I don't necessarily agree with all these predictions, but they are certainly make you stop and think about what real world objects will be replaced in the near future.
For the record, I think there it's not a case of making these object extinct, it's a case of killing off the majority of them.
1. The Olympics summer of proof-of-concepts
A huge amount of corporate investments will go into the Olympics, so we’ll see them spend their money on sponsorship and advertising more than product development. This will mean we’ll see a lot more cutting edge, proof of concepts (in adverts) rather than market-ready new product launches.
2. Social to level off, but will become a central hub for our activities.
Just like you currently open your browser to look at a number of websites, I expect your homepage will be a Facebook, Google+ or LinkedIn page which will then keep you within the ‘walled garden’. Expect to see a close tie up between the social networks and a search engine (Google or Bing).
3. A big tech failure
Expect one of the big websites to collapse which has been too dependent on more and more VC funding rather than its own revenues. We’ll witness the collapse and realise that our own data has gone with it, and then we’ll realise how important that data really is.
4. Mobile payments
It’s been a long time coming, but 2012 will be the start of mobile payments. I don’t think consumers will be paying via our phone in 2012, but you’ll see the banks start the education process using advertising and proof of concepts to enable consumers to see that by the end of 2013 we won’t need a credit card any longer (except when the battery runs out).
5. 3D printers after the Olympics
If it weren’t for the Olympics, I think 2012 would have been the year of the 3D printer. You can already buy them from under £2,000 and that printer will fall as demand increases. 3D printers will compete with Windows 8 for Christmas presents next year.
6. Akamai stock to rocket around EURO 2012 and the Olympics.
The Content Delivery Network Akamai will be covering the two biggest sports tournaments of the summer for most broadcasters around the world. With encoding bitrates (quality) constantly increasing to end viewers, they will be handling record levels of traffic during the summer. More traffic will mean significantly increased revenues.
7. More toolbars
In a bid to keep their logos on the screen in ever more engaging user interfaces, expect to see JavaScript toolbars being used more regularly, sitting like a taskbar inside your browser. This is not to be confused with browser toolbars - I don't think you'll be proactively installing anything.
8. Home automation to make a comeback
Its been possible to connect your household appliances to a computer for many years. The problem has been selling it as a technology rather than a function - and this made it marketable to geeks and no one else. With apps such as Sky Anywhere, people will want to turn their heating up, or switch the oven on while they are commuting home from work.
Photo courtesy of FL08 on Flickr
The scan above is from this week's edition of my local newspaper.
There are two popular pairs of terms used to describe users in Internet terms - Digital Migrants and Digital Natives, and Gen X and Gen Y. Personally I prefer the first term because it describes the groups perfectly.
Digital Migrants are pretty much anyone over about 20 years old, who remembers life before The Internet. They (errr, 'we') had to change our mindset to adjust with the cultural and technological challenges and advances the Internet has provided. Digital Natives are the opposite group - those under about 20, who don't know any different.
Back to the article in the newspaper.
I have two thoughts regarding the 81 year old Mr Moller (and yes, I do think his age is important):
Earlier this week we ran an event at Endava called The Future of Social Media for Financial Services. At the event, the author Richard Watson gave a speech on The Future of Money. I wasn't quite expecting to read an article in my local paper the following day highlighting that it's not so much about the future... it's already happening right now.
Back in January I made 10 predictions for Digital Media for 2010. Being open and transparent, how did these predictions fair over the year?
Pretty good going overall. Any more accurate and I'd be an octopus.
I'll post an article on 2011 predictions next week.
Photo courtesy of Shine 2010 - 2010 World Cup good news.
One of the things I think will take off in the next couple of years is 3D printing.
I'm not a massive fan of 3D tellies and cinema films, so this is not another 3D fad... 3D printing is about making real objects in the real world from home, rather like a dozen things around the room you're in at the moment, all from a block of plastic.
Like my post on the R2 robot earlier this week, 3D printing hasn't had a great deal of publicity, however I think it will be a massive game changer.
In 10 years time you won't go to the supermarket to buy disposable plates, cutlery, plastic cups, in fact anything that is plastic and is under say, 30 cubic centimetres and without any electronics inside, will be made inside our homes. We will buy blocks of plastic and feed it into our 3D printers.
