Are CEOs allergic to social media?

What’s more surprising -- how few CEOs use social media (only 7.6% use Facebook, 4% Twitter and 1% Google+, according to CEO.com), or predictions of how quickly the number that do is set to rise?

A recent IBM survey of 1,709 CEOs found just 16% currently participating in social media. But the study predicts the percentage will likely grow to 57% within 5 years, notes a blog in the Harvard Business Review written by execs of inventory management company Fishbowl.

For me it’s the CEO’s head-in-the-sand approach to social networks that was the bigger surprise. I figured the number to be low, but not that low. But the news that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison only recently made his first ever tweet should have tipped me off -- even tech CEOs can’t be bothered.

LinkedIn is the only social network where CEOs are slightly ahead of the general populace, the CEO.com study concludes: 26% of CEOs surveyed use LinkedIn, compared to 20% of the U.S. population at large.

The HBR piece quotes another study that gives plenty of ammunition to the idea  that CEOs (or really any exec in my opinion) need to get on the social media bandwagon:

“The BRANDFog 2012 CEO Survey says more than 82% of respondents are likely or much more likely to trust a company whose CEO and team engage in social media. The study also reports that 77% of respondents are likely or much more willing to buy from a company whose mission and values are defined through their leaderships' involvement in social media.”

The Mobile Wave changes everything

Michael Saylor, author of the new book, The Mobile Wave: How Mobile Intelligence Will Change Everything, says the fast-growing adoption of smartphones and tablets is “an incendiary movement” that most of the world hasn’t come to grips with yet. 

“We're in an inflection point where it's cheaper to learn to read on a tablet computer than it is to learn to read on paper,” said Saylor in an interview with Fast Company. 

Saylor says it's only a matter of time before every 6-year-old kid has a tablet computer, as well as older adults, and that has major implications. 

“So instead of 5% of the economy being remade, it's 50%. I think this puts this on the scale of being the biggest transition we've yet experienced in the history of technology.” 

Saylor further astutely observes that we’re quickly moving to a software era that most companies would be foolish not to embrace. 

“Companies that make keys, credit card companies, any company in the service business--anything to do with a consumer is probably a software company. If you're a retailer, a bank, an insurance company, or an entertainment company, you're a software company. If you open doors, if you start cars--Mercedes Benz has a key that's a software program that runs on an iPhone.” 

Saylor said the industries in the firing line of this new software era are those that either produce electromechanical items that are now inferior to their software substitutes, or the industries that produce a mechanically created service that's now inferior.

“If you look at television, I now watch HBO almost exclusively on a program called HBO GO on an iPad. I don't need remote controls; it has every television show that's ever been on HBO ....  at my fingertips within 10 seconds. And it's so much easier to use than the four remote controls, the four boxes sitting underneath the one television with the eight wires hooked up to five speakers. I look at all those things and think they're just electromechanical boxes I want to throw away.”

Condition One: Video from all angles on your tablet

We’ve all watched great movies and videos on our iPads, but what if you could don a virtual director’s hat and instantly see a different view of any scene?

That’s the visiion of Condition One (C1 for short), a company backed by Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban.

As Xconomy reported earlier this month, C1 has developed a media player that lets users change their viewpoints within any scene from a near-panoramic experience.

C1 CEO Danfung Dennis says Cuban is developing the AXS TV network—which was rebranded this month from HDNet—for live music, sports, and entertainment news and is using C1’s platform to bring immersive content to the network.

Dennis says about thirty million cameras on the market are enabled to shoot Condition One–style video.

“We’re using commonly available hardware and we’re capturing 180 degrees of video,” he says. 

That video footage is mapped onto a three-dimensional model. The platform, he says, leverages technology in mobile devices to let viewers change the perspective of videos as they are playing.

“Once you have this 3D representation, we can tie that to the gyroscope or accelerometer of an iPad or iPhone,” he says.

As more mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones are used to play back video, Dennis says he sees a growing opportunity to bring a new perspective to the medium. “We’re really not pushing the capabilities yet,” he says. “We’re just scratching the surface of what video and communication will become.”

(You can download some cool sample content from Condition One on your iPad here).