While all of the findings are of interest (mobile, widgets, personalization, etc.), this year I was most struck by three big trends:

•  The global traffic share gains of YouTube, Facebook, Hi5, Wikipedia, and Orkut – all making the global top-10 for the first time.  I remember when Time selected "You" as the "Person of the Year" for their Dec. 2006 cover.  They may have called it too early.  Social connection online has truly arrived.  The growth of these sites are staggering, highlighting the power of community, user-generated content, and word of mouth online.
• The share gain of Amazon.com relative to large, multichannel retailers.  They led the way with customer reviews over 10 years ago, and have become a Wikipedia of sorts for broad, product-focused reviews.  And they continue to innovate at a staggering pace, spending over $3 billion per year on R&D.
• The uncharted territory we are in with the recession, truly making this our most important presidential election in history.  Although Bazaarvoice is growing at a very fast pace, beating our financial projections repeatedly, we are also cautious and watching the economy closely.  And I know that most, if not all, of our clients and partners are doing the same.

In case you missed the link above, you can read the full report here.

And if you have some more time this weekend, you may also want to check out Steve Jobs' recent keynote on the iPhone 2.  While I carry a BlackBerry myself (my wife carries an iPhone), the power of the iPhone's new programming language (and SDK) to deploy corporate applications as well as the new AppStore (reminds me of Salesforce.com's AppExchange) signal a new type of Apple.  With these moves, they are embracing being an "open" platform and focusing on B2B at the same time.  This should lead to an accelerated adoption of Macs in corporations, as the iPhone uses the same OS and user behavior historically shuns change (or seeks familiarity; heck this is human behavior not just 'user' behavior).  In any case, his keynote may lead you to believe that the iPhone 2 will be the dominant mobile computing platform for corporations in our near-term future.

Steve Jobs set the blogs ablaze in January by announcing the iPhone and continued causing a word of mouth stir all the way through the interview with the Wall Street Journal. Looking back to my post in January, from day one the iPhone was a hit. The expectations were overwhelming and the dissenters numerous, but Apple adhered to one key rule in marketing – live up to the hype. Apple called their shot and told consumers EXACTLY what to expect, with demos and details metered out carefully, then simply released exactly that. Creating the buzz is easy, but nailing it on launch day is where some products have missed the mark. Not the iPhone.

The experience of getting one was great. The Apple store I went to in the Domain here in Austin had over 1000 in stock the first day, according to rumors in the line. Apple wouldn’t say exactly. The line was visited by Apple employees handing out free Starbucks' certificates and water. They told everyone that you could buy two at a time and they had more than enough in stock. This easily prevented the mayhem seen with the PS3 launch AND boosted the image of Apple to the crowd. People around me were talking about how great Apple was for two hours. Can’t get better than that. Also, they had about 30 employees in the store, they were processing the sale of the iPhone quickly and efficiently, then you bought your accessories in a separate purchase. All with handheld checkout devices to keep things moving and avoid lines. It worked perfectly.

Activating it worked through iTunes, making the purchase process faster and the activation process easy. This is certainly the new model for activating mobile hardware. I did it all from my house and had to call into their hotline only when my current plan didn’t allow for adding a second line on the same bill. Once that was fixed, I was talking on my iPhone in minutes.

The iPhone itself is exactly what you’ve seen on TV, blogs, Apple.com, and everywhere else for the past six months. The interface is fast and slick. The multi-touch input mechanism works really well. You won’t set speed records for text entry but it works – and for anyone but the fastest of BlackBerry typists it will be fine. The audio quality is great and notably better to the people I’ve spoken to on it so far. Text messages look great (resembles iChat). Videos look fantastic and the touch-screen iPod is fantastic. As others are already saying, this will change the way MP3 players and phones are designed. And everything is exactly as Steve Jobs said it would be back in his keynote in January.

If you want one, go get one, you won’t be disappointed. Last time I checked their website, stock levels were good. And enjoy being a part of the best product launch in a long time.

