Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Trends for Next 4 Years

Robert Scoble has a thought provoking post at The Business Insider today where he talks about what Google will look like in 5 years.

But that is not what interested me. He made a list of the trends he sees as happening in force - or not with 3DTV - during this time.

Here they are. How are you preparing for them?


First, what will the trends be for the next four years?

1. Mobile will get bigger screens, more capabilities, and many more users will have more than 100 apps (today only the weirdos like me do, the industry even has a name for us, they call us “heavy app users”).

2. Home entertainment systems will increasingly go completely Internet connected and many people will unplug their cable systems.

3. All media will be streamed, very few users will have downloadable files anymore.

4. There will be “apps of apps.” In other words, there will be apps that join many apps together. Already that’s happening. When I take photos with Instagram I can send those photos over to Foodspotting, Trey Ratcliffe’s photo app, amongst others. Om Malik wrote about that trend yesterday.

5. Social networking will be far more nuanced than it is today. I saw one startup, coming soon, that figured out who people I worked with 10 years ago were. All by just looking at Facebook. How? Artificial Intelligence from a lab at Stanford University.

6. We’re going to know EVERYTHING about ourselves, if we put the data in. Just this past weekend there was a Quantified Self conference with hundreds of attendees (held just a couple of miles from Google’s headquarters).

7. Automobiles will have more interactivity and more “assisted driving technology” than today, but the fully automatic self-driven car will still be years away for the average person due to cost.

8. 3DTV will continue to struggle, due to lack of content and the continued requirement to wear glasses on most screens.

9. Our social graphs will bring us much richer experiences. Going to Sonoma? You’ll know exactly where your friends have visited in the past and you’ll be able to see where celebrities like Mark Zuckerberg or Ashton Kutcher have visited.

10. News has shifted very heavily toward socially-influenced real time displays like Zite, Flipboard, Feedly, etc, on tablets.

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