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Taiwan’s U.S. Security Specialists

The Pentagon will soon announce a formal strategy to deter cyberattacks by declaring a foreign computer hacks an act of war. Meanwhile, media sites, like PBS, are being routinely hacked by detractors. The soaring numbers of hacks and attacks require a redefinition of “social security” — one that has as much to do with protecting old age as our social identities.

As early as 1996, just two years after the mainstreaming of the Internet, 42% of respondents to a survey by the Computer Security Institute and the FBI reported a breach. That figure leapt to 62% in 1998. That was 13 years ago.

An Air Force Cyber Command Recruiting video on YouTube proclaims, “This building will be attacked 3 million times today.” They need all the help they can get. Cyberattacks are exploding and the daily siege of the Pentagon is just part of today’s cyberwarfare landscape.

 

The Air Force has turned to YouTube to hire cyber security personnel with this video that begins with the dramatic statement, “This building will be attacked 3 million times today,” while showing the Pentagon.

In 2005, cyber snoopers broke into NASA’s digital network and stole a mind-boggling 20GB of data, routed to a server in Taiwan. Taiwan is widely acknowledged by U.S. security specialists to be a digital way station for the Chinese government.

In Jan. 2010, Google, Intel, Adobe and others were hacked in a coordinated hacking campaign. Google said the attacks originated in China, leading the company to abandon the Chinese market.

In January, Morgan Stanley admitted it too had been hit by the same China-based hackers who attacked Google’s computers, an operation dubbed “Aurora” by cyber-security firm McAfee. McAfee estimates that the number of companies known to be hit in Operation Aurora now exceeds 200.

Government organizations and companies spend vast amounts of money on security precautions. But the situation is so dire that the Defense Dept., whose Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) developed the Internet in the 1960s, “is beginning to think it created a monster,” says BusinessWeek.

As a 2008 Rand Corp. study puts it: “Cyberspace is its own medium with its own rules. Cyberattacks, for instance, are enabled not through the generation of force but by the exploitation of the enemy’s vulnerabilities.” And weak spot exploration is a forté of hackers.

To provide an idea of the advanced state of cyberwarfare, here’s a review of notable recent incidents:

• Apr. 2007 – Wide Internet service disruptions in Estonia make the country the world’s first victim of a cyberwar that bore all the digital fingerprints of Russia.
• Aug. 2008 – Malware is suspected of playing a role in a Spanair plane crash in Madrid.
• Jul. 2010 – A sophisticated malware virus, the Stuxnet worm, is suspected of killing an India INSAT-4B broadcasting satellite. Cyber security experts label Stuxnet the world’s first known cyber super weapon designed specifically to destroy real-world targets.
• Sept. 2010 – Stuxnet infects Iran’s nuclear facilities and is considered so dangerous it could shut down the entire national power grid.

Now imagine the safety of your social network profile and private data. Think it stands a chance? Not if you can spend $500 to buy off-the-shelf software that will do all kinds of nefarious things. As ClickFacts CEO Michael Caruso tells Ubercool, “In the past I had to hire someone to help me build software to do illegal things. Now I can set up a keylogger myself, or use a Zeus botnet to illegally obtain credit card information from all my Facebook friends.”

The shady use of malware in social media is exploding. It’s fairly easy to buy banner ads with stolen credit cards, mimic a site like Amazon.com, steal the social identities of unsuspecting clickers, and store them for two years, says Caruso. Why two years? Because that’s when the lock on your credit identify theft expires, allowing cyberthieves free reign.

This makes Sony’s offer to the 77 million Sony PlayStation Network and Qriocity users whose identities were hacked in April of a one-year-free enrollment in the “AllClear ID PRO” identity theft protection program a dubious value.

The malware scams on Facebook, in particular, have taken on an ominous dimension. In Feb. 2009, the “Error Check System” app ran rampant, deceiving many users into downloading this malware. That same year, Facebook users also unwittingly began spreading the Koobface worm.

This year, cyberthieves exploited the high interest Osama bin Laden’s death by tricking network members into clicking message links that claimed to show photos or videos of bin Laden’s dead body.

