Technology Trends & How They Are Changing The Ways Brands Are Connecting With The Millenials Date:   Wednesday , October 08, 2014 Founded in 1990, SapientNitro (NASDAQ: SAPE) is a part of Sapient. The company provides integrated marketing & technology services. Increasing buying power has made Millennials the prime target segment for many brands. However, connecting with Millennials needs constant innovation, involving many new generation technologies. Born between 1984 and 2004, the Millennials have grown up in an era where technologies like GPS, Touch-screens and Tablets have become ubiquitous. At the same time, software has emerged as a core competency for enterprises. The advent of the Internet led to the first wave of innovation connecting brands and Millenials. But with so many channels and technological developments surfacing everyday, what do brands bet on, as they strive to connect with their consumer base in newer ways? ]As a Digital Marketing Agency, we follow technology trends and what we see these days is not always about invention of brand new stuff, but more of Integration and Inter-connectivity. Ours is a world of seamless cross-channel communication and linked experiences across connected devices. We find that consumers tend to focus on technology only when it fails. So, technology really needs to be invisible to the experience it helps create. Listed below are several technology trends that are creating new opportunities for brands and Millennials to connect meaningfully in today\'s digital world. Physical World As the new Digital Channel – IoT and all that Boundaries are blurring between the physical and digital worlds. The much-hyped Internet of Things is really transforming into the Internet of Everything, covering People (11 Billion Facebook accounts), Places (>3 Billion monthly FourSquare check-ins), Information (>30 Trillion web pages in the Google Index) and Things (>25 Billion by 2020). We are entering an era where Software defines Everything and Everything is Programmable. In the coming days, IoT will move beyond practical uses (medical, fitness, security and more) into more subjective, artistic scenarios, creating worlds and opportunities that never existed before. Proximity and Location Based Services Beacons and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) are enabling the next generation in-store experiences by introducing a level of granularity that Wi-Fi and GPS Targeting never achieved. The latter were primarily location technologies and more effective outdoors than indoors. With accuracy down to the inch, Beacons and BLE have successfully brought Proximity based services to the connected store. We only see growth for these technologies. Data, Data, Data Whether big or small, Data has been in the news for a long time. Like everyone else, we too foresee data volumes continuing to grow exponentially. The need for near real-time insights is pushing the boundaries of data processing at scale and in turn, that is paving the way for tremendous innovation on the physical infrastructure front. At the same time, Data streams are meaningless to marketers without context. To eliminate the lack of context, businesses are striving to establish platforms that enable the creation of contextual information. In the coming days, integration with retailers, suppliers and distribution systems in near real time will be critical to convert data into insights. Integrated Apps World The Apps are here and they rule our lives in many ways that we never thought were possible. The opportunity is in integrating Apps to create an eco-system that increases consumer engagement and customer value. We do foresee a shift towards Integrated App Platforms. At SapientNitro, we help marketers create the most innovative experiences through fully integrated systems that bring different technologies together and allow for seamless flow of data across the entire Data Supply Chain. Whether it is integrating proximity based services into mobile apps or helping stores replace traditional PoS systems with mobile based ones, we are seeing the most progressive brands embrace emerging technologies like never before. Global enterprises must stay aligned to the digital technology curve or they risk being left behind.