At the beginning of 2010 we looked at the World of 2019, outlining a number of main trends we watch. Here is an update for 2011:
1. Bandwidth will carry on expanding
No change here. If anything this is growing, I predict that in about 2 months the mainstream Sundays will start running stories of households with 2 DSL lines to get the bandwidth they need (in the UK that is, other countries can plumb 24 Mbit/sec reliably into homes)
2. Talking to each other will remain the Killer App
No change here. The main shift in 2010 is from talking via voice on mobile devices to email and txt as smartphone penetration rises (it is faster and more easly searchable)
3. Our "Social Networks" evolve onto whatever the best platform of the moment is
2010 saw the rise and rise of Facebook, we predict that 2011 will be the zenith.
4. All useful technology and applications commoditise over a 3-5 year cycle.....
See above....
5. .....but People are Still People. The more things change, the more they stay the same
If a service helps hatching, matching or despatching better than what is here, now, it will succeed. All others will win on the ability to generate sufficient....
6. Hype (and dodgy economic theories) spring eternal in the human breast
Ecclesiastes Law states that there will be a new inflationary bubble in something, and cometh the hour, cometh the man (or woman) to pimp it. A new generation of Tech Wonderfulness will thus be declared this year, that is of course quite unlike anything before, and it will of course herald in a New Economic Paradigm which (oddly enough) will promise to allow you to get richer with less effort, and that people who don't "get it" will of course be labelled as crusty old farts. Groupon was this year's cause celebre, promising that the old economics of coupon sales can
somehow be overcome by The Web. We predict that in 12 months time they will be sold or sad.
7. There is a Google or two in every Decade
We wrote last year:
"Re Google in particular, we think that their search algorithms are going to be increasingly less useful over the decade - in a way a self inflicted goal, as by adding value to links means an entire parasitic SEO ecosystem has emerged. Given that Google funds itself entirely on its link economics, but subsidises many other ambitions, this is going to make its activities in other arenas harder over time."
....
Others that are interesting are around the disruption of very big industries today - the growth of online video (Hulu), the disruption of Olde Print Media (Huffington Post, Techmeme) and the emerging Non-bank Banks (unless they get regulated sooner). Also the change to digital in the basic Telco layers implies the emergence of "Soft" Telcos (Telecoms companies that own no direct assets) - Skype is the first wave."
New Search, Online Video, Online print media, non-bank banks and digital Telcos (witness the impact of Skype's failure in December for impact). We'd keep with those......
8. Planet Mobile will always overestimate benefits and underestimate time to get them
Enter
Mary Meeker to this fray in 2010..... but our view remaisn the same. Overpriced, overhyped, and over-forecasted unto eternity. The one thing that is a game changer is the tablet (iPad et al), all our research tells us that this "fifth screen" is a behaviour changer for media consumption - but not for creation. More later, as they say....
9. Privacy (and a related issue, Trust) will become a bigger and bigger factors.
2010 saw Wikileaks, the very educational overreaction by USA Inc (legal due process is for wimps...), and
craven caving in by Silicon Valley Inc. This won't go away either. We predict that 2011 is the year Google and Facebook both get hoist on serious privacy petards, the mass market is becoming more aware of what they are up to now.
10. How Green was my Valley again?
We wrote last year:
"Anything that makes more efficient use of existing energy assets (renewable or un) is probably a real win. There is also so much money and interested vested in the whole Carbon Trading arena that no doubt many maths PhDs' time will be spent adapting systems from the financial industries to game this one."
I am hopeful over this - a lot of the Greenscam has disappeared up its own underperformance, big VC's are taking a big hit, the BRICS world are telling it like it is, we expect a lot more practical outcomes here, now.
11. Enterprise 2.0 will be rebadged with a Three Letter Acronym by 2011.
We were wrong - it was rebadged as "Social Enterprise" and "Cloud Commerce", but it's still largely vapourware still, the plunge into the hype cycle's slough of despond has been staved off another year by rebadging. If the Wikileaks affaire taught us anything though, it was "don't give your key services to someone else to host"
12. Government 2.0 will be a slow train coming
Some carriages have yet to leave the station. If anything the Wikileaks affaire has ceded ammunition to those who would delay this (that and the "most voted for" resolutions in the UK was to make grumpy newspaper columnist Jeremy Clarkson the Prime Minister, and to get rid of Gordon Brown. Probably both very good ideas, but not what those running the Government - 2.0 or no - want to hear)
13. The Internet of (Moving) Things
The amount of fighting being done by drones is one of the main unremarked, yet remarkable - and scary - trends in 2010, This won't go away. Guessing 2013 for the first OECD protests partly policed by drones. (pdate - saw this very
interesting application of cameras and prediction software....)
