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Marketers are already confronting the implications of a more shadowy Internet, specifically the phenomenon known as DarkSocial and DarkSearch.

“DarkSocial,” estimates that 69% of the publication’s social traffic is dark--meaning users who access content by clicking on a link emailed or IMed to them. Marketers don’t know where these users came from or what exactly drove them to their website.

cloud services like Google and Apple are proactively stripping referral data out when sending users to third party sites via search. These DarkSearch visitors, like their DarkSocial counterparts, also end up in the “direct referral” bucket of analytics reporting, indistinguishable from the geography-less visitors who typed your domain name directly into their browsers to visit your site.

In the near-term, brands will have to confront a potentially darker Internet, as the roadblocks to data-driven marketing thrown up by DarkSocial, DarkSearch and an emerging DarkNet increase. There will be real consequences, including in investments in marketing, if it becomes more difficult to quantify customer engagement.

In the longer-term, we may see a nascent e-commerce system more familiar to science fiction fans (and current users of services like Silk Road, the online illegal drug marketplace). Imagine a future Amazon.com-like e-commerce site where all profiles are anonymous, all payments utilize crypto-currencies, and all deliveries of physical goods use inexpensive, multi-hop services that conceal the ultimate end delivery address behind anonymous dropboxes.

Adaptive. As customer interactions fragment across devices, experiences must perform reliably across an expanding interface landscape that includes PCs, laptops, smartphones, tablets, and, increasingly, TVs and cars. But just having a presence on these devices is not enough. Experiences must persist across these devices

Further, they need to become polymorphic, taking advantage of the connected devices that surround us to delivernew multi-device experiences that were not possible before.

As consumers adjust to post-PC realities, they expect companies to provide the right mix of content and functionality at the right time and right place.

design and customer understanding, not technology, will rule the post-PC era. In a time when you can hire a handful of engineers to build just about anything you want, value shifts from what is possible to what is desirable. 

A survey by Wakefield Research, commissioned by U.S. cloud-services company Citrix Systems (CTXS.O), last November found 91 percent of respondents were excited about wearables, but 61 percent said they had no plans to purchase one.

Epson (6724.T) unveiled a $700 pair of eyeglasses that allow the user to simultaneously view data about objects they are looking at.

By consistently embracing all these technologies, we inevitably relate ourselves to them as servomechanisms. Thus, in order to make use of them at all, we must serve them as we do gods. The Eskimo is a servomechanism of his kayak, the cowboy of his horse, the businessman of his clock, the cyberneticist - and soon the entire world - of his computer. In other words, to the spoils belongs the victor ...

Man’s relationship with his machinery is thus inherently symbiotic. This has always been the case; it’s only in the electric age that man has an opportunity to recognize this marriage to his own technology. Electric technology is a qualitative extension of this age-old man-machine relationship; 20th Century man’s relationship to the computer is not by nature very different from prehistoric man’s relationship to his boat or to his wheel - with the important difference that all previous technologies or extensions of man were partial and fragmentary, whereas the electric is total and inclusive. Now man is beginning to wear his brain outside his skull and his nerves outside his skin; new technology breeds new man.