In January, Facebook finally added the ability for members to use secure connections (HTTPS) but made it an option and not a requirement. In April, the popular social netwrok reported that just 9.6 million users had enabled HTTPS, a scant 1.5% of Facebook’s 650 million users at the time.

In announcing a deal with McAfee, which is to provide its Internet Security Suite free of charge to Facebook users for six months, Facebook noted that 80% of consumers do not have updated anti-virus, an enabled firewall or anti-spyware, and nearly 50% use expired anti-virus software.

Social Freemium

With the acquisition of social medium Skype today for $8.5 billion, more attention than ever has been drawn to one of the most classic Internet revenue models: “freemium.” But how does one price a free service?

For years, Skype has thrived on a simple model. Allow people to chat freely over the Internet, even allow direct Skype-to-Skype user calls, and more recently, video calls, but charge them for completing landline or mobile phone calls.

Sure, the company floundered under the non-leadership of eBay, which was clearly a fish out of water, but Skype has a lot of potential, something Microsoft recognizes. When the service launched in 2003 it combined free calling with chat, or “IMing” due to the popularity of AOL’s Instant Messenger (AIM) program. But it was Skype that propelled realtime chat to heights never seen before.

Shortly after eBay acquired the company in 2005 for $2.6 billion, Skype reached 100 million users. By comparison, AIM only had 63 million users at the time. Today, there are 600 million registered Skype users, of which 170 million use the service each month.

This means Microsoft paid about $15 per Skype user, significantly less than what News Corporation paid for MySpace, which went for approximately $26 per social network member. Even when just counting active users, Microsoft only paid $50 per user, not a significant premium in 2011.

In the end, it’s Skype Co-Founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis who made a killing. Their current 14% stake is worth about $1.2 billion, this after making about $530 million in a post-deal payout, in addition to the original sale to eBay for $2.6 billion.

Do we have your attention now?

In 2010, Skype handled 207 billion minutes of voice and video calls. As their pricing page shows, Skype charges nothing for Skype-to-Skype calls and 2.3 cents per minute for a pay-as-you-go plan:

Skype charges nothing for calls between two Skype users, but charges 2.3 cents per minute for calls made to landlines and mobile phones, with an optional subscription plan tier of 1.2 cents a minute. Skype Premium is a group video calling plan for $9/mo., a price point that is very popular as you will see later on.

Does this model make money for those 207 million minutes of calls? Yes and no. Last year, Skype posted revenues of $860 million and $264 million in operating profits, but still had a loss of $7 million.

The trend is that phone calling is slowly declining as a preferred communication medium. TeleGeography notes that international call traffic growth has stalled while international traffic routed via Skype exploded to an astonishing 45 billion minutes in 2010 — more than twice the volume added by all of the world’s phone companies, combined.

But most of that call volume is free. International phone traffic grew just 4% in 2010, to 413 billion minutes, a far cry from the 15% average growth rate achieved during the previous two decades. A simple calculation suggests that Skype’s paid share of calling is just 0.05%, and that calculation doesn’t even include the number of non-international paid voice traffic.

But for Microsoft the Skype acquisition was a strategic move, one designed to boost the flagging fortunes of Windows 7 Mobile.

Pricing Social Services
So how do you put a price on your social services? In order to do that, we examined what companies are currently charging for their social media services. Because most social freemium models emanate from the Twittersphere, which is shrinking, we’ve included not-so-freemium models, including a few that will let you test-drive their application for 14 or 30 days for free.

SOCIAL ANALYTICS
This is definitely the most crowded field, with some 52 players. The best known brand, Radian6, was just acquired by Salesforce.com and simply states that pricing starts at $600 per month. We expect that the Salesforce purchase will lead to pricing changes, hopefully downward. Why do we say that? Because 75% of the market reports spending less than $500 each month on analytics, an area no hardball social network player can afford to miss.

We found only one true freemium social analytics model, offered by Kontagent:

Kontagent offers a refreshingly simple freemium model, one seat is free, multiple seats will cost you money, although they don’t mention how much.

Remember that $9/mo. price point? We continue our social analytics pricing review with three players at that level, PeopleBrowsr, SocialReport and Viralheat:

PeopleBrowsr offers three analytics levels, starting at $9, with the $100 plan adding viral analytics and the $1,000 plan offering social graph features.

