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In this issue:

  * Targeted Digital Advertising: A New Opportunity
     for KBS?
  * Virtual Worlds: Taking Stock
  * Robots and the Subtleties of Human Motion
  * Challenges for the U.S. Financial Industry: 2008
     and Beyond
  * Technology Survey of College Students
  * Explorer Technologies in 2007: The Year in Review
  * Smart Materials and Safe Transportation
  * Landline, Cell-Phone, and Internet Coverage
  * Core Customers of Financial Services
  * Signals of Change
  * Press and Presentations

	
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------------------
 New Publications
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Targeted Digital Advertising: A New Opportunity for KBS?

Software is playing a far greater role in the advertising
industry than ever before. Google leads digital
advertising today, and recently Facebook and MySpace
announced the addition of advertising software and
services to their Web sites. As the volume of data about
consumers grows and opportunities increase for
personalized advertising, the need is growing for
software that can analyze consumer data and ensure that
advertising reaches the right person at the right time.
Future advertising systems will need to deal with the
format and context of mobile devices, consumers'
increased use of computer games, and the growing number
of technologies that allow consumers to shut out TV
advertisements.
(November 2007 Knowledge-Based Systems Viewpoints)
http://www.sric-bi.com/Explorer/KBS.shtml

(This publication is part of our Explorer service.
To learn more about Explorer, see
http://www.sric-bi.com/Explorer .)

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Virtual Worlds: Taking Stock

Perhaps, in five years, commentators will recognize 2007
as the year in which virtual worlds began their ascent to
become a major new technology medium. The popular press
began to take notice, Second Life and World of Warcraft
continued to be popular, and children's virtual worlds
grew dramatically. But despite this progress, virtual
worlds remained a niche market in 2007. In 2008, analysts
at SRIC-BI's Virtual-Worlds Consortium expect to see
moves by large players like Google and Cisco, continued
proliferation of the number of virtual worlds and
platforms--and therefore little progress in
interoperability and standards, growing popularity of
Web-based worlds, and integration of virtual worlds and
social-networking sites.
(December 2007/January 2008 Virtual-Worlds Viewpoints)
http://www.sric-bi.com/VWC/VWviewpoints.shtml

(This publication is part of our Virtual-Worlds
Consortium [VWC]. To learn more about the VWC, see
http://www.sric-bi.com/VWC/ .)

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Robots and the Subtleties of Human Motion

For decades, researchers in a variety of engineering
disciplines have sought to reproduce elements of human
behavior and motion and to enhance the way that humans
and robots interact with each other. Mimicking the motion
of parts of the human body is an important part of this
work. However, many of the systems under development are
complex, because the human body itself is complex.
(November 2007 Robotics Viewpoints)
http://www.sric-bi.com/Explorer/ROBO.shtml

(This publication is part of our Explorer service.
To learn more about Explorer, see
http://www.sric-bi.com/Explorer .)

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Challenges for the U.S. Financial Industry: 2008 and
Beyond

U.S. financial institutions must have a solid
understanding of consumers' behavior and motivations if
they are to provide attractive products and services. Is
consumers' buying streak nearing an end? Will the
heralded "sprint to retirement" materialize as Boomers
save more? How soon will new payment systems make their
mark? How can companies adjust their marketing strategies
to twenty-first-century realities? The MacroMonitor
program will explore these and other pressing issues as
it continues to amass comprehensive information about
consumers' financial needs, propensities, and preferences.
(Ten Challenges for 2008 and Beyond)
http://www.sric-bi.com/CFD/news/tenchallenges2008.shtml

(MacroMonitor is part of SRIC-BI's Consumer Financial
Decisions [CFD] group. To learn more about CFD and the
MacroMonitor, see http://www.sric-bi.com/CFD .)

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Technology Survey of College Students

The popular press commonly portrays young adults as avid
consumers of a wide range of technology products and
suggests that most of these young consumers receive these
products as gifts. A recent VALS(TM) survey of college
students, the first to take place on the VALS Survey Web
site, dispels both these ideas. Though adults between the
ages of 18 and 34 may be tech savvy, they have disparate
ideas about technology ownership and use, and their
technology activities follow the standard VALS pattern of
innovation diffusion.
(Technology Survey of College Students: Highlights)
http://www.sric-bi.com/VALS/summaries/2008-02TechSurvey.shtml

(This publication is part of our VALS[TM] service. To
learn more about VALS, see http://www.sric-bi.com/VALS .)

