10 Big Trends for the Future

Entrepreneurs are always asking themselves, “what could the world look like if…” Here’s some of the things we’ve been pondering – we left out the ones about what we’re going to eat for lunch and what style of kung fu is the most bodacious.

1. Facebook Will Become the World’s Biggest Country- The social networking/web/media category (not just sites like Facebook, Twitter, and others) started out as “fringey” – but those days are long behind us.  Social Media has gone from being what’s cutting edge in the world of technology to being decidedly mainstream – which is a good thing for companies working in this space, in one way or the other.  Whether liking, friending, following (when will we see “Stalk Me” as a part of the social media lexicon?), social networks and media are becoming a fact of how we communicate with each other. One consequence is that social media will get an opportunity to hone in on the things people truly want out of a ubiquitous virtual social network.  The next big thing on the horizon? Virtual worlds may just be a good bet – but certainly a convergence of social media, traditional cinema and entertainment, and 3-D animation is heating up. Still have your Second Life island?

2. Huge Bandwidth & Ubiquitous Connectivity Will Make Mobile Computing Mainstream – In the next few years, increased demand and competition are going to bring a new level of bandwidth at lower costs to the table (building on all the progress of the last 10 years), better supporting our insatiable appetite for computing everywhere.  Between mobile providers, cable companies, phone companies, coffee companies, and search companies, everyone has been getting into the game of providing bandwidth and connectivity.  Not only will this trend continue to lower the costs for businesses and consumers, it will increase our dependence and expectation of ubiquitous computing, bringing higher volumes of users around the world.  And in the short term, it may just mean that we spend more time looking at a screen than a face when we hang out with people for coffee.

3. Really New Web Interfaces Will Emerge – Gesture has been the talk of the town for a while now, but it still depends quite a bit on a paradigm that’s been around for a while.  One of our most dependable forms of command – voice – has been waiting in the wings for a while to be incorporated into mainstream technology.  Automated Speech Recognition and Text-To-Speech technologies, coupled with high quality, noise-cancelling and sound isolating peripherals will give us a new, safer way to compute on the go.

4. Text, Email, Voicemail, and Application Messages Will Become One – Let’s face it, you’re just one person, even if you have 10 email accounts, two cellphones, a Skype account, and a Facebook account.  Let’s get it together, people. As we are deluged with more contact, this issue will become increasingly important.

5. Form Factor Evolution Will Pick Up Speed - Now that the smartphone, netbook and tablet have truly added themselves to the array of form factors available to consumers (not just laptops, desktops), evolution and perfection of a new series of archetypes will unfold. Embedded Computing and Sensors will change the way we think about form factor.

6. Rationalization of Social Networking/Applications Will Increase - Some tools won’t make it, some will be subsumed into larger organizations.  Either way, the amount of web applications and information available to us right now is more than enough to get our heads around.  On top of the sheer number of tools available, many have very similar functions. Expect to see more integration, a focus on a more common user interface – a trend that has been growing in importance in the corporate space (EAI, SSO) and got started in the consumer space will continue.

7. Ubiquity of High Quality Content Tools Will Redefine Our Lifestyle - With amazing content authoring tools now available in our pockets, we expect to see not only fewer bulky briefcases and more smartphones, but another surge in user generated content.  Will these tools produce tangible benefits or just distraction?  Only time will tell.

8. Collaboration Will Replace Crowdsourcing/Outsourcing/Offshoring – Connection by the power of the wire has smashed geographic boundaries and made the world smaller, giving firms and individuals access to a crowd that is larger and more diverse than ever.  Crowds can form based on a shared interest, commonality, etc.  But now, with the conduit and the crowd (or virtual teams) in place, how collaboration happens is going to take center stage.

9. Focus on Creating Data Will Be Replaced with Focus on Understanding and Using Data – Simply based on the fact that we as a society generate massive and growing amounts of data yearly, we know that we greatly improved the infrastructure necessary to capture and store huge amounts of data from across the globe. But now that we have it, and we can get it, what do we do with it? Should we collect some data at all? Should we analyze it or simply store it?  Connection between the data itself and actionable intelligence about what our data means is still in the works.  This will be a major focus for the future: the idea of connecting the dots versus collecting the dots.

10. Privacy and Public Safety Debates Will Heat Up – Unfettered access and open information sharing can be great, and has been important to the growth and success of the internet, but it has darker sides. Putting personal information out on the web, means you no longer have to be a public figure in order to be the victim of defamation or invasion of privacy.  In the electronic world, the only surviving statute of the now-defunct Communications Decency Act (CDA), Section 230 holds that the distributors of the speech can never be publishers, thus, not liable for lawsuit against them when there are anonymous defamatory speeches unless they have been notified of the problem.  Although it is possible to ask the court to subpoena the host site to give up the IP address of the publisher, that seldom happens.  Invasion of privacy is a very serious issue, and the spectrum of the issue is expanding due to people having the resource to reach out to vast quantity of people in a short amount of time.  One mistake, one inadvertent click of the mouse could mean spreading even your most personal information to the general public; worse, what you think is unimportant (checking into Foursquare at a certain time on a certain day) could mean that those with malicious intent can more easily target you for crime.  In the end, even criminals can connect the “dots” in an open computing world.