This past week saw the public announcement of what will be THE device of the year in consumer electronics – the Apple iPhone.  Regardless of your views on Apple, the Mac, or the now legally-embroiled Cisco iPhone issue, you will admit that this thing is cool.  The blogs that cover this space exploded on Tuesday with the announcement at Macworld by Steve Jobs.  The blogs that DON’T cover this space exploded just the same.  It seemed that everyone was talking about this 4.5” x 2.4” x 0.46” phone – that doesn’t really exist yet.   I found it interesting that no matter how hard people tried, you couldn’t really talk about it for the past 2.5 years – including Apple employees that were working on it.

Apple did something that they’ve had difficulties doing in the past – they kept the entire project secret.  Many blogs and interviews have covered the “how Apple did it” of this achievement, but what’s amazing is that they really pulled it off.  Even up to the day of the presentation by Steve Jobs the rumored specs, capabilities, and even photos of the iPhone were vague or flat-out wrong.  Do a quick search for iPhone on Google’s image search and you get seven wrong images before you get to the right one.  The first page of results is all wrong except for two.  Clearly the word of mouth about the idea of an Apple phone was extreme leading up to the announcement – and this allowed Mr. Jobs to announce only one other major innovation and still have a very successful keynote.  No update on the rumored Macbook + Macbook Pro form factor, nothing about Leopard or Time Machine, nothing about iLife ’07.  The Apple TV got some early spotlight time in the presentation but that was it.  This announcement was too big to let anything else get in the way.

So the world wanted to hear about it – and the markets were waiting to react.  This image is a snapshot of Apple (AAPL), Research in Motion (RIMM), and Palm, inc (PALM) showing their relative performance on the day of the announcement.
 

While the activity corrected a bit by weeks end, the results were Apple gained 7.83% with Palm and RIM losing 3.43% and 5.23% respectively.  Legitimately, the Apple iPhone is not a competitor of the Blackberry as it has no business-level email support nor any integration with Outlook planned (yet).  That didn’t matter – as the perception by the market and the word of mouth on how great this new device will be was enough to add BILLIONS to Apple’s market capitalization and erode hundreds of millions to billions for Palm and RIM respectively.  All because the word on the street about a device that exists in prototype only and won’t be available for six months was so very cool.  (Full disclosure, I will gladly be one of the first to try and buy an iPhone)

Even Mr. Jobs is being conservative with their estimates of how many they can sell – by saying that their stretch goal is 1% of the overall market.  That means ten million units, or a minimum of almost $5 billion in sales.  And to think that at one point the experts said that the iPod was a failure in the making.  Anyone predicting the same of the iPhone may have some fun looking back on their quotes in five years. 

What has generated such strong word of mouth for Apple, particularly in recent years, are the strong products they’ve released and revolutionary experiences they’ve provided for their customers.  Referencing some of the word-of-mouth training on WOMMA’s website, Apple doesn’t have “me too” products.  Their operating system OS X is very different than Windows and if anything Vista could be the “me too” product here.  Their design for the recent flat-screen, single-unit iMacs is completely different than anything else offered in the PC world and has remained that way for years.  The iPod was different in its controls, its link to a music store, and its constant innovation (the iPod nano, shuffle, video iPod, etc).  Their basic premise of creating great products, over and over again, has created the foundation of great word-of-mouth potential – which was realized completely this past week.  This has worked for a number of companies like Google and Starbucks, referenced back in September by Brett in his posting here.  But keep in mind that it can fail even for companies with great previous wins – if they don’t continue to innovate and deliver great products.  Anyone remember the Apple Lisa? Or the Newton?  The lesson is that companies which invest in greatness in their products and services instead of tons of additional marketing will win in the long run.

The buzz about this new phone from Apple shifted billions of dollars of wealth, scared a number of multi-billion dollar companies, and generated outstanding traffic and interest on the net.  All in a day.  I’m off to read more about what Apple will do next