We're looking to hear what you feel are the major drivers and motivators in the tech industry right now. This year we've devoted a considerable chunk of the survey to investigating business analytics - its role in the workplace and where we currently are on the adoption cycle. Typical questions:

• Where is it used in the organization?
• Where does your organization need to be?
• What are the concerns you face?

Think you have the answers? Want to share your perspective? Complete the Tech Trends survey now!

In 2010, more than 50% of the respondents told us mobile application development will overtake other types of development by 2015. And nearly 70% felt cloud computing will become the primary way organizations will acquire IT in the next five years.

So, what exactly happens to the results of this survey? Last year the survey garnered press coverage across the globe, allowing IBM to highlight its offerings for the top trends identified.

We also use the survey here at developerWorks to help shape the strategy for our content and site. It helps us ensure we're delivering relevant content that best fits the need of the 4m visitors who visit us each month.

Take the survey now and pass the word along!

Great, we’re getting a bunch of traffic without having to pay any third party. But is the traffic any good? developerWorks’ core objective is engagement, and we find this Twitter traffic ranking as high in terms of loyalty (and proxy metrics such as 'average page views per session’) as any other channel at our disposal.

So here we have a social media strategy delivering tremendous ROI when measured against other marketing channels.

Now talk of using Twitter as a marketing channel may sound heretical. Whatever happened to using social media to engage in conversation? That's fine, but that isn't strictly our model. We produce technical content in the shape of articles, technical demos, trials - a lot of content that really doesn't lend itself to 140 character feedback. So we take a different approach: we adopt a content syndication model. We use Twitter to promote our content. And our content helps bolster our Twitter audience. A swirling symbiosis of content and marketing.

Sure, we've reached out and made ourselves known to people in our space (primarily through monitoring #hashtags), but no-one is going to follow us back if our content isn't appealing. How do we build and promote this content? Largely by looking at what resonates with our audience and building a content and Twitter promotion strategy around this.

This really is a content marketing story. As Edelman's Michael Brito points out:

"As long as the messaging on a company’s owned media channels is relevant, not inundated with sales propaganda, and delivers valuable information, they will essentially position themselves as a trusted advisor of content related to their own products and/or industry related information."

Being a trusted advisor really ties up with the core mission of developerWorks.

Now where does Google+ fit into this? Well, this content marketing model can be applied to any social network that has a strong technical/informational community (for this reason, we've seen this model work better on Twitter than on Facebook). Google+ has something to offer this segment. Google does have some history here, having evolved Usenet into Google Groups and swallowed up Blogger.

As an early example on this fledgling community, Digg founder Kevin Rose upped and moved his blog wholesale over to Google+. We're not quite ready to go that far with developerWorks, but if the platform continues to grow at its current rate, the Google+ for Business model could be a particularly strong fit for our content marketing strategy. There's a bunch of suppositions here, but this is definitely something we will be keeping our eye on.

If you have similar stories around content marketing on social networks, we’d be interested in hearing these!

Apparently not according to Streetline.

Earlier this year the San Francisco-based tech firm launched the free Parker app which not only shows you where the parking meters are located, but also shows you which meters are available. Forget circling a five-block radius waiting for a spot to appear. With this app (currently available for iPhone and Android) you can pinpoint and snag that elusive space.

Not only does this save you gray hairs: you also cut down on emissions and congestion. The Parker app fits neatly into IBM's Smarter City vision: one that fully utilizes technology to help us humans live more efficiently in urban spaces where close proximity. So it's no wonder that Streetline won IBM Global Entrepreneurship Program's SmartCamp 2010.

What are the key tenets of a Smarter Planet? These solutions should be Instrumented, Interconnected and Intelligent.

The Parker app demonstrates this wonderfully:

Instrumented

Streetline captures data using self-powered sensors mounted in the ground at each parking space which can detect whether or not a space is vacant. The Parker app uses your smartphone's location sensors to know where you are and highlight local parking spots. It also uses the large screen to display a dynamic map of the nearest spots (rather than just display a list of street addresses).

