U.S. e-commerce will reach nearly $249 billion in revenue by 2014 at an annual compound annual growth rate of 10 percent, Forrester predicts.

2009’s U.S. e-commerce sales totaled $130 billion. Analysts predict between 8 and 15 percent growth for 2010.

Forrester predicts that, while has e-commerce matured, it will continue to drive overall retail growth.

“Much of the overall retail sector’s growth in both the US and the EU over the next five years will come from the Internet,” said Forrester Research Vice President and Principal Analyst Sucharita Mulpuru.

“To maximize that growth, eBusiness professionals will have to help enable a multichannel strategy that responds to consumers’ increased desire to hop between the offline and online worlds and their increasing mobile and social behaviors. The retail innovators over the next five years will demonstrate customer enablement across all touchpoints, not just via a PC-based Web browser.”

The top categories for U.S. online retail, accounting for 40 percent of total sales, are apparel, footwear, and accessories; consumer electronics; and consumer hardware, software, and peripherals.

Forrester predicts that e-commerce will account for 8 percent of overall retail sales by 2014, and that 53 percent of all retail sales will be influenced by online research.

What would be interesting to see is the difference in growth between mobile and PC-based e-commerce. While consumers are slowly adopting mobile shopping, many are taking advantage of smartphones to comparison shop within brick-and-mortar stores. Forrester notes that shoppers who begin shopping online and finish in the store are less satisfied than those who do both in the store. Wonder how smartphones play into that equation?

A University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research study on Fortune 500 Companies social media usage show how the largest corporations of the United States use blogging and Twitter to create a public online presence. This study, "The Fortune 500 and Social Media: A Longitudinal Study of Blogging and Twitter Usage by America’s Largest Companies," was conducted by Nora Ganim Barnes, Ph.D. and Eric Mattson, CEO of Financial Insite.

Of the Fortune 500 of 2009, 22 percent of the corporations (108 altogether) had a public blog with a post in the last twelve months, their criteria for the analysis. In 2008, only 81 companies, or sixteen percent, had qualifying blogs. Of the top five this year, only three had blogs: Wal-Mart, Chevron and General Electric. The remaining two that did not are Exxon/Mobil and Conoco Philips.

The 108 corporations of 2009 represent a cross-section of the industries with the greatest blog presence. The distribution of these industries from the last two documented years follow (2008 vs 2009):

• Computer Software, Peripherals, Office Equipment: eight versus eleven
• Specialty Retail: four versus seven
• Telecommunications: five versus six
• Food Production, Services and Drug Stores: five versus six
• Commercial Banks: four versus five
• Insurance: four versus five
• Semiconductors: four versus five
• Motor Vehicle: four for both years
• Information Technology: three versus four

93 (86%) are linked directly to a corporate Twitter account, more than three times as many as members of the 2008 list. Many more of these corporations have Twitter accounts, but do not have a link from their blog to it. Either way, 173 (35 percent) have used the service for their corporation in the thirty days before the survey took place.

While the number of blogs from Fortune 500 corporations has risen from 2008 to 2009, they are much lower than the Inc. 500 numbers. While 22 percent of the Fortune 500 have qualifying blogs, 45 percent of the Inc. 500 do.

Digital distribution platform Steam has been dropping hints that they will be expanding support to Macs. The Valve Corporation’s online game store is one part of a company made famous for such popular video games such as Half-Life and Portal, the latter’s sequel recently announced. Boing Boing’s prediction, while not irrefutably verified, is that the release of several images of Valve-themed Apple-advertisement parodies points fairly clearly to just such an expansion. With the Game Developers Conference looming, such a suspense-provoker would be an ideal build-up to the event.

The images include altered dancer-silhouette iPod posters, a Half-Life character inserted into the 1984 Super Bowl Macintosh commercial, a Portal robot and a Team Fortress II turret in an "I’m a PC" tableau, etc.

Not only are gamers excited about such a possibility, its a positive move for Valve. With a consistently rising market share, Apple is not just the underdog anymore. At nearly eleven percent of US users, according to analytics from Quantcast via Ars Technica this week, Apple does best domestically. But MacWorld believes that there are other reasons to why now is a good time for Steam to come to OS X.

For certain, the move from the G-processors to the Intel chips that are now being used made compatibility a great deal simpler. As shown for Netflix streaming and anything using Microsoft Silverlight, support is best left for PCs and Intel-based Macs, not for anything older. Games are cheaper to port to Macs, which means that they are available quicker.

Additionally, game consoles have become more popular among casual and hardcore gamers alike, leaving less profitibility in the computer game category. If Valve acts now, says MacWorld, it has a chance to become the dominant source of Mac games. This would be a different market than those available on the iTunes App Store for iPhone and iPod Touch, potentially under-tapped.

Online fashion marketplace Bellaga launched Thursday, a site that connects shoppers to independent fashion designers with Bellaga-based boutiques. While sites like Etsy give anyone with a crochet hook or a silkscreen the opportunity to make a little cash on the side for indulging in their hobby, Bellaga is for serious seamsters only.

