
If George can anoint himself “The Decider” then I can confidently take the title of “The Predictor”. I was just crowned (literally, I have the tiara to prove it) 2008 Visionary Of The Year by Unlimited Potential. Which is pretty impressive, considering it happened in the first month of 2008.
It was another fun event and my fellow predictors had plenty of prescient and witty insights. Hopefully UP will post all the predictions somewhere.
The following is my outlook on the year to come. It contains a fair dose of wishful thinking, but sometimes technology and events do sneak up on you quicker than you expect.
2007 Greatest hits and misses
DRM finally goes away
Hit. Woot!
Wellington weather will be shit
Miss. Woot!
2007 Report card
User generated video advertising
Good progress: LiveRail, BrightRoll, YuMe, Adap.tv, VideoEgg, Adotube, Google/YouTube
Enterprise SaaS
Good progress: Netsuite IPO, Force.com
Web OS
Good progress: Macbook Air, gOS, CloudBook
Mobile Media Centers
Not so much: iPhone + Apple TV
2008 Better mobile experiences
3G iPhone with GPS, still won’t be available in NZ
Mesh networks start catching on thanks to Wireless USB (WUSB)
Somebody will provide a standard wifi billing platform (think OpenID + Paypal)
Presence detection gets real, gets fun:
get pinged when social network in proximity,
“scan” a party, cafe, club, biz conference to see profiles,
mixing and mingling privately while standing in a crowded room
2008 Hyperlocal on the homefront
Oil nears $200 a barrel, travel increasingly becomes a luxury,
people start thinking and acting a lot more local
Biofuels start becoming more efficient, demand surges
Aqua Flow becomes a leading provider
Working and learning from home becomes more and more of a necessity, collaborative web applications thrive in response
Lending networks thrive, microloans help ease economic turbulence
Home bio scanners start to hit the market - letting people scan food, detect viruses and germs, capture and analyse medical data, send data to a remote expert for further analysis
2008 Geeks Robots rule the earth
Portions of Google Earth and Streetside become available as realtime video
Mashed on top of this “open surveilance” framework will be
massively multiplayer game experiences
Hardware widgets and software widgets will converge producing very hackable, very personalised, interoperable device components (Buglabs, ThingM, Chumby)
New software driven materials interactively, physically reshape on command
2008 will go down in history as the year the robot uprising started taking shape
2008 Politics
Obama wins by a landslide
Helen wins (barely)
Kerry resigns in disgrace over conflicts-of-interest scandal
Tom Beard becomes the new mayor!
Finally, in my acceptance speech I predicted that next year the panel will include a woman!