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Explorer Technologies in 2007: The Year in Review

Each January, SRIC-BI's Explorer service publishes a
review of key developments in each of its technology
areas during the previous year. The January 2008
Viewpoints highlight the developments in 2007 that have
implications for the commercialization of the 34
technologies that Explorer covers. The Viewpoints are
accessible via the Web pages for the individual
technologies.
http://www.sric-bi.com/Explorer/techList.shtml

(These publications are part of our Explorer service.
To learn more about Explorer, see
http://www.sric-bi.com/Explorer .)

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Smart Materials and Safe Transportation

Safety is one of the major drivers of technology
development in the auto industry, and strict standards
both govern and highlight the safety performance of
vehicles. In the aerospace industry, increasing use of
composites is driving the development of damage-
monitoring systems. Players in these industries continue
to adopt and develop new technologies to keep pace with
(and in some cases, to define) changing regulations and
industry ratings, enabling the next generation of
vehicles.
(November 2007 Smart Materials Viewpoints)
http://www.sric-bi.com/Explorer/SM.shtml

(This publication is part of our Explorer service.
To learn more about Explorer, see
http://www.sric-bi.com/Explorer .)

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Landline, Cell-Phone, and Internet Coverage

Recent research shows that the number of adults living in
U.S. households with landlines has decreased in the past
two years. Although the decrease is not yet significant,
it has sparked a debate about how best to represent the
adult population in research. The gold standard has been
to contact people through landlines via random-digit
dialing. The emerging challenge is to ensure accurate
representation of landline, cell-phone, and Internet
users, and a recent VALS(TM) white paper looks at
benchmarks to identify who is currently represented in
each of these populations.
(White Paper: Benchmarks and Trends in Landline, Cell-
Phone, and Internet Coverage of U.S. Adults)
http://www.sric-bi.com/VALS/summaries/2007-11whitepprphones.shtml

(This publication is part of our VALS[TM] service. To
learn more about VALS, see http://www.sric-bi.com/VALS .)

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Core Customers of Financial Services

In the race to win affluent consumers' savings and
investment dollars, financial-services companies have a
critical need to understand these consumers' motivations
for choosing one financial institution over another and
to determine the extent to which customers consider
economic trends and stock-market fluctuations in making
their financial decisions. Recognizing the difficulty of
this task for institutions, the MacroMonitor program has
launched a new Affluent Core Customers segmentation
project to flesh out companies' understanding of their
most committed affluent consumers.
(Segmenting Financial Institutions' Most Dedicated
Customers)
http://www.sric-bi.com/CFD/MRsummaries/MR-VIII-04.shtml

(MacroMonitor is part of SRIC-BI's Consumer Financial
Decisions [CFD] group. To learn more about CFD and the
MacroMonitor, see http://www.sric-bi.com/CFD .)

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Signals of Change

Organizations are creating innovation ecologies--complex
webs of a variety of parties and partners--to generate
the innovations they need to compete. The latest issue of
Scan(TM) Monthly explores this and other signals of
change, including the development of real-time maps, the
advent of molecular pharming, the growth of a vast
repository of photos on the Web, business opportunities
to convert virtual objects into three-dimensional
computer-aided-design files, and increased accessibility
of genetic testing to consumers.
(Scan[TM] Monthly, January 2008)
http://www.sric-bi.com/Scan/ScanMonthly/SM059.shtml

(This publication is part of our Scan[TM] service. To
learn more about Scan, see http://www.sric-bi.com/Scan .)




-------------------------
 Presentations and Press
-------------------------

* On 31 January 2008, Eilif Trondsen, director of
SRIC-BI's Virtual-Worlds Consortium, spoke at the MBA
Leadership Conference in Austin, Texas. His topic was the
strategic uses of virtual worlds for MBA program delivery.


* The December 2007 issue of Researchmag.com, an online
magazine for financial advisors, featured an interview
with Larry Cohen, director of SRIC-BI's Consumer
Financial Decisions group. In the article, "Making It
Simple," Cohen spoke of people's innate desire for
simplicity in their financial-service relationships and
suggested that simplified approaches to retirement are
the wave of the future.



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