In the near future, when we need 25 plastic plates for a picnic, we'll make them at home.
There are already a few 3D printer manufacturers, and HP has used it's 'Jet brand of printers to extend into the 3D arena. Their DesignJet is a little over £10,000 at the moment, though I reckon an affordable home version will be available within a few years.
The technology is improving at a rapid pace. When I was on holiday in Israel during the summer I spoke to someone who had seen a 3D printer in action, and he criticised the technology for lack of intricacy, and the amount of time it took to create a simple object such as a cup. However both of these criticisms have been improved upon - some objects are now very intricate and detailed.
At the end of this month something will happen that is taken straight out of Chapter One of the basis of most science fiction novels: Space Shuttle Discovery will transport a humanoid robot will work alongside humans, in space.
I don't understand why there hasn't been more publicity of this game-changing event. The 'geeky press' such as Register and PC Pro have been covering R2 for the last six months, but it hasn't been covered in the mainstream press.
R2 is an amazing milestone. Take a look at the video below where the robot folds a large piece of paper. In years to come we'll look back at these activities and laugh at their simplicity. In the meantime, in 2010, these activities are extremely complex to do.
R2 will take care of what computers and robots do so well down here on Earth - constant, repetitive tasks. The astronauts will simply ask the robot to help with a task, and as time goes on, they will be able to replace the lower half of R2 with different components, such as wheels, claws and other things to help it replace the kinds of tasks that endanger humans miles above the Earth.
This is a real milestone for both mankind and technology. Well done to NASA and GM for sponsoring getting the genie out of the bottle.
Napoleon and Adam Smith described the UK as "a nation full of shopkeepers". Walking down my local high street today couldn't confirm anything further from the truth. My local high street goes something like this:
There used to be an electronic retailer, which is now the east European Supermarket. Virtually all the other shops have either become hairdressers/ barbers, or a coffee shop.
The confusing factor here are the banks. I can understand the barbers, hairdressers, coffee shops and sandwich shops/ restaurants - in all these cases, you can't buy the equivalent from eBay/ Amazon/ the rest of the Internet.
It's the banks that confuse me - why do we need all the major high street banks here? Can/ do they all depend so much on customers physically entering their premises? The answer is either yes - because of the cash that the local shops need to keep paying into their business accounts each day, or no - and over the coming years we're going to see many more high street banks closing down branches, similar to the Post Offices that we've seen in the past few years.
In the future I think we will see the coffee shops close down quite rapidly. The high street can't sustain a Starbucks/ Costa/ Nero on every corner (and a couple in between). The same happened in the 1950s with Lyons' tea rooms, who had 250 shops in London at the time.
What will replace them? One idea (expanding on Richard Watson's prediction) is to have 'brand showrooms', where a manufacturer, say Sony, needs to show off it's latest products. Because we'll all be using our phone to buy the latest 5D, nanotechnology television, we won't see the other latest gadgets that Sony will be inventing. So we'll go into a brand showroom to see these new releases. New brands that come along (say, a 21st century Dyson) will have to create these showrooms as well, or else people won't be able to discover them.
I find FourSquare simultaneously frustrating and potentially excellent.
FourSquare is a website/application which allows (requires) users to say (check-in) where they are. The more regularly a user checks in to a location, they are rewarded with 'badges' and status changes. A user can then become a 'mayor' of a location if they are the most frequent user in that location. It's clever through it's addictiveness.
The commercial model is that locations can then reward it's mayors with free prizes, such as a coffee in a cafe, or a discount. FourSquare's model is that it's users are the ones who map the World rather than rely on Google or anyone else to do so.
The frustration stems from the iPhone app crashing when I try loading it without a wireless connection. For an application which relies on being out and about for its use... a very limiting factor. Apparently it only happens to some people, such as myself.
The potentially excellent view is that I can easily see Google or Microsoft buying them soon. Imagine Google knowing where it's users are and integrating it into Buzz, GMail and Google Latitude (another excellent location utility commonly misunderstood). Or Microsoft integrating Messenger, Bing, Hotmail and FourSquare together as a single offering.
Here are my predictions for the coming year. In 12 months time, let's review what actually happened!