SocialReport lets you choose pricing plans based on the number of friends you have, with $9/mo. handling 3,000 network member, $39/mo. getting you to 10,000, and $79/mo. handling 100,000.

Viralheat chooses to price its plans based on social profiles, with five profiles costing $10/mo., 20 profiles costing $30/mo., and 40 profiles costing $90/mo.

Beevolve uses both the number of search terms tracked and the number of seats to determine its pricing plans, with one seat costing $30/mo., scaling all the way up to 15 seats and 40 search terms, which will cost you $300/mo.

MutualMind prices based on campaigns, which it defines as the number of seats and search terms. The lowest campaign, 5 seats/15 keywords, cost $500/mo.

Europeans who prefer to deal with a local social analytics provider, can choose one of the levels offered by Silverbakk, which charges $90 for 1 seats/5 keywords, rising to $2,500/mo. for unlimited seats and 500 keywords.

SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT
The engagement leader is unquestionably HootSuite, which uses a social freemium model and offers a $6/mo. “Pro” version. Of course, many people prefer to use TweetDeck to engage, but since it has no scheduling abilities, a critical engagement feature in our opinion, we did not include it.

HootSuite is has been a very popular social engagement tool since its launch in 2009. We like the simplicity of its freemium model a lot, which ramps up to $6/mo. for two seats and improved reports. We just wish the higher tier would also include a post scheduling trail.

SOCIAL MONITORING
This field has the second largest number of social media players after analytics, with 18 players. There are a number of services that will track keywords for free, usually via email, like Google Alerts or SocialMention. While others, like BuzzFeed and TweetMeme, are more site oriented.

These two social monitoring services do more, and charge more accordingly, although Action.ly does offer a true social freemium model:

Action.ly will track one keyword for one user free each month. Need more, then cough up $20/mo. for five seats and three keywords. The Pro level tops out at $100/mo. for 20 seats and 15 keywords.

Trackur portrays an interesting approach to its price scaling by putting the most expensive program on the left, counter-intuitive when you look at all the other pricing plans. Trackur offers to search one keyword each month for $18, while ramping that up to unlimited searches for $377/mo. The pricing sheet mentions no seats but one can assume it starts at one seat and goes up to multiple seats for SMBs.

SOCIAL PROMOTION
While Wildfire does offer a “Like Gate” application free, it appears to be a limited-time offer only. While some of the following companies offer Facebook-only management services, we’ve decided to broadly define this category as “Social Promotion.”

Since North Social is focused on Facebook “tab” applications, like the aforementioned “Like Gate” or an email sign-up page, the company charges based on the number of fans a page has starting at $20/mo. for 1,000 fans or less, going up to $150/mo. for unlimited numbers of fans and five Facebook pages.

RootMusic offers BandPage, a service aimed at socially promoting musicians on Facebook. Its service offers a host of free services, but if you want custom fonts or colors, it will cost you $2/mo. or $20/year. Clearly, musicians need a price break, and RootMusic is nice enough to give it to them.

ShortStack allows you to create custom Facebook pages, including custom tab names and widgets. ShortStack prices its services based on the number of fans, with pricing starting at $9/mo. for 2,500 fans and going up to $300/mo. for an unlimited number of fans.

Wildfire is a traditional social promotion provider and can manage many aspects of your social campaign from contests to like gates. The company charges $5 per campaign, plus $0.99 per day the campaign is active. Prices go up to $250 per campaign for such features as custom entry forms and data export, plus $5 each day the campaign is active.

SOCIAL CRM
This field is rapidly developing. We include it because while Batchbook currently charges $15 per month as a minimum entry for one seat, Nimble is free while still in beta, and we don’t know what Constant Contact plans to charge for Bantam Live, but the service had a $20 monthly base fee before the service was cancelled.

Batchbook, like most CRM players, bases its pricing on the number of users, with a one-user program, dubbed NavyBlue, starting at $15/mo. and a 50-user program costing $150/mo.

Want to make a few billion dollars? Focus on delivering a premium service that uses “free” as the “greased chute” to put it in marketing parlance. As Oprah so delicately put it back in May 2009, “Where the Skype are you?”

