Top 10 Technology Tends for 2013

1. Big data ubiquity, along with machine learning algorithms, and information visualization
2. Video is the platform (example: individual YouTube channels with over 100,000 people making more than $10,000/year from ‘home video’ properties like My Drunk Kitchen, the ShayTards, and Right This Minute) 
3. Wearable computing and objective biometrics: Fitbit, myZeo, WiThings, smartwatch, smartring, wearable electronic patches and tattoos, Google’s Project Glass
4. Fracking
5. eHealth biohacking: Quantified Self-tracking, self-experimenting, group health collaboration, $99 personal genomics (23andMe), $99 personal microbiomics (American Gut Project), $5 home blood-test cards (Talking20) 
6. eLearning: Coursera, Udacity, edX, Class Central (MOOC aggregator)
7. Mobile is still the platform: worldwide smartphone adoption crosses 1 billion
8. Crowdsourced labor marketplaces: CrowdFlower, CrowdSource, oDesk, ClickWorker, Mechanical Turk, mobileworks, TopCoder, Elance, vWorker/Rent a Coder, Guru, 99designs, crowdSPRING, CloudCrowd, Soylent, microtask, LiveOps, Gigwalk
9. Computer security: increasing power of Internet-based activist hacking groups (e.g.; Anonymous)
10. New economic models (crowd-based): crowdfunding (Kickstarter, indiegogo, etc.), sustainable business, and crowdfunded debt forgiveness (from the Occupy movement’s financial arm: Rolling Jubilee)

Up and coming: Consumer EEG rigs wearable 24/7 (Axio, Interaxon) and attendant neural and biometric data privacy rights, ideally sans Faraday Cage 2.0

Still waiting for: nanotech, 3D printing, eHealth data commons with public longitudinal phenotypic data sets

Predictions for 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009 

Newtech: enterprise social networks

Like email, instant messaging, and wikis, the latest newtech spreading into businesses is social networks, essentially serving as a private internal version of Facebook and Twitter. Enterprise social networks are used for a number of purposes, first and foremost, status updates to work teams, but also for real-time messaging with colleagues including document transfer, broadcast announcements, and opinion capture via polls. There are several companies in the enterprise social software sector (Gartner chart). Among the most vibrant are Yammer and Chatter (affiliated with salesforce) each of which has over 100,000 corporate customers in a wide range of industries from finance to entertainment to professional sports; Jive is a third large company in the space. The standard pricing model appears to be freemium-based, free for light-users and $5/seat/month for power users. Enterprise social networks are typically externally-hosted.

Two of the key challenges that come to mind with enterprise social software are: consolidation with other internal communications platforms and data mining. As with enterprise instant messaging, archival and retrieval is important, both at the personal level (for productivity) and organization level (for information systems backup and compliance). There need to be effective ways to consolidate and mine multi-platform internal communications. Formalizing the explosion of casual interaction as it naturally occurs could be abstracted into value-added tools such as a codification of internal knowledge and expertise in the internal wiki for training purposes. It might also be possible to integrate communication flows unobtrusively and automatically into prediction markets or other sentiment analysis algorithms to capture opinion about key upcoming events like product launches and quarterly sales results.