Forget the Nook, Amazon’s Kindle Fire has already blown that tablet device away with 335% growth in Google search interest during the last quarter of 2011 compared to the Nook’s 150% search interest growth. Fueling growth for both brands was the holiday season, but there is no doubt that the Kindle Fire’s low price tag attracted a lot of buzz and a lot of sales after it debuted.

The Nook isn’t the only tablet feeling pressure from the Kindle Fire. Apple’s dominance won’t be challenged in the near future, and the iPad will stay the market leader. However, it will continually lose market share to new competitors and lower-priced tablet devices. Emarketer estimates that iPad market share will drop from 83% in 2011 to 68% in 2014.

In 2011, 3.9 million Kindle Fire devices were sold compared to 18.6 million iPads. The total tablet market in 2011 reached 65 million units, but market research firm IHS iSuppli expects that number will grow to 287 million units by 2015.

If the Kindle Fire’s early success is any indication, there are plenty of opportunities for non-Apple tablet devices to steal additional market share from the leader. For example, Barclay’s Capital estimates that in 2011, 5.5 million Kindle Fire units were sold (higher than the IHS iSuppli data) and expects that number to increase to 27.8 million in 2014.

With rumored launches of a Kindle Fire device with a larger screen and a Google tablet coming in 2012, the tablet market is wide open to new competition. And with all of that competition comes better products and better prices for consumers.

While tablet device sales continue to skyrocket, advertisers see growing opportunities to leverage the content consumers view on those devices. In fact, Barclay’s estimates that Amazon Kindle Fire content revenues reached $38.5 million in 2011 and could grow to nearly $1 billion in 2012 and over $5 billion by 2014.

It’s a changing world for content publishing, content consumption, and content monetization. To date, it appears that consumers have benefited greatly with better access to the information they want and need anytime they want or need it. The next step in this evolution will undoubtedly include a battle between content publishers and device manufacturers as each party tries to get its fair share of the ROI potential that content consumption via tablets offers. Who do you think will win? Leave a comment and share your prediction.

Image: Brian Sawyer

Newstex is sponsoring CloudCamp Rochester which will be held on March 24, 2012 at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Golisano College of Computing and Informational Sciences, in Rochester, New York.

The goal of CloudCamp is to advance cloud computing in general through open discussions among end users, IT professionals, and vendors. Conference organizer David Kavanagh from Eucalyptus Installation says, “We’re pleased to run the first CloudCamp in Rochester this spring. We’ll be combining the best un-conference style with some must-see speakers from the industry. If you have something to share, put yourself on the schedule in the morning! Come learn and network with the other cloudies in Rochester and the region.”

Newstex vice president of technology Chris Moyer explains, “CloudCamp is a Developers “un-conference”, with headline speakers including Jeff Bar. Everyone that attends also presents, so it’s a great time to find out what your peers are working on. It’s based off of the popular “BarCamp”, with a focus on CloudComputing of all types. CloudCamp is not just about AWS, but all cloud computing in general. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Windows Azure, IBM Cloud, and Google AppEngine are all expected to have a presence at this conference.”

Speakers at CloudCamp Rochester are being announced, and so far the list includes:

• Jeff Barr, lead evangelist from Amazon Web services who will talk about public crowd infrastructure.
• Greg Dekoenigsberg, vice president of community at Eucalyptus who will discuss private and hybrid cloud infrastructure
• Jim O’Neil, developer advocate from Microsoft, will speak about Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Chris and the team of Newstex developers will be at CloudCamp Rochester. They’ll be giving away some free gifts to the first attendees, so get there early!

You can register for CloudCamp here.

Yes, you read that headline correctly. Today, Advertising Age reports that Ladies Home Journal is leveraging the crowdsourcing trend to create content, but the magazine is going about the process in the opposite way that every other brand and company is doing it.

Instead of just leveraging the crowd to create content on the Ladies Home Journal website, the magazine will republish content in its print magazine that visitors originally publish on its website. The goal of the new strategy is being hyped as an effort to attract a younger audience to a print magazine that’s in a very mature market and has a reputation of being for an older audience.

The new strategy will debut with the March 2012 issue of Ladies Home Journal when the magazine’s editors will curate most of the publication’s content from the posts that visitors publish on DivineCaroline.com (a website owned by the same company that owns Ladies Home Journal, Meredith Corp.). Customer stories from that site, the Ladies Home Journal website, the Ladies Home Journal Facebook page, and “other digital channels” will make up the bulk of the print magazine’s content going forward.

The leadership team behind Ladies Home Journal is confident that the reverse crowdsourcing for content model will be a success, and predicts that other print magazines will follow with similar strategies. However, there is growing speculation outside the walls of the Ladies Home Journal offices about how effective this strategy will actually be. For example, how will the content in the magazine be selected? Is it misleading to say the magazine is written by readers if the editors still choose that content in order to fit their agendas (i.e., selling more subscriptions and attracting advertisers)?

Of course, it’s a business first, so naturally, making money comes first. However, there’s a better argument against the reverse crowdsourcing for content model that the Ladies Home Journal is pursuing. What’s the benefit of buying a magazine with content that’s already been published, discussed, and shared online? What added value does republishing reader content from the website in the magazine deliver to customers who purchase the print magazine?