Influencer Metrics

When the founder of Sidney Frank Importing Co. hired 20 young women called “Jagerettes” in the early 90s to visit bars and shoot Jagermeister down drinking patrons’ gullets with a spray gun, he reaffirmed the power of a marketing channel focused on reaching influencers who can propel emerging brands.

In 1997, Sidney Frank took another successful stab at influencer marketing with Grey Goose vodka, which helped establish the superpremium liquor market. Today, the focus of influencer marketing, or reaching trendsetters, tastemakers or whatever in-crowd term you prefer, has shifted to the world of social networking.

The influencer metrics market received a shot in the arm with Facebook’s launch of its Open Graph protocol in April 2010, which allowed outside developers to access rich profile data of Facebook members, something many refer to as the “social graph.”

The value of online influencers was reinforced by a 1998 Burson-Marsteller study, dubbed “E-fluentials” (brochure PDF), which found that 8% of the Internet population, about 9 million users at the time but double now at 18 million, based on a U.S. Internet population of 220 million, were “e-fluentials.”

The study, conducted by Roper Starch, which has been studying “influential Americans” since the 40s, says that these opinion leaders account for 10-12% of the general U.S. population, but have an impact twice as great as their population size.

A more recent 2004 study, cited in “Communicating With Congress,” created for Blue Shield and Chevron (PDF), puts it this way:

“A 2004 report by The George Washington University Institute for Politics, Democracy, and the Internet (IPDI) found that people who use the Internet to become politically engaged are far more likely than average citizens to be ‘Influentials.’ Influentials — a term coined by the RoperASW market research firm — are people who ‘tell their neighbors what to buy, which politicians to support, and where to vacation.’ Influentials are thought leaders in their communities. They join organizations, attend meetings, try to persuade others of their points of view, and become engaged in political action. Typically, about 10% of the general public can be considered Influentials. Among Internet users, 13% can be considered Influentials.”

It’s important to draw the distinction between online and offline influencers because several online articles confuse the two. Using the 2004 RoperASW data implies that today’s online influentials universe, 13% of the Internet population or 29 million, can impact as many as 57 million Americans, a market size that should satisfy just about any start-up or existing brand.

Another perspective on this exclusive segment was provided by Young Rubicam’s Brand Futures Group, who in 1999 released a report that attempted to identify “the most open-minded, forward-thinking, and imaginative individuals, American Trendsetters.”

The group, lead by renowned trendwatcher Marian Salzman, found that trendsetters were “typically independent, opinionated, self employed, well educated, and well paid, people who picked up on what’s happening before it happens — and, in so doing, make it more likely to happen.”

The Brand Futures Group study also pegged the share of influentials: “10% of the population are individuals who are self-assured, pointed to the future, interested, unconventional people, able to pick up the vibes of the time in which they live and, as a result, point to the future trend.”

This number closely matches RoperASW’s general population figure mentioned in the George Washington University study. One can safely assume that the composition of influentials online is higher, due to the propensity of the Internet to attract the avant garde.

Trendsetters are a desirable demographic segment, says Young & Rubicam’s Brand Futures Group, describing them as more open and optimistic, valuing imagination and curiosity. They also tend to be more educated than the average, and, insightfully enough, there are a lot more female than male trendsetters. Pictured above: brand innovators at an Ubercool event.

To an extent, one could also draw a parallel to the influential Twitter population. The latest data suggests that just 8% of U.S. population uses Twitter. Given that pundits have begun postulating that Twitter is not really a social network, but actually an information network, one could argue that Twitter sets the tone for the rest of the nation.

And those “tone-setters” are few indeed. A recent Yahoo! Research study entitled, “Who Says What to Whom on Twitter,” found that 50% of all tweets consumed are created by just 20,000 “elite” users. This startling conclusion not only points to Twitter being an information distribution network, but a very top-down one to boot.

That’s why it’s been rather disconcerting to see how Twitter management has been flailing about for so many years, trying to desperately find a way to monetize their information network while the solution has been staring them in the face all along.