For designers and shoppers alike, the site is 100% percent free for the time being, says co-founder and systems lead George Shammas. The Brooklyn-based site will eventually adopt a sales commission business model. The shopping cart is powered by the Amazon Payments system, so Bellaga is US-based only for now. Sellers only need an Amazon Payments Business account, and when an item sells, a seven percent transaction fee is charged [updated: since Bellaga is not yet charging, only the Amazon minimum of three percent is currently charged per sale].

For now Bellaga wants more styles and more members. With only about 45 pieces and seven designers at last count, they have yet to reach one-stop-shopping status, but the perks for indie labels are enticing - featured designers get top billing on the homepage, and each brand gets their own shop analytics - and according to Shammas, that’s "[s]omething no other marketplace on the Internet gives you."

The focus of the site is to create dialogue between seller and buyer, as the Bellaga launch blog post explains. "The direct connection between buyer and seller on this platform creates a level of communication that accentuates the style, exposure, precise comprehension and attention to details that may otherwise be lost in an online environment." Bellaga’s success will be due to its focus on the individuals that will make up its community - creating an ideal interface for fashion-lovers, giving powerful tools to the creatives, and encourage conversation between these groups. "The boutique approach allows sellers and buyers alike to have a place to deliver and discover unique fashion and style that may otherwise go through a lengthy process to reach consumers directly."

We’re simplifying the ways we interface with technology. Touch computing will hopefully once and for all get rid of the mouse as pointer, but we still have to hold the device in one hand and manipulate the screen with the other.

What if the screen was our body?

That’s a scenario that Carnegie Mellon’s Skinupt offers.

The goal of Skinput is to compensate for the small screen spaces on mobile computing devices.

“In my research I think about clever ways to appropriate surfaces that are already around us, like tables and walls,” said Skinput’s designer, Carnegie Mellon’s Chris Harrison.

Skinput uses bio-acoustic sensing technology that makes the human body the input source.

Parts of the body are acoustically distinct: different parts make different sounds due to size mass, bone density, as well as from filtering effects such as joints and soft tissue. The sounds are read by a device worn around the upper arm. Skinput’s software classifies the impacts, making the body an input device. A pico projector can be attached to the device to project a graphical interface onto the user’s body (see video for some really cool examples, including playing Tetris on your hand).

“Appropriating the human body as an input device is appealing not only because we have roughly two square meters of external surface area, but also because much of it is easily accessible by our hands (e.g., arms, upper legs, torso),” Harrison writes on his blog. “Furthermore, proprioception (our sense of how our body is configured in three-dimensional space) allows us to accurately interact with our bodies in an eyes-free manner.”

Just watching the demo video is enough to make it obvious how useful this technology could be, and how computing paradigms are in the process of radically changing. Functionalities are improving so fast these days, but until the last few years, the ways we interface with technologies have remained clunky.

Technology like Skinput makes sense for the evolution of computer interfaces. And how can you beat playing Tetris on your hand?

If “atoms are the new bits,” hackerspaces are the new processors.

After Chris Anderson shared his inspiring thoughts about changes involving new economics, the Internet and opensource technologies Monday at Stanford, we think that production processes are quickly evolving. A new paradigm in conception, production and distribution is born.

And even if they won’t change the way we produce objects from the ground up, these new places will strongly improve innovation.

What is a hackerspace?
Hackerspaces, or hacklabs, have been spreading all over the world over the last two years. Today there are few hundred,  mostly concentrated in the United States and Europe (Germany, Netherlands). First born in academic laboratories, they are now open to everyone and catching the attention of companies’ R&D departments.

Hackerspaces are places where people who are willing to imagine and build projects in electronics, art, design, and programming can work together, share tools and learn from each other. “How to make almost everything,” is the catchphrase of Waag Society, MIT’s fablab representative in Europe.

In hackerspaces, small projects come to life, useless devices are built, and new ways of working together are experimented with. Opensource cars, Wii drones, coffee machines working with Twitter, LED walls, 3D printers. . .  The new, the unbelievable and the hijack are the leitmotif of this new kind of innovation.

The projects are usually made together by sharing production tools and knowledge between members of the space. The prototyping phase, production and distribution processes are available and explained on the Internet in order to give others the possibility of copying or improving devices.

What does it change for organizations?
At L’Atelier, we think that there is something to learn from this movement. It won’t substitute the way the design-production chain works but it is giving us the key to help innovation evolve faster. Small groups, high specialization and segmentation of the prototyping phase with a specific attention to expertise and the makers’ desire, quick transition from virtual design to real object : these are some of the ways innovation occurs.

(Image:  Wired)

What if you could feed a monkey, donate a meal to the homeless, plant a tree or deliver a life-saving vaccination to people just by adding an app to your smartphone?

CauseWorld was designed for that. Owners of iPhones and Androids open the app, go to nearby stores (indicated by GPS) and earn “karma points,” which they can donate to the charity or the cause of their choice — even if they don’t buy a thing at the store. Since the app’s December launch, companies like P&G, City Bank and Kraft have donated more than 400,000 dollars for causes, which is huge.

