2010 Tech Review

by Roberto AraujoThere’s no doubt that 2010 has

been the year for technology, social media and mobility. New gadgets made their debut, social sites hit record numbers of users and the largest amounts of data and traffic were recorded. For all this developments to take place, many teams of geeks had to put their heads together to come up with clever and sophisticated campaigns. The following are these creative campaigns, listed by quarters.January – March

In the first few months of 2010 we saw an increase of interest from many consumer and enterprise companies in implementing a social media programs. Social media has proven to be of high value to many businesses and entrepreneurs. This led to Google’s launch of Buzz, a networking tool that promised to displace Twitter, but didn’t follow through growth. Location based services such as Foursquare and Gowalla, began gaining a positive momentum in these first few months. Worpress proved to be the leader as the blog platform of choice, while Justin Bieber was a regular top trending topic on Twitter, showing signs of his future dominance as the Most influential Twitter Celebrity of 2010.April – JuneTaking advantage of their large number of

active users, Facebook launched the “like” button social plug in, which rapidly spread throughout websites. YouTube exceeded 2 billion views a day and decided to also incorporate the “like” button on each of their videos. Meanwhile, people started raising security concerns on Facebook and other sites, which put Facebook in a controlled PR moment.July– September

We saw the success of the viral “Old Spice Guy” campaign, which began on YouTube and earned hundreds of thousands of views within a few days. Apple, realizing the importance of social networks, launched Ping, which didn’t catch much buzz, but is still striving to survive. By this time Facebook hit a new record of subscribers with 500 million. This news confirmed a direct battle against Google on the domination of the online space. This came along the realization that users spend more time on Facebook than any other website.October – DecemberAfter several exciting and innovative previous months, people awaited the highly anticipated debut of the “Social Network.” A movie based in the story of Facebook, which ranked number one for the first two weeks, so far has grossed $193.6 million world-wide. Gamification was a trending topic for the month of October, especially considering the Foursquare record of 4 million users. Google hit a new home

run by expanding user’s time and shortening the wait time for a query by 2 – 5 seconds. Meanwhile, the soccer World Cup took over the media and out came the vuvuzelas, even made into a YouTube button. November and December marked the months for “internet freedom,” after Wikileaks revealed classified government secret documents. Cyber security was a big concern throughout 2010, but particularly these months after an anonymous group launched DDoS attacks on companies that bailed on Wikileaks. Finally, the year couldn’t end without mention of the Angry Birds fever. People discovered the addictive pleasures of pitting Angry Birds against smug snickering pigs so much that the social game was made into a Play Station and PSP game.