Nova Spivack recently wrote a story in TechCrunch entitled, “How Twitter Can Save $50 Million: Forget TweetDeck, And Go Freemium On Its API,” in which he offers a solution that would generate a scant $20 million extra per year. But by leveraging the social graph, Twitter could easily generate hundreds of millions in annual revenues.

No wonder a number of companies have jumped in to fill the void, some even partnering with Twitter itself, to resell access of its own data to help marketers apply the social graph to uncover influencers.

Each tweet contains a host of hidden data, including 40 data fields, some of which can be seen in the above map of a tweet. Companies like Gnip and Mediasift sell access to Twitter’s data “firehose,” which affords developers custom access to desired demographic segments.

At the downstream level, there are InfiniGraph, Klout, PeerIndex, Traackr, Twitalyzer and others. At the upstream are outfits like Gnip and Mediasift, both Twitter partners, who offer developers direct access to the Twitter “firehose,” or Twitter’s realtime tweetstream, so they can slice and dice Twitter users to their heart’s content.

While Facebook and LinkedIn have more sophisticated ad mechanisms than Twitter, no social network today can help marketers reach influentials without the help of third-party solutions providers.

Services like Klout are being used by Las Vegas’ Palms Hotel where Palms Chief Marketing Officer Jason Gastwirth has created “The Klout Klub,” which is designed to “allow high-ranking influencers to experience Palms’ impressive set of amenities in hopes that these influencers will want to communicate their positive experience to their followers.”

Klout, which updated its interface this week, features an easy way for the Twitterati to gauge their online influence. Klout says it ranks users on a score of 0-100, which is based on such parameters as “reach” and “amplification.” These metrics are influenced by user activity and whether their tweets are re-tweeted by other influentials, and how often — in other words their impact on the social graph.

This week, Klout launched a new interface to make it easier for users to gauge their influence. A clue to where Klout is headed is Klout Perks, a user promotion that suggests Klout is moving in the direction of offline engagement to incentivize its members to maintain their influence scores in exchange for cool perks.

There’s no question that influencer marketing has progressed markedly from the heydays of the Jagerettes. Let’s hope that the drink influencer marketing is pouring down the mouths of marketers does not turn out to be Kool-Aid.

Fan Gate: Do Forced “Likes” Depress Response?

The current social media fad is put up a so-called “fan Gate” to force visitors to “Like” a brand before being able to access their Facebook page. Companies like North Social and Wildfire provide easy to use apps that enable this particular feature.

North Social offers an app caled Fan Offer, which is available for $19.99/mo. for less than 1,000 fans. Wildfire offers a free iFrame app that includes a free fan gate feature.

One conferencing solution marketer has seen Likes for its Facebook page decline by 47% since adding a fan gate. But Zappos.com’s Social Engagement Scientist Graham Kahr tells Ubercool that the company’s Facebook page Likes grew from an average of 200 per month to 9,000-plus currently.

Social marketers, like Zappos.com, are forcing Facebook visitors to like their Facebook page through the use of a “fan gate” — a not very socially engaging approach in our view.

Based on these results, it appears that when Facebook page visitors are familiar with a brand, or perhaps expect to find discount coupons as Zappos.com infers on its fan gate (graphic above), they’re much more likely to Like a page, sight unseen.

But not all marketers should expect Zappos.com’s exemplary results. We will continue to investigate this issue. At press deadline, neither North Social or Wildfire had responded to requests for comment.

Tweets Have Tripled. Tune-out Rate Keeps Pace.

So 155 million tweets are now posted each day. But I see more and more reports about Twitter’s inactive accounts and the high rate of inattention tweets now receive.

If a Twitter account is limited to publishing a maximum of 1,000 messages per day, that would mean at, at absolute most, 25% of all tweets published ever get read by anyone.

I think the folks at Twitter are going to have to address this inactive user issue in some way:

The international research team examined nearly 55 million Twitter accounts that were in use in August 2009. Over 6 million of these users were considered “active” in that they’d posted more than 10 tweets and had a currently valid screen name.

Did Google Kill MySpace?

Google may have well ended up killing Myspace by forcing too many ads and pageviews.