Only time will tell if this business model holds works. Desperate times often call for desperate measures, and the print media industry is certainly desperate. Let’s wait and see a year from now if the Ladies Home Journal strategy to attract a younger audience to its print publication works or ends up going down in media history as a desperate effort that failed. What do you predict?

Image: Manoj Jacob

This week, Nielsen released its 2011 State of the Media: Consumer Usage Report which offers insights into consumer usage trends across television, mobile, online, and social media. None of the trends that can be determined from this study are shocking. At this point, everyone knows that mobile content and social media are the “it” media these days, but televisions are far from dead yet. Following are some highlights from the report to put some numbers to the state of the media in 2011.

Mobile and Online Consumers

It’s actually amusing to look at the data from the Nielsen study and compare it to how media market share was broken down 10 years ago. The stats from the Nielsen report follow:

• 232 million Americans age 13 and over use mobile phones.
• 211 million Americans are online.
• 192 million Americans use personal computers and laptops at home or work.
• 116 million Americans age 13 and over access the mobile web.

Video Consumption

Video viewing habits have also changed significantly over the past decade. Nielsen reported the following statistics from its study:

• 288 million Americans age 2 and up watch traditional television.
• 143 million Americans age 2 and up watch video on the Internet.
• 111 million Americans age 2 and up watch timeshifted television via DVRs and similar devices.
• 30 million Americans age 2 and up watch video via mobile phones.

 Social Media Access

Computers still reign supreme when it comes to accessing social media sites. The Nielsen study revealed the following breakdown:

• 97% access social media via computers.
• 37% access social media via mobile phones.
• 3% access social media via gaming consoles.
• 3% access social media via iPads.

Nielsen also reports that in 2011, nearly four out of 5 active Internet users visited social networks and blogs.

Smartphone Operating System Market Share

57% of mobile phone owners have standard feature phones while 43% have smartphones. When it comes to buying a smartphone, Android devices are preferred over any other operating system. The Nielsen report provides the following stats:

• Android = 43%
• iPhone = 28%
• RIM BlackBerry = 18%
• Windows Mobile = 7%
• Other = 4%

Mobile Activities

Nielsen broke down the time spent each month on activities by owners of Android devices and reported the following results:

• Texting = 14%
• Browser = 10%
• Dialer = 6%
• Social Networking = 5%
• Email/Instant Messaging = 5%
• Maps/Location = 4%
• Music/Video = 2%
• Camera = 1%
• All Other Apps = 53% (including Facebook, Twitter, eBay Mobile, Barcode Scanner, and all other apps downloaded and used by study respondents)

Another interesting statistic revealed in the report is the number of apps people download to their smartphones. According to the study, app downloaders have an average of 33 apps on their phones.

You can read the complete Nielsen report here. It’s filled with statistics about mobile, online, television, and social media that can help you build your content strategy for 2012.

Image: exacq

Last month, Juniper Research released a report about the rise of geosocial networking and the growth of smartphone adoption. These trends spell big business for mobile content and mobile social media to the tune of 1.3 billion mobile social users by 2016 (up from 650 million in 2011).

The biggest driving force behind the mobile social media growth prediction is the integration of social, local, and mobile experiences. With these trends shaping the way people consume content in the near future, content publishers and brands need to develop strategies for content distribution through varied mobile devices.

As Surajit Agaarwal describes on Technorati, publishers and content distributors need to consider not only the many devices and platforms that end-users can consume content on in the mobile environment but also the context of that content consumption. He mentions the following types of context that can affect the content consumption and mobile social media experiences:

1. Device

People can consume content an a wide variety of mobile devices, including smartphones, tablets, laptops, and so on, and that content could be viewed on a small screen or a large screen. Device options are only going to get more diverse in the future.

2. Location

Mobile social media activities and content consumption can happen from just about anywhere you can imagine. That’s why mobile marketing and geo-targeting are high priorities for businesses these days. It should be important to content publishers, too.

3. Time

People consume content via mobile devices at all hours of the day and night. The trick for publishers and businesses is to publish relevant content targeted to audiences that are online at any given moment.

4. Social Relevance

Mobile social media will be even more heavily affected by what users’ social circles are consuming, liking, sharing, and talking about at any moment in time. Social relevance also includes geo-social influence from people who may or may not be in a user’s social circle but are within the local vicinity of that individual at a given point in time.

5. Personalization

One of the hottest topics for social media and content marketing as we begin 2012 is content personalization. The goal is to deliver content that individuals are most likely to be interested in at a specific moment via their mobile devices using behavioral research and analytics tracking.

6. Attention Spans

People’s attention spans on mobile devices are lower than most other media — including online. For example, in his article on Technorati, Surajit cites a study from the University of Colorado that found college students typically consume less than three paragraphs of text, less than 30 seconds of audio, and less than one minute of video on mobile devices before moving on to different content. That means your content needs to be relevant, personalized, interesting, and device-compatible, or you’ll have almost no chance of getting your complete message across to people.

Keep these trends and insights in mind as you develop and implement your content publishing and marketing strategies in 2012. And if your plan doesn’t already include a mobile social media strategy, develop one now, because 2016 will be here before you know it.

Image: Steve Paine