Nothing happens overnight; next year's trends will be an outgrowth of what is happening already this year. But a few markets may see an inflection point in 2013:
Cheap tablets - most people still think of tablets as expensive premium Apple toys. But these things are going to be $19.95 soon, cheaper than a hardcover book. This has some implications:
- Every kid in every school can have one or more than one.
- They'll be widespread in Africa, Asia, South America, even in places without landlines. Many folks may skip smartphones completely and move directly to small tablets.
- You can own multiple tablets, optimized for different purposes (same as how you own multiple hardcover books today).
- This will bring in changes in education, health care, retail and restaurant experiences, automobiles, etc, as we stop thinking of these things as expensive computers and start thinking of them as replacements for paper.
Mobile payments - as NFC becomes more widespread, and services like Square and Paypal roll out, 2013 might finally be the year where walking into a store and paying with your phone or just by giving your name becomes common and not just an early adopter experience in a few markets.
Wearable computing - a revamped iPod Nano, the Pebble watch project, and/or other things like them will make this the year you'll finally see people checking a watch or a necklace regularly for messages from their friends vs. whipping out their phone and turning it on constantly.
Corporate IT moves to the cloud - this is already happening but is large enough that it still deserves a mention. Trillions of dollars of IT spending are moving from data centers and software licenses to cloud services. Soon you'll be able to read about companies with 10,000 employees who don't have dedicated data centers.
The aas-ing of everything - companies are moving software and storage to the cloud. They'll soon realize those cloud services can easily pull from cloud-based data sources (Jigsaw, Insideview, Rapleaf) plus cloud-based labor pools, both crowdsourced and professional services firms. For example, why should a mid-market company buy solutions from Marketo, Salesforce, Insideview, build a website, design their lead management workflow, hire IT people to implement the software then staff to implement the workflow? Outsource the whole thing to a firm who runs the plumbing and provides a labor force to do some of the grunt work, leaving the company free to test and push messages to customers through that infrastructure and have their employees talk only to qualified opportunities. Companies will increasingly simply design products and messages around them while letting others handle lead generation, qualification, manufacturing, and logistics.
TV - this may be wishful thinking, but something significant could finally happen in the living room in 2013. It could be the long-awaited Apple iTV, or it could be Tivo getting acquired by Apple or Google or Microsoft. The ideal TV experience is a a single box that lets you both record and download any content you want at any time via a single interface. We'll take at least a step towards that this year. My bet is on an upgraded Apple TV box plus a true iTV with built in DVR functionality, a revamped interface and set of services, and an app store.
It will be a wild ride.
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