Around this time, the Google agreement, which had been hailed as a major coup by Chernin and Levinsohn as well as Wall Street, started to be viewed by Myspace executives as a double-edged sword. The Google deal required a certain number of Myspace user visits on a regular basis for Google to pay Myspace its guaranteed $300 million a year for three years. That reduced flexibility as Myspace couldn’t experiment with its own site without forfeiting revenue.

“It was a good deal in the short-term but in the long term it ended up not being so good,” said a third former Myspace executive close to advertising sales. “We were incentivized to keep page views very high and ended up having too many ads plus too many pages, making the site less easy to use than a site like Facebook.”

Ubertrend: Voyeurgasm

Rodney King’s 1991 beating was a watershed moment in modern history. Not only was it groundbreaking because police violence was captured on video, but it also helped propel a new Ubertrend, Voyeurgasm, which points to a future where just about everything will be captured by digital cameras or camcorders.

Since King’s incidence, an explosion in high-profile events have been captured on video, including the Concorde crash, September 11, Paris Hilton’s “sex-capade” and President’s Bush’s shoe-throwing incident, O.J. Simpson’s infamous car chase, among countless others, and violent teen beatings.

Voyeurgasm traces its history to the beginning of humankind, but has become a force over the past few centuries with the assistance of manmade tools. The painting was the first device to help budding voyeurs catch glimpses of one another, robed or disrobed. Then, in 1839, Louis Daguerre came along with his daguerrotype and ushered in the photographic revolution that allowed any consumer to capture images on film.

But there’s no question that digital technology, in particular camcorders; mobile phones equipped with video cameras; webcams and surveillance cameras have helped whip this Ubertrend into a frenzy. In February 2005, the world’s videophiles gained an outlet, YouTube, that in five years grew into a medium that serves 34 billion videos in May 2010, according to Comscore.

That same month, YouTube celebrated its five-year anniversary and Google announced that more people viewed YouTube than the three networks combined during their “primetime” evening time slot, or more than 2 billion views per day.

The new Kodak Playsport camera features a built-in “Share” button that allows consumers to e-mail videos to friends or upload to Facebook, Twitter or YouTube in just a few steps.

YouTube was designed for this instant video generation. Expect Voyeurgasm to completely reshape media, as the YouTubes, Facebooks and Twitters of the world conspire with billions of camera phones, digital cameras, camcorders plus surveillance cameras to create a brave new, crowd-sourced media experience where just about anything goes.

The first inkling of this came on August 21, 2010, when a surveillance camera caught a woman throwing a cat in wheelie (garbage) bin. That surveillance cameras will soon catch every misdeed was also underscored by a painting created by noted U.K. artist Banksie, who added surveillance cameras to a British country side painting.

Voyeurgasm has also been a boon for the police, catching an endless string of people red-handed in the midst of everyday crime. Madeline Toogood beating her daughter in 2002 was one of the earliest examples of child abuse caught on surveillance video. That has been followed by a flood of other captures, like that Orlando woman who was caught “power-washing” her child in a car wash in 2008.

But surveillance cameras have also done their share of spreading the good news, as when one camera on duty recorded the miracle landing of US Airways Flight 1549 for posterity.

Because video cameras are omnipresent, being among peers is no longer as safe as it used to be, as Prince Harry found out when he mocked gays and Asians in a secret video that somehow made its way to the press. Michael Phelps discovered much the same when he was caught smoking a bong during a college party at the University of North Carolina.

High-definition technology will raise the quality of home videos, some of which are bound to end up on television, which is also transitioning to HDTV. That will significantly turn up the graphic volume now produced by the world’s videophiles.

The Internet in particular has been a boon for Voyeurgasm, or “digital rubbernecking,” as you might call it. CNN streamed 21.3 million videos of President Obama’s presidential inauguration.

Our national obsession with celebrities led New Scientist magazine to conclude in 2003 that one-third of Americans were suffering from something it called “celebrity-worship syndrome” (CWS), a figure that’s probably around 50% by now, judging by the massive amounts of publicity that blogs like Perez Hilton and TMZ.com have attracted with their celebrity-peeking adventures.

The “pixel paparazzi” now stand at the ready for any opportunity to capture a Britney Spears “oops I did it again” moment so treasured by our celebrity obsessed culture.

