It’s that time of the year when analysts look over the past year and try to anticipate upcoming trends. Some reports cover our digital media industry, and among those some of the most useful write-ups are free.
Jon Peddie Research’s Visions and Predications for 2011 uses a round-robin of analysts to offer snappy reports on our growing post-PC era, a time when smartphones, tablets and more push beyond the first generation of personal computers. JPR’s prognosis gets into specifics on hardware, including trends in 3D, solid-state drives, and graphics chip innovations. Peddie has followed the computer graphics market for years, and regularly presents his findings at industry confabs such as NAB and Siggraph. You can download the JPR report here.
comScore focuses more on “the behavior of digital consumers”, so the research firm offers up details on retail e-commerce, trends in group-buying and flash sales sites, digital advertising, and search engines. You can download their report from this website. (Note: comScore requires you to fill-out contact info before you can download.)
So whether you want to look backwards or forwards, now is a good time to make use of free reports from companies that usually charge thousands for similar, if more granular, investigations. I’ll post similar notices whenever I find free or low-cost analyses of our digital media world, so do check back.