The folks at Google have drawn up this great infographic to show the journey that Gmail has taken until now. Hard to believe it is 9 years old already, and at its launch it was pretty much the norm for web based email accounts to have less than 10 MB of space. So when Gmail launched on April Fools Day in 2004, many people thought it was a joke that Google is launching a service with 1GB of storage for you to use.

The service quickly branched out into a full consumer focussed personal information manager, with tools like Calendar and Contacts launching soon after. These days Gmail is the standard in web based mail – but the biggest problem is that now you cannot get the email address you want anymore. These days you have to settle for yourname1964kitty@gmail.com… See the evolution of Gmail below: (more…)

Does it make sense for companies to invest in e-commerce based on Social Media networks? 8th Bridge did this great infographic showing the current most successful methods and networks for retailing using social network integration. (more…)

Content marketing is rapidly growing overseas as brands realise that being a publisher online is a great way to get their products noticed and growing. As someone in the content marketing business I’m very focussed on words but further to that with the growth of Instagram and 500px it’s inevitable that imagery will eventually tell a thousand words. Here’s an infographic on the growth of visual content marketing:

Speech recognition is one of those pie in the sky features that we always get excited about, but somehow just does not work all that great. It makes for a great demo, but we all know sooner or later we do not use it all that much – be it because of poor recognition or just that it does not really save time. After all, speech recognition has been a feature in most higher end phones for quite some time now, yet you do not see too many people using it. Except maybe in a car.

Now enhancements in the AI is about to revolutionize the way we talk to our gadgets – just think how good Google Voice Search has become (with multiple language support), and the way we can tell our iPhone to play a specific album. There is also talks that Apple is building speech recognition into iOS5 (which will probably ship only with iPhone 5). Apple has recently been in talks to build Nuance technology (the folks behind Dragon Naturally Speaking) into the iPhone, and Apple also recently bought “Siri”, the personal assistant app.

So you future command to your phone wont only be to “Call Jane”, but might just be: “Arrange dinner with Jane tomorrow night at Italian restaurant in Cape Town”. Then using numerous services on the web arrange all of this for you… Take a look at this video of Siri to see what I on about:

Sure, we as South Africans might have some challenges because our accents do not match the yanks (who typically get catered for first), and many of the online services do not always arrive on our shores, but it is exciting nonetheless. Only time will tell whether these enhancements do mean more people use speech recognition.

But how does it all work?

This infographic does a pretty good job of explaining automatic speech recognition (look out for the Mike Tyson quip): (more…)

Yeah – there is a bit of a war brooding out there. And its not Microsoft vs Apple. Its the battle of the mobile OS’s. So take a look at this infographic that details the personality characteristics of users of iPhone and Android. Hunch is a pretty great site that makes recommendations based on things your personality and things you already like, so they have a pretty strong database to draw these correlations from. Here are some interesting findings:

• iPhone users are 100% more likely to be Mac users. What would be great to know if these users first had Mac before the iPhone, or afterwards? Did the iPhone create a halo effect for the users to buy more Apple products?
• Android users are typically late adopters, in fact they are much less technical according to these results. I would have honestly have thought it to be other way round, with Apple‘s focus on dumbing down user interfaces, and the large Android hacker base out there who like to customize their phones…

If you cannot see the infographic below, click through.

Yes, we are aware correlation is not necessarily causation.

Those of us who are addicted to our mobile phones (hold on, who is not?) know all to well that accessing social media sites like Facebook and Twitter is a lot easier on your phone than on a PC, and in many cases, a lot more useful. Instead of waiting until you are in front of a computer, you take out your phone and access the sites right on the spot, and keep your friends (or followers) updated. So here we have a great infographic from the guys at Flowtown to explain how phones have affected social media.

Some interesting Stats:

• People who access Facebook from their phones are twice as active on the social network.
• There is a good spread across all age ranges for people accessing social networks from their phones. Clearly, it is not only the young ones who do it.

If you cannot see the infographic, please click through. (more…)

How sad. At one point Google and Apple actually got along quite well. In fact, Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt used to be on the Apple Board of Directors. But then the iPhone came along, and Google built their open source Android smartphone operating system, which soured the relationship a bit. Apple still uses Google for some of the key services on the iPhone, like Maps and Search. But since the release of Android, there has been very little working together. But the most damning evidence of animosity comes directly from the top at Apple, with Steve Jobs stating:

“We did not enter the search business. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them.”

But you are here to see the infographic. It is large, so clickthrough if it does not fully show. (more…)

This great infographic was done by Unisys to demonstrate the current landscape of consumerization of IT, and how Enterprise IT departments plan to keep up. Out of the survey it is found that most IT department are completely out of touch with how “iWorkers” prefer to work, and is completely unprepared for it. What is pretty interesting is that most respondents claimed to buy their choice of device themselves – this is in stark contrast to the IT department of yesteryear where users had a limited catalogue of hardware, and those hardware devices were the only supported way to access your work resources.

Modern workers prefer using their own devices, and expect IT to support this. In a way IT departments have to shift to a device independent services offering – which might not sound too difficult in smaller businesses, but in large business it is a monumental task. So I have a few issues with this infographic:

• When they refer to “modernized” customer facing applications – are they referring to actual applications running on the phone? This is strange, because smarter organizations these days tend to focus on device independent web interfaces. Using modern HTML5 methods, these web sites can be very high quality.
• “IT is doing less to secure mobile devices” – There is one major reason for this. Modern mobile device management software has a major flaw – they can do not support all modern mobile devices on the same level. On certain platforms this is an overly manual process of sending config files to devices. Blackberry has brilliant enterprise management. iOS – not so much. Once all the new smartphone platforms start seeing enterprise management as a priority (which happens little by little with each release), this will improve. My issue here is probably rather with Apple – Android has been playing along more with MDM solutions like Afaria. Apple compatible MDM tends to rely on silly apps in order to communicate with MDM servers. Microsoft is however also looking to support more mobile platforms in future versions of SCCM. But we have to wait for Tech Ed to see how that pans out.

At the end of the day it is important to remember that infograhics these days are primarily used to market a service – so some statements have to be taken in context for whom the infographic is made. Otherwise this infographic is pretty spot on – and a harsh wake up call to IT departments… (It is pretty big, so you have to see it after the break) (more…)