Top 10 technology trends for 2012

1. Mobile is the platform: smartphone apps & device proliferation
2. Cloud computing: big data era, hadoop, noSQL, machine learning
3. Gamification of behavior and content generation
4. Mobile payments and incentives (e.g.; Amex meets FourSquare)
5. Life by Siri, Skyvi, etc. intelligent software assistants
6. Happiness 2.0 and social intelligence: mindfulness, calming tech, and empathy building
7. Social graph prominence in search (e,g.; music, games, news, shopping)
8. Mobile health and quantified self-tracking devices: towards a continuous personal information climate
9. Analytics, data mining, algorithms, automation, robotics
10. Cloud culture: life imitates computing (e.g.; Occupy, Arab Spring)

Further out - Gesture-based computing, Home automation IF sensors, WiFi thermostat, Enterprise social networks

Is it ever coming? - Cure for the common cold, Driverless cars


Looking back at Predictions for 2011: right or wrong?

• Right: Mobile is the platform, Device proliferation, Big data explosion, Group shopping
• On the cusp: Crowdsourced labor, Quantified self tracking gadgets and app, Connected media and on-demand streaming video
• Not yet: Sentiment engines, 3-D printing, Real-time economics

Crowdsourcing the stock market

New market tools are emerging that could be much better (real-time and objective) indicators of performance than the traditional methods of speculation-driven stock market price, quarterly reporting, and financial statements.

These tech tools are a nice response to the perceived social economic malaise of the times, and could help to realize some of the new thinking promulgated by both theorists and activists that markets are more of a Darwinian game of the fittest rather than an invisible hand meeting favorably for all parties.

The new market tools - real-time performance indicators:

• Prediction markets (SimExchange, Hollywood Stock Exchange, Intrade) for unit sales data
  
• Real-time purchasing feeds (Blippy, Google Wallet, social shopping sites) for the aggregation of real-time purchase data
• Social media check-ins (FourSquare, Facebook, etc.) for revenue prediction
• Forum badging and site gamification (Badgeville) for measuring the digital economics of brand sentiment

Top 10 technology trends for 2011

1. Mobile is the platform; mobile payment ubiquity could be next
2. Device proliferation continues; tablets, e-book readers, etc.
3. Connected media and on-demand streaming video, IPTV, live event interaction
4. Social shopping: grouppurchasing, commenting, recommendation, LBS
5. Sentiment engines (ex: Pulse of the Nation, We Feel Fine) are ripe for being applied much more broadly to other keyword domains; sentiment prediction
6. Big data era explosion: machine learning, cloud computing, clusters, supercomputing
7. Labor-as-a-service: microlabor, on-demand labor, global task fulfillment
8. Quantified self tracking gadgets and apps (ex: WiThings scale, myZeo, BodyMetRx, medication reminder, nutrition intake, workout coordination, DIYgenomics, etc.)
9. Personal manufacturing, digital fabrication, 3D printing ("atoms are the new bits"); slow but important niche growth
10. Real-time economics: blippy, crowdsourced forecasting, stock market prediction

(Review predictions for 2010)