Voyeurgasm’s impact on media consumption is already well-documented. In 1992, MTV debuted “Real World,” a show about seven strangers who share a house, which started the reality show trend in earnest. “Big Brother,” created in the Netherlands by Van der Mol Studios, became a big hit in the U.K. in 2000.

“Big Brother” was buoyed by the popularity of Internet-based peeping-tom webcams, like JenniCam, and was quickly followed by a series of me-too shows, such as “Survivor” and “The Bachelor,” proving that people do indeed like to watch. Today, a plethora of reality shows clog the airwaves.

The public’s fascination with celebrities combined with reality shows produced a logical fad, “celebrity reality,” popularized by the 2003 MTV show “Newlyweds,” a reality show based on a celebrity couple. That unleashed “The Simple Life,” “The Osbournes,” “Celebrity Fit Club,” “The Surreal Life,” “Hogan Knows Best” and our favorite vomit-inducing reality show, NBC’s “Fear Factor.”

Today, reality shows have are a standard staple among TV viewers. Our look-at-me culture has fueled a dizzying array of TV shows, ranging from the bizarre to the outrageous. VH1’s “Flavor of Love,” starring Public Enemy’s Flavor Flav, featured a “spitting” incident that redefined the term voyeurism.

Another change brought on by Voyeurgasm is the growing role of transparency in everything we do. From public disclosure to glass-walled bathrooms to see-through restaurant kitchens, society is headed towards a future where being able to see one’s innermost processes is a key element.

Beijing’s The Emperor Hotel, designed by internationally-renowned designers, Graft Labs, shows how Voyeurgasm has even infiltrated hotel design: a growing number of hotels now feature transparent showers and bathrooms.

Fueled by an increasing need for security, the global video surveillance industry is growing rapidly. The video surveillance market is expected to grow from $11.5 billion in 2008 to $37.7 billion in 2015, at a CAGR of 20.4% from 2010 to 2015, Research and Markets reported on January 25, 2011.

London now has more surveillance cameras monitoring its citizens than any other major city in the world. In all, there are some 500,000 cameras in the city, out of a total number of 4.2 million cameras in the U.K. One study suggested that on a given day a person could expect to be videotaped at least 300 times.

The city’s highly visible cameras are posted on corners of many buildings, on new buses and in every underground station. Since 2003, the license plate of every car driving into central London during weekdays is being recorded as part of a program to reduce traffic congestion. London charges a fee to cars it records but also uses the videos to catch and fine cheats.

As videocams become cheaper and sharper, it’s only a matter of time before virtually everything is captured digitally. Still, as Rodney King’s case proved, Voyeurgasm often has highly beneficial results.

Ubertrend: Generation X-tasy

They stand in long lines eager to gain entry into one of the city’s celebrated nightclubs. Once they slip by those over-sized 350-pound doormen, they line up again at the bar, where they wait usually three-deep for a chance to scream their order to a bartender who helps make hundreds of $10 cocktails each hour. Welcome to Tao Las Vegas. Welcome to Generation X-tasy.

It could have been any city. Just fill in your favorite DJ-hosted affair. Clubbing has replaced traditional watering holes. In Chicago, the number of taverns plummeted from 7,000 in 1947 to just 1,321 today, as nightclubs have become the entertainment of choice.

How could they possibly compete with Tao? Its 60,000-square-foot interior features a 20-foot golden Buddha, and enough stylish, scantily clad people gyrating on the dance floor to provide copious eye candy for any of the 600,000 annual diners who spend $70 on average per meal.

Immersive experiences have become de rigueur for attracting thrill-seeking patrons. In fact, Tao Las Vegas at the Venetian Hotel, is the highest grossing independent restaurant in the U.S., according to Restaurants & Institutions magazine, which has been ranking the top 100 for 24 years. In 2006, its first full year of operation, Tao netted $55.2 million, or $16 million more than its closest competitor, the now-closed New York’s Tavern on the Green.

The experiential restaurant trend began in Amsterdam, where in 1990 supperclub began combining dining with exotic theatrical performances — the serving staff are accomplished artists — plus art, all enjoyed from the comfort of your own bed, ushering in another trend that would spread globally.

