Marketing Technology for Growth

Early last week, the online community was introduced to Web Platform Docs (WPD), a new website dedicated to answering questions about the Open Web Platform. The website will operate similarly to Wikipedia in that it can be accessed for free and updated by anyone who creates an account with the community. The Web Platform Blog boasts that this website will become the one-stop shop for designers and developers wanting to keep up with the ever-changing standards of the web platform. Backed by organizations like Google, Microsoft, Opera, Facebook, Mozilla, Nokia, Adobe, and W3C, the website has the potential to become one of the most valued resources on the web. I, for one, am very excited about having so many useful documents, tutorials and other resources catalogued in one convenient location.

Yesterday, computer software mainstay Adobe finally made good on a promise made in November of last year, announcing that it would stop all development of its popular Flash multimedia player for mobile devices. In doing so, Adobe is putting all of their mobile web (computer) chips on HTML5.

HTML5. It's one of the hottest buzzwords in the world of web development and design. But what exactly is HTML5, and why is everyone making such a fuss about it? HTML5 has been around since about 2008, but it really started to generate buzz when Steve Jobs openly cursed the use of Flash and told the world that it would never be allowed on Apple's devices. Since then, HTML5 has pretty much become the standard for any mobile development, and it’s on its way to becoming the standard for HTML development in general.

For the busy chief executive or harried small business owner, here are a few key “need to know” marketing tech trends for 2012 and beyond.

I once had a college history professor who would have us map out raw data from old archives. Though a laborious and often futile exercise, he argued that by doing so you can sometimes glean patterns from seemingly unrelated data. In addition to being a handy tool for would-be historians, the practice can be useful for spotting business trends. There have been a number of recent disclosures and initiatives that suggest tech industry leaders are pushing HTML5 for web and app development big time. Today’s blog will serve as an introduction to HTML5, and will be followed by a second post outlining the different ways the tech industry is promoting it. The third and final post will delve into the more complex questions of why tech industry leaders are embracing HTML5, and what this trend bodes for the future of app development.