I still don’t have one, though I’m increasingly curious! Of course the FAA maybe the biggest disruptor for this trend.

9. Netbooks vs. Tablets: Analysts disagree on what’s going to happen on this one. Apple’s highly rumored tablet promises to rock the market, and lots of companies are launching new netbooks, in particular rumors about a dirt-cheap Google netbook could keep the netbook market hot. I think we may see a bit of segmentation happen and netbooks will be popular with biz travelers and teens (people on the move that still need more than a cell phone to work on)

10. The come-backs, kind of…: This year, more than any other big companies saw little guys (or big guys that act little, like Google) kick their butts. Innovation translated into customer acquisition in pretty much all spaces, but big companies may be a it slow but are definitely not dumb. The enormous amount of resources they have can be focused and make miracles. People are keeping on eye on some giants like IBM, Nokia and Microsoft all poised to make big and bold moves in several aspects this year.

It’s noisy out there for sure. People broadcasting their morning coffee, news from every corner of the world, companies desperately trying to get our attention and cat videos. Turns out that once we democratized the ability to broadcast, our ability to create content (noise) became unlimited. And know that there are many people out there that ‘don’t know what to say’… YET.

Naturally, we expect that the same technology that helps us connect and broadcast on the cheap to help us filter (for free). But the attempts are all imperfect and in their infancy.  So we’re left to our own natural filtering devices, which in the case of humans means TUNING OUT. This is a technique we learn early on in life, when our mothers ask us to clean our room, and we continue to perfect with spouses and loud kids. It really works, simple UI and it’s a smart app that quickly learns and adapts and even sometime predicts unwanted information so you don’t even notice.

I like how Rajesh Setty from lateralaction.com described 9 ways we do this in the information overload era:

Graphic from lateralaction.com

So what to do if you are in the business of engaging people online?

Rajesh suggest a tried-and-true generic recipe of knowing your audience, establishing goals and getting feedback. But the crux of his formula resides on Step 3.

3. Unleash Your Creativity

You know the audience and you know the purpose of the article. Now the next step is to unleash your creativity and create something that will generate the kind of response that you are looking for.

Some questions to think about:

* What would be unique (content, point-of-view etc.) in this article that will make the audience do what I want them to do?
* How can you make this article “extremely relevant” to the current times?
* What can you include that will increase the “longevity” of the article?

This is the hard part. Everything else is pretty methodical, there is market research, strategic planning, feedback loops. etc. But coming up with an idea that resonates with people is still a mystery and a gamble. And we can’t replicate what worked int he past, what seemed cool and worth sharing once, seems useless and phony the second time around.