Some skeptics will say that this is just another way for multinationals in need of good publicity to make themselves look good. We can’t say the skeptics are wrong, but still.

This simple application is unique. It is the only one to add a charity dimension to geolocalization and shopping apps by using virtual money. Causeworld converts its currency, “karmas,” into real dollars with real impact. So why use Foursquare, Gowala or brightkite to communicate your location and find stores if you can do the same, and much more, with this app?

Causeworld has a very simple business model. Its monetization is based on a background in the retail industry: companies are ready to pay a little to have clients entering their shop.

The app seems to be quite a success, as in two months more than 300,000 people have downloaded it. It is one way  to do something good while you shop and for the retail companies to convert individuals into customers. But what’s important at the end is more than the click on your phone, it’s that you helped.

At least one industry can expect only a couple more years of sluggish growth, projects AMR International’s "Online B2B Marketing in the United States: Assessment and Forecast to 2013," released February. While growth in the category is forecast at eight percent for this year, it is expected to reach fourteen percent by 2012.

Online marketing will be growing, but some sections will do better than others. Business-to-business "advertising spend on social media and lead generation sites is forecast to grow at an annualized rate" of 21 percent and seventeen percent respectively to 2013.

The marketing mixture of targets for B2B showed an improvement for online since 2008, which only accounted for seven percent that year. In 2013, this is set to reach twelve percent.

While more allocation of strategy and budget are being shifted to different types of online tools, marketers do not plan to marginalize traditional marketing activities. In fact, two-thirds of mentioned marketers believe online must be complemented with just such activities.

In addition, B2B online and offline marketing budget was analyzed by objective. As shown in eMarketer’s additional coverage of the report, in the Fall of 2009, building awareness was the highest priority for combined online and offline budget at 38 percent, with 28% for online only.

Lead generation is the higher online priority, and garnered the highest percentage of online marketing budget, at 38 percent. It received 34 percent of the combined budget.

The lowest combined budget was for customer retention at 28 percent, but a middle-performer for online marketing at 34 percent.

In the same time period, 68 percent of business-to-business marketers who analyze metrics or statistics agree that paid search is effective at lead generation. Of those who are not familiar with the measurements, only 31 percent agreed, and 62 percent were neutral on the question. Between those who use metrics and those who do not, the population was split 50-50.

Entrepreneurs and VCs are in Washington DC this week to promote the StartUp Visa Act.

The Act, introduced February 24th by Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), would make it easier for foreign entrepreneurs to start their business in the U.S.

The Act would create a new visa, the EB-6, which would grant a two-year green card to foreign entrepreneurs who can secure $250,000 in U.S. VC funding.

The EB-6 Visa is a modified version of the current EB-5 Visa, with requirements that are easier to meet than the current one. The EB-5 grants a green card to foreign nationals who invest $1 million in the U.S. and create ten jobs here.

Under the EB-6 Visa, after the initial two-year green card, entrepreneurs would become permanent U.S. residents if they have either created five full-time jobs in the U.S., raised an additional $1 million from investors or have earned $1 million in revenue.

The Act’s goal is to keep U.S. startup activity globally competitive.

“I think this is mandatory for the U.S.,” said Stéphane Delbecque, CEO and co-founder of Footbalistic, a French startup based in San Francisco. “If you rely on only local people that’s great, but if you bring people in from around the world, that’s better.”

“It’s one of the best ideas of the last ten years,” Delbecque said.

Hulu often seems to be at the mercy of its network and cable television content providers, as when Comedy Central pulled The Daily Show and The Colbert Report - the shows will cease to be streamed by Hulu on March 9th.

While this could lead to an uptick of questionable content that involves prehistoric prepubescents, Hulu seems to have gone in a more mainstream-constructive direction.

If I Can Dream is Hulu’s first foray into original content, and the project has a fairly solid backing of established creator Simon Fuller and big name branding with Pepsi and Ford.

The main If I Can Dream site features a 3D rendered map of the house, and promises an immersive experience with different ways to interact with the "dreamers" and the 60 cameras.

The "Just Watch" option does provide a classic Web cam meditation on banality. A quiet moment with cast member Ben folding and putting away clothes while singing "O Canada" probably won’t make it into the edited version.

So far there is one full episode on Hulu, "The Journey to Hollywood Special." It’s somewhat like network TV, as Mashable says, in the aspiring performers are not going to be the only people of interest on the reality show. In the future, auditions for new places in the house will be ongoing, culled from the MySpace upload page.

The show could be successful, though it takes a handicap for its lack of celebrities or originality, as it is deemed by the Huffington Post. As they quote Robert Seidman of TV By The Numbers, "in general it would need to average about 4 million adults 18-49 for the duration of the show to be considered a success."

While there was no translation to a success threshold on an Internet-based show, if this program were to reach such levels, we could at least expect to see even more perky hopefuls on the Internet, now in HD.