When talking to consumers in their 20’s we are finding that the more digitally savvy are moving to no longer paying for TV licenses - streaming content from their laptops instead.

They dislike and see no need for a TV schedule, preferring to watch programmes as they become available; and when they do are happy to binge watch a whole series.

‘House of Cards’ is the first show made specifically for Netflix to be downloaded and watched in one sitting. Rather than introducing one episode a week, as distributors have done since the days of black-and-white TVs, all 13 episodes will be streamed at the same time with the goal of shutting down a portion of America for a whole day.

In addition to helping you explore the world around you, discovery tools lend themselves neatly to the challenge of extracting meaningful information from the large data sets that are increasingly the staple of business life.

Whilst Google Now (#GoogleNow) packages up information about your everyday life, another Google related product, Consumer Barometer, packages up information on the role of online channels in the consumer purchase journey.  For example, it makes it easy to compare and contrast the use of search engines in the purchase journey across sectors and geographies.

As with Google Now, the key to the success of the tool is in its ability to only ever present a manageable amount of information; you’re never swamped with data and it’s easy to drill down should you want more detail.  When coupled with some rather impressive visualisation this makes the information easier to absorb and makes this a pretty powerful tool; definitely another One to Watch for 2013.

Discovery tools, applications that help individuals find, explore and learn, are one of the key battle grounds in the technology sector as Apple discovered to its cost when it ditched Google Maps in favour of its own inferior software.

There is a lot of information out there that can help you plan and enjoy your day, it’s just fiendishly difficult to get to grips with it all.  A well designed discovery app should pull everything you want to know about your location, the weather, transport, news, local restaurants, your diary etc. into one easy to use app.  For example, if you give it access to your diary, it should be able to tell you that the flight you’re about to take is delayed.  As an additional challenge, it needs to achieve a high level of personalisation in a way that doesn’t seem too Big Brother.

Google Now (#GoogleNow) seems to have pulled this off; the feedback to date is overwhelmingly positive.  Consumers have grown increasingly reluctant to share personal data with big companies but Google Now seems to offer enough in the way of useful information to make this trade-off worthwhile.  It’ll be interesting to see if it’s relatively quiet launch in 2012 gives Google the edge over its rivals in 2013.

When online grocery shopping really took off, around 2004, it was seen as the next big thing. Consumers were fascinated with the idea of hassle free shopping.

Then the novelty of shopping groceries online started to fade as people realised that it took them a lot of time to fill up their baskets, perhaps more than they would have spent if they had gone to the physical shop. At least, they knew more or less where things were physically located. In addition, it was the nightmare of organising the delivery. People also realised that they were missing-out on the great promotions or the new products.

Since then some things have changed (e.g. more delivery slot options, free delivery, etc.) and many people continue shopping online. However, consumers are not really being wooed by the online experience offered by grocery retailers.  It’s still tedious and time consuming. Unless you have the exact name of the variety of the product you want or its code, browsing for it is not really easy as you have to go through long list of small visuals of similar products.

However the online shopping experience for groceries may be about to change now with slingshotshopping.com – a new platform that promises to make shopping easier and more fun.

Slingshot basically allows you to add products to your existing online shopping basket from many places. You could add a product from a facebook page, pintisterest or any page as you see them in day-to-day life while browsing the Internet – meaning that you don’t longer seem to have to browse the entire site of Tesco.com or Ocado.com (or the website of the online grocery retailer you use) to look for a specific product.

The advantage for retailers, on the other hand, is that Slingshot facilitates impulse purchasing, so their sales could go up. Slingshot is already working with the bigger online grocery retailers in the UK – Tesco, Sainsbury, Asda and Ocado – and is keen on adding more retailers to its platform. It has been tipped as one of top 10 start-ups in the world right now by Forbes, TechRadar and PepsiCo.

This is definitely a space that all (not only grocery retailers) need to watch out for.

…was the wonderfully titled article in the Times last week. It was a feature based around a book by Henna Rosin called The End of Men. The premise of her argument is that, as we move to a post-industrial society in which: “Thinking and communicating have come to eclipse physical strength and stamina as keys to industrial success”, men and these masculine traits will decline.

She goes on to say that: “The attributes that are most valuable today – social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus – are at minimum, not predominantly male, and in fact the opposite may be true.”

It made me wonder whether there was a parallel shift in the ‘gender’ of major brands. Most successful brands have a strong personality and I’m sure most marketers have played the game of describing their brand as a person. A key question is always the gender of the brand. So my thought is that it would be interesting to track the proportion of major brands that are male and female, and define the trends in ‘gendering’.

And are the most desirable brand characteristics also shifting – from established, professional, powerful and hard-working to open, socially intelligent, focused and patient?

What are your thoughts?