In September 2005, San Francisco became first U.S. outpost of Amsterdam’s supperclub, featuring performers like “Fauxnique,” who add spice to the dining experience. (Photo courtesy: Colin Vincent for supperclub S.F.)

Generation X-tasy can be traced to the bible, but a modern-day milestone was Nevada’s 1931 legalization of gambling. Gambling revenues propelled Las Vegas’ status as America’s mecca of adult entertainment — reinforced by its telling tagline, “What happens in Las Vegas, stays in Las Vegas,” a motto that became a pop culture phenomenon of sorts.

If Las Vegas is the capital of Generation X-tasy then Steve Wynn is surely its chairman. When Wynn opened the Mirage in 1987, he single-handedly put Las Vegas on its current course of palatial excess. The crown title now belongs to The Venetian, which with its 3,025-room The Palazzo wing is the world’s largest hotel with 7,074 rooms.

“Moderation is a fatal thing,” Oscar Wilde wrote in an 1893 play. “Nothing succeeds like excess.” Were Wilde alive today, he would find plenty of evidence to support his prescient observation. And he would be highly amused by the ritual of Spring Break.

Each year, Cancun welcomes more than 100,000 visitors for Spring Break, which has transformed Cancun’s nightlife. In many U.S. seaside communities, Spring Break has actually become a legal specialty as lawyers help bail out the many arrested “party animals.” The party culture has even spilled over to clothes, where Ted Baker in 2005 introduced the Party Animal Tuxedo, a spill-resistant tux for dressy drinkers.

The term “party animal” was elevated to a new cultural stature when apparel maker Ted Baker in 2005 launched the “Party Animal Tuxedo” — a spill-resistant tux lined with Teflon.

But Generation X-tasy rules far more than wanton excess. The cruise-line business has similarly experienced a sea-change shift, so to speak. Today, it’s not merely enough to provide passengers with comfortable sleeping quarters.

Ships have literally become floating cities, replete with such eclectic features as a football-field-size version of Central Park, containing a town square with dining and entertainment that occupies five stories of the 16-deck Oasis of the Seas cruise ship, which had her maiden on December 5, 2009.

Royal Caribbean’s Oasis of the Seas features an amphitheater, called the AquaTheater, and a rock-climbing wall, able to provide outdoor entertainment to some of the ship’s 6,300 passengers which first set sail in December 2009.

While the entertainment, travel and hospitality markets are most influenced by Generation X-tasy, the real estate market is also showing signs of adopting the trend. Joining such global gambling playgrounds as Las Vegas and Macau, the middle east is redefining itself through Dubai and up-and-coming Abu Dhabi.

The Generation X-tasy Ubertrend is chiefly responsible for propelling a global luxury market that reached $220 billion in 2010, according to Bain & Co., down from $270 bilion in 2008 due to belt-tightening by the very rich.

The overdoing it trend has also led to a peculiar new phenomenon: eating contests. Who could have ever imagined that someone might be able to consume 66 hot dogs, or more than 20,000 calories, in 12 minutes flat? Nathan’s International Hot Dog Eating Contest, which draws participants from all over the world who vie for its gluttony title, is perhaps one of the best barometers of eating excess.

Experiential can also be harrowing, like when it arrives in the form of “Parkour” — an acrobatic sport that originated in the streets of Paris and that was featured in Madonna’s “Jump” music video. Participants run and vault through an urban jungle equipped with nothing more than a pair of running shoes, bouncing off walls, jumping over roofs and using any human-built obstacle as part of their parcours (circuit).

Parkour is an urban sport designed for Generation X-tasy: it involves racing through the urban landscape and using any obstacle as a springboard.

Dangerous sports, and we won’t even delve into the extreme fighting trend, are expressive elements of the Generation X-tasy Ubertrend. From the startling edifices of Dubai to the cavernous castles of Las Vegas to the “Fantasy Island” flavor of today’s theme parties, Generation X-tasy is driven by a need to stand out.

And the need to stand out gets greater with each introduction of something more remarkable, something more extraordinary. It’s a trend that’s vividly illustrated every time someone says, with classic signs of ennui, “been there, done that.”

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