MicroStrategy World (#mstrworld), an annual conference held by business-intelligence software developer MicroStrategy, generated excitement about Social Intelligence. This refers to a suite of new applications that collect data from, for example, Facebook (see the Wisdom app) and then analyse it in a highly structured and presentable format.

This is not a new idea, but the consensus is that MicroStrategy has implemented it more successfully than others who have tried, and at a time when many businesses are still looking for a way to chart a course through disruptive trends. A quote from CEO Michael Saylor’s keynote address catches some the confidence and persuasiveness behind the pitch:  ‘Scale fast…or fail fast’.

In all the enthusiasm it can feel like there is not enough risk-awareness. Take the following from Ventana Research CEO Mark Smith: ‘You can quickly access more than 30,000 individuals who have already provided permission and their Facebook tokens and analyse their friends’ fan information – this resource includes information from more than 5 million people in what MicroStrategy calls the Wisdom Network.’

One might be left to wonder how you get from 30,000 who have ‘already provided permission’, to 5 million, without raising privacy concerns regarding the extra 4,970,000 people who may not be aware of what their friends have chosen to share on the Wisdom Network. A further issue is how popular the current generation of social media sites will remain if there is too much talk of their effectively being customer-relationship-management databases.

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The act was prevented from being made into US law, although efforts to pass it could resume at a future date. Those in support were largely from the entertainment industry – companies such as Viacom and 20^th Century Fox – who argued for new powers to disrupt copyright infringement on the internet.

The anti-SOPA campaign successfully managed to turn this into a debate over who should have the power to censor the internet. That they were able to define the debate in such favourable terms has led to some historicising about this being a watershed moment in the transition from ‘old’ to ‘new’ media.

Transitions in the world of making, distributing and consuming entertainment are less overtly, but perhaps more decisively determined by another kind of development that happened last week: IBM announced that their scientists have managed to make the fundamental unit of computer memory, the bit, using only twelve atoms. Practical application is still some way off, but could improve the standard of memory capacity by over a hundred times.

It seems that while the value of entertainment itself remains unchanging, the underlying economics of its availability are set for transformations perhaps beyond the horizons of even the most scrupulously modern legislation.

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Two statistics might be helpful in drawing a line under some of the inferences that were being made both this week and last:

Attendance was the highest it has ever been in CES history, so much of the pessimistic talk picked up in the Jan 02 – 09 bulletin turned out to be peremptory.

Secondly and despite never exhibiting at CES, Apple was still seen as setting the pace and received a lot of positive attention in the coverage; however, it is Android that has become the most popular smartphone operating system over the last year by a very large margin: according to comScore, between October 2010 and November 2011 Android went from a 23.5% to a 46.9% share, while Apple were much more modest at 24.6% in October 2010 increasing to 28.7% in November 2011.

In many ways, the themes which attracted the most attention – CES going into decline due to the departure of Microsoft, Apple’s pre-eminence – bore a heightened relation to reality. The factor that was implicit in most of the discussion, but perhaps not given a good enough airing, was the outlook of the ordinary consumer. CES remains strong because it is pitched towards the largest possible audience, just as Google’s Android is growing not because it is the best operating system, but because it meets the needs of most consumers and is more widely available than the Apple alternative.

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On the one hand, some headlines talked about technology spend slowing and gloomy predictions, with both analyst houses reducing their forecast rates of growth. On the other hand, Gartner is forecasting growth of 3.7 per cent and Forrester, 5.4 per cent (the differences in part due to what’s included in technology) – a slower rate of growth than previously forecast.

While there is scope for downside –if too many factors, such as the Eurozone and China, perform badly – growth is still a positive, particularly with Forrester predicting spend in the US will grow by 6.6 per cent. If technology’s glass is half-full, there are emptier glasses elsewhere.

The media are reporting analysts looking to the consumerisation of IT, cloud, analytics (and big data) and IT consulting as areas that will help drive growth in spend. A number of these themes are expected to be highly disruptive and to help bring benefits to businesses: scalability, agility, cost-savings, protection of the customer-base and growth in revenue. Significantly, Apollo’s analysis of 1,500 media in the US and Europe shows these technologies and their benefits are gaining increased traction in the business and CIO media, as well as in the tech media.