1. Reinvestment in Digital Media.
Based on a lack of investment in 2009, I think a lot of companies will see a website revamp, or a new product version appearing in 2010. This will be especially true of companies who chose to 'cut corners' in 2009, for example deciding to build their own proprietary CMS. This coming year, they'll choose to re-engineer the same site using an off-the-shelf, or even open source CMS.
2. Lack of new products due to R&D being slashed in 2009.
I'm not sure we'll see so many new Spotifys (Spotifies?) appearing in 2010, because of a lack of investment/R&D budget last year. Maybe we'll see new stuff appear at the end of the year though. The exceptions will be anything from Apple, with the imminent launch of their iSlate.
3. A number of live events on YouTube.
Yup, live is where the value is. And Google know this. So expect some new live events appearing on the platform in 2010.
4. More Flex applications, less Silverlight.
Flex will succeed because the creative agencies like Adobe and not Microsoft. This might change in the longer term, but for 2010, expect to see some sites migrate into very funky (I can't use the adjective flash here!) Flex applications.
5. SecondLife to further decline.
Yup, not many people are writing about SecondLife these days. My own personal view is that in the long term, the web will be accessible through a graphical interface probably not far off SecondLife, but for the next 5-10 years, the standard browser is very much here to stay. The LindeX (the market to sell real world cash for made up cash - quite remarkable really) is in a steady decline, and the data has been moved from publicly available to a free signup. Here's the graph as of today. Next yearm expect the graph to be totally unavailable, or in steep decline. A shame, but some technologies are just too ahead of their time.
6. The UK to start accepting blogging at the same status as the US.
In the US, bloggers have almost the same status as journalists. That's a bit of a sweeping statement, and my apologies to journalists who have had a turbulent couple of years, and an even bleaker future for a trade that's totally unfairly undervalued. Anyway, in the US, bloggers are often quoted by journalists and news organisations, whereas in the UK they are dismissed by the news organisations. Of course there are some exceptions such as The Guardian, but in the main, most people think that bloggers are nerds/IT geeks. This is a view which Twitter & the term 'microblogging' has helped to change slowly, but by 2011, I expect to see some famous UK bloggers be quoted by the press.
7. Offline browsers make a comeback.
My view of the Internet is that the same applications are constantly being re-invented. Facebook is like a modern version of Compuserve (a nice clean, walled environment); Skype is ICQ on steroids; Spotify is Real Networks (OK, just sort of!); Twitpic is like a billion free image sharing sites; today I even stumbled across a 'directory' of Twitter users - and directories kind of died off a few years ago! I remember installing offlines browsers on my Palm V in the mid 1990s, which effectively downloaded snapshots of a website on to my Palm, for me to read on the way home. I had a similar application on a few early mobile phones. Expect similar applications on iPhones, Kindles and iSlates to start appearing, so that users of the Tube and other areas can read articles on the move, outside of an RSS reader.
8. The FIFA World Cup sees huge use of video over mobile & broadband.
Put it another way, if it doesn't, expect to see broadcasters and mobile operators to pull out of mobile video for the foreseeable future. Expect some amazing stats for broadband use from Sky, ESPN & FIFA. In 2005 we were discussing a 10 deal for bandwidth that went into Petabytes, and everyone thought we were mad. Expect to see that word banded around a lot during the World Cup.
9. Expect ebooks to take off.
This has the potential for a huge market. I estimate football club programmes, concert programmes, manuals, etc. all to be available in ebook formats, either free or very low cost by the end of the year. It will be a mini-reinvention of MP3s...
10. 2010... the year of Web CRM
I have no idea why it's taken so long for a vendor to come up with a Web based CRM system. Facebook Connect, Windows Live signin & Google Orkut are the main contenders, but does a major website really want to release their list of customers to be shared with Facebook, Microsoft or Google? No. There are CRM vendors who charge a 'per user' model - which is useless for a free sign up model. A number of the newsletter systems are extending into this area - with Traction probably being the most attractive. But if you want a standalone web authentication and single customer view with Single Sign On (SSO), who are the sub $50k vendors? Exactly. So expect to see new players start appearing here.
Head of Digital Media at Endava, although all the views in this blog are purely mine and not necessarily those of Endava.