Interconnected

The parking meter data from the sensors is transmitted across ultra-low power mesh networks to Streetline servers which build a real-time picture of which parking meters are vacant. This information can be shared with drivers through the Parker app, and also with city officials, operators and policy managers.

Intelligent

The Parker app is a perfect example of turning data into insight. Plotting vacant parking spots on a map helps you find a spot faster, with the added benefit of reducing congestion and emissions in busy metropolitan areas. The app even goes further: once you park, the app uses this information to provide walking directions back to your vehicle and can record how much time you have on the meter and alert you when time is getting short.

Download Parker now to see this app in action for yourself (currently available in a limited number of metropolitan centers around the US).

I understand from Steven Levy’s seminal Wired piece that Facebook integration could face more than just technical hurdles.

Also, we weren’t seeing this level of interest in HTML5 even a year ago. True, there was a lot of interest in mobile: but at that time the larger focus was around mobile platform development (led by iPhone and Android).

Full list:

>> HTML5 fundamentals, Part 1, Zone: Web development
Functional thinking Thinking functionally, Part 1, Zone: Java
Building CouchApps, Zone: Open source
On-demand demos, Zone: N/A
>> HTML5, CSS3, and related technologies, Zone: Web development
Just what is Node.js?, Zone: Open source
Application virtualization, past and future, Zone:  Linux
>> Improve web application security with jQuery Mobile, Zone:  XML
Use Node.js as a full cloud environment development stack, Zone:  Cloud computing
Taming big data, Zone:  Information Management

If you are a WebSphere application developer looking to go mobile, check out the Web 2.0 and Mobile Feature Pack.

In a series of short interviews, watch the infectiously energetic Jerry Cuomo (WebSphere CTO) explain that for many customers mobile is not an option. They need to have a roadmap to mobile deployment, and they need it now. Drawing parallels to the growth of the web over a decade ago, Jerry talks of the current ‘frenzied excitement’ which he believes will lead to an environment of better choice, architecture and the design moving forward.

And choice is something we’re not short of in the mobile development space. Should you develop web-based mobile apps? Should you develop native apps to cover the whole gamut of platforms (which still includes Blackberry if you’re talking B2B development).

Whilst now developers are faced with a number of mobile architectures on which to develop, the Holy Grail is to leverage existing skills, whether they be around the web, open standards, Java, etc. to write an application once and deploy to many devices.

(See the whole series)

WebSphere Application Server has taken this approach for its mobile strategy with the launch of the Web 2.0 and Mobile Feature Pack. Built on the popular Dojo Toolkit, the Feature Pack gives developers access to HTML5 mobile themes (to develop web apps that look like native applications), mobile widgets, diagrams and improved gauges and charting. 

As IBM’s Chris Mitchell explains in this video, for the clear majority of developers of enterprise applications, the user interface (UI) is simple enough to not require all the full-blown features of a native app. Displaying an XML feed of first-quarter product sales is a substantially different proposition to rendering a realistic 3D racing game. Having said that, mobile frameworks like Dojo are becoming richer and really stretching the paradigm of what can be displayed on the web.

For instance, Eric Durocher over on the Web 2.0 and Mobile Development Blog shows how a complex diagram like an organizational chart can be rendered for a mobile device:

What are the best practices for developing these applications?

Chris Mitchell suggests an architecture that decouples the server from the client. Data from the server side can be exposed using REST or web services. These can be accessed from the client side, whether the client be a web application or a mobile one. In this way you only build one core application with only minimal work on the front-end to cover any web-enabled device.

If you want to take this a step further and offer native apps (say, if there is a requirement for the app to appear in an App store like Apple’s or Android’s), you can create a hybrid application with a tool like PhoneGap. You effectively build a web-based mobile app and let PhoneGap provide a wrapper so from a user perspective it looks and runs like a native app.