CES 2012 began on January 10, so the activity covered by our Jan 02-08 report was all the build-up before the first day. There were two main, interlinking strands of discussion. One was the new TV products developed by Apple and Google, the other was the future of CES itself after Microsoft decided to stop exhibiting after 2012.

These different subjects interlink through Apple, which has never shown new products at CES yet continued to be a major part of the coverage. This led to doubts being voiced over the effectiveness of CES as a venue for consumer technology companies looking to catch the public imagination, for example see the New York Times story ‘A Tech Show Loses Clout as Industry Shifts’.

The industry shift in question is how far other companies will go to emulate Apple’s approach to the consumer market. There is always the possibility that things will proceed to the point where nobody is interested in showcasing their products at third-party events, but there are reasons not to think that this is the case. For one, not all companies are large enough to contemplate such a strategy, and secondly not all companies are making premium goods like Apple.

Even if others follow Microsoft and leave CES, it won’t be possible for all consumer technology companies to follow their footsteps, and the Apple marketing formula may require some adjustments before it works for more mainstream brands.

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This isn’t surprising. SAP operates in areas currently attracting intense media coverage, such as cloud, big data and mobility. At a time of disruptive technologies, the ability of one of IT’s biggest players to adapt and innovate has come under scrutiny. The acquisition of SuccessFactors less than a fortnight before the summit helped intensify the debate.

At the summit there was a lot of debate and ultimately some measured approval, for example at Dennis Howlett’s blog: “SAP Influencer Summit: A qualified success”.

The summit aired a number of concerns and positives. It will take six to twelve months to determine how successfully SAP is now being positioned to prosper within the changing environment.

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For the first time since we started these bulletins the same hashtag, #LeWeb, was top for both analysts and writers. When you consider that these influencers are watched by over 1.5m followers it’s easy to see the big impact LeWeb made on the technology industry in general.

In recent weeks it’s been interesting to see how technology issues and themes have grown in prominence. The technology influencers appear to be less enthusiastic about the longer running mainstream stories. The Occupy movement hardly got a mention last week and even the long term stories surrounding the Republican candidates and the crisis in the EU made much smaller impacts than they have in recent weeks. Instead we saw technology related hashtags such as #SAP, #IBMSCForum, #GartnerDC and #Cloud getting the most traction.

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The big news story was the privacy issues surrounding the Carrier IQ diagnostic software that is installed on 141 million smartphones. Last week, there was a lot of indignation about this software with many tweets explaining how to switch it off and some questioning whether the software infringed privacy laws. It looks as if this story has more to run with the news that HTC and Samsung have been hit with class-action lawsuits in relation to the use of this software on their products.

The event that occupied many of the tweets from both analysts and writers was the IBM Connect 2011 analyst event in Stamford. In addition, there were many more topic based tweets than we’ve seen for a few weeks around topics such as cloud, enterprise software, social business and big data.

As the technology influencers prepare for Christmas there are still splenty of non-tech stories to tweet about including Christmas itself. Other stories that made an impact last week included Jeremy Clarkson’s comments about the strikers, the GOP candidates, the Occupy movement and the Leveson inquiry which, unsurprisingly, was the top trending hashtag for the writers.

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You can download the latest Twitter Influencer Bulletin here or view it in the slide show below.

The visitors break down between vendors, agencies and, increasingly, journalists (see chart below for the breakdown). They come from 22 different countries, although the US, UK, Germany and France predominate.

Having invested heavily over the last 18 months in building the media base we research, our analytics and reporting – not too mention the web site itself – we are extremely pleased with the results. Not least what they show about the desire for measurement and evaluation.

The tag cloud is dominated by words such as Thanksgiving, turkey, Christmas, Xmas, Black Friday, shopping, etc. which suggests that the minds of the key technology influencers on Twitter were not necessarily focussed on purely technology matters.

Sitting amongst the holiday phrases were other significant words, None more so than Leveson which refers to the ongoing Levenson inquiry in the UK that is likely to have major repercussions for the UK newspaper industry. The inquiry has heard a series of dramatic and often damning testaments from a number of people who have been adversely affected by the practices of the UK’s newspaper industry.  Not surprisingly, many of the technology journalists have been following these events very closely.

As far as technology is concerned the main coverage once again surrounded the mobile sector with iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Samsung, Windows and HTC all getting a fair amount of coverage.

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