Ready to get started with mobile app development? The Web 2.0 and Mobile Feature Pack is a no-charge product extension to WebSphere Application Server (version 8.0 now available for download)

“As an example of the current strategy, [Eric] Schmidt talked about getting more information from YouTube users in order to offer more targeted video.”

YouTube already has a fairly robust recommendation engine:

but from Schmidt’s comments, development around this area of exposing social analytics is where they see real business value. This is backed up by moves such as YouTube’s purchase of movie recommendation site Fflick.

How can analytics be used to derive value?

For instance, predictive analytics solutions (like IBM SPSS) can traverse a large inventory of content and make associations based on a visitor’s past behavior and the behavior of their friends in the network. Match this with sentiment analysis, which can be used to look at the conversation around a video to determine whether it is loved or loathed (or somewhere in-between), and suddenly you have a more immersive viewing experience.

This doesn’t just apply to Google and video. Foursquare is apparently taking this approach to differentiate itself as Facebook encroaches into its space with its Places offering.

Whilst analytics can offer differentiation in a hotly-contested area, the issue of privacy has to be addressed. The interfaces can get so good at offering recommendations that they border on being plain creepy. Couple this with the growing paranoia around the extent to which our digital lives are tracked, and suddenly these interfaces appear more Big Brother rather than benevolent Jeeves. One way to address this issue is to be as transparent as possible when exposing social analytics.

So if Eric Schmidt’s comment can be taken at face value, I’d suggest it’s in the context of a growing trend in looking to maximize the value in existing networks rather than racing to build new ones. Social analytics, when handled deftly, can unlock this latent value in social data.

Do you agree?

As the attention span of the browsing population shrinks below that of your average goldfish, so the need to create razor-sharp, perfectly honed navigation systems increases. There’s a demand on publishers to use whatever information they have to provide a more contextualized browsing experience.

That’s all well and good, but have you ever looked at a recommendation and wondered what on earth was the system thinking when it picked it? You’ve spent months on the site exploring hardcore thrash metal so why on earth are you being offered a book on floral knitting patterns?

I just went onto Youtube and noticed that they have actually got pretty transparent with their recommendation engine:

Notice the ‘because you watched’.

As we use more analytics systems to build interfaces, being explicit about how decisions are made becomes increasingly important: 

Show what determined the recommendation: This answers the question of why on earth am I seeing this recommendation? In this instance YouTube bases this on what you have watched previously, but this could just as well relate to what others with similar interests have liked (the Amazon approach).

Allow you to interact with the recommendation: YouTube allows you to remove recommendations from the list that you don’t think are appropriate. One thing it doesn’t do is spell out whether that feedback is factored into future recommendations. Some systems (such as Pandora and Netflix) use a thumbs-up/down or rating system with the implicit understanding that this information will be fed into the calculations of future recommendations. As James Taylor, the Decision Management expert pointed out to me some years ago, recommendation engines have their limit. If I booked a once-in-the-lifetime trip to Bermuda last year, there’s no point in showing me vacations to Antigua six months later. Allowing me to vote this kind of recommendation down can help systems disentangle one-shot whims from longer term patterns of behavior.      

The question of privacy: Being transparent about analytics systems and and how exactly visitors are being tracked can go a long way to allay the growing public fears around the growing mountain of data produced by the internet in general and social networking sites in particular. Indeed, here in California there has been considerable press around a bill to increase the privacy of social networks. Justin Brookman, director of the Project on Consumer Privacy at the Center for Democracy and Technology has said, “I think the idea of telling people what is going on and giving them control over their information from the beginning is a good idea for social networks and others places as well”. Privacy advocates are asking publishers to be more open about how data is being used.

As user interfaces become more reliant on analytics tools to offer a more personalized experience, there are significant advantages to displaying upfront exactly why we are being shown the recommendations we see.