Top 10 Tech Trends: 4/10 are mobile

From the Churchill Clubs Top 10 Tech Trends Dinner. Six pundits-- 10 trends. Interesting that four of the trends concern mobile:

1. The mobile phone will be a mainstream personal computer.
2. Betting on smart phones: The mobile device migration to smart phones from features phones will produce even greater disruption than PC industry moving from character mode to graphical interface.
3. Within 5 years, everything that matters to you will be available to you on a device that fits on your belt or in your purse.
4. 80% of the world population will carry mobile Internet devices within 5-10 years.

Even though I agree with all of these predictions they still got my attention.

A couple of predictions on virtual worlds

I was in a discussion a couple of weeks ago at an inworld event at Emory University: Virtual Worlds and New Realities in Commerce, Politics, and Society. A small group of us got talking about whether virtual worlds are a harder sell, to whomever we have to convince, than the World Wide Web was back in 1993. Of course, there weren't that many people in the discussion that had actually been in a position to have to sell the Web back in 1993, but that's a different matter.

I'm writing a post on this topic, but before I do, I thought I would kick off the discussion with a couple of quotes from our favorite, and very conservative, analysts on what they see coming:

Forrester Research:

In five years, business versions of online virtual worlds like Second Life will be just as important to commerce as the Web is today.

Gartner Group:

By the end of 2011, 80 percent of active Internet users (and Fortune 500 enterprises) will have a “second life”

(They are not referring to Second Life in particular, but the general concept of virtual worlds.)

There are many other predictions I could have used to forewarn what is on the horizon in regard to virtual worlds. It's suffice to say that the freight train is coming.

I'm a big believer in the first-mover advantage. If you wait until your customers/clients/constituents have already made the move to new ways of learning, communicating, and working you'll be years attempting to catch-up. If you aren't working on getting ready for this right now you're already late.

That said, from my perspective I think selling virtual worlds to decision makers is a much tougher nut today than the Web was back in 1993. I'll explain my reasoning in a subsequent post.

Goodbye RSS hello feeds

I'm very careful never to use the generic RSS feeds when discussing syndication feeds. So I was especially pleased to see rev2.org's: Predictions ‘08

Buzzwords:...RSS will be replaced by “feeds”, and the buttons with simply “Subscribe...”

Please! Not even geeks can remember what RSS stands for (rec.sport.soccer?), and more importantly it's not a standard. The sooner we get rid of the use of RSS the better. Both the acronym and the technology.

Highlighted predictions: youth, podcasting, facebook

I said I was going to highlight interesting predictions made by others, here is #2. Anastasia Goodstein at Ypulse has posted her predictions for 2008: Ypulse 2008 Teen Tech Predictions

I like her comments about Facebook, and that youth are moving there because it's less in-the-open.. She also mentions Facebook having a negative impact on the widget space. I think she's right. I think widgets will be most widely adopted by the older set:

Facebook, apps instead of widgets and more "privacy." This may be the generation that is more comfortable living their lives online, but not when the people looking are adults with authority over teenagers (parents, teachers, cops, etc.). There will continue to be a migration to Facebook from MySpace as Facebook is viewed as "more private" by teenagers. Teens may keep their MySpace profiles to connect with bands and check out content, but it's becoming all about Facebook for socializing. It doesn't matter to teens that there are tons of loopholes or that adding Facebook apps exposes your personal data to marketers (though I am a proponent of opting in), it's just that most moms and dads haven't figured out how to find you there...yet. And as I alluded to the other day, this move towards private is fueling the growth of applications and apparently hurting the widget space.

I also agree with her comments on podcasting's demise:

Podcasting. I just don't hear that much about it anymore. I know there are some high profile teen podcasters but it never quite reached the mass adoption level of blogs or even online video.

Of course this is nothing new, but it's nice to see more mainstream voices saying that it's going nowhere. I've been taken to task for saying the exact same thing in the past: Podcasting is not for me...

Nope, I‘m not buying that rosy scenario. Listening takes way more personal bandwidth than most are willing to invest. If they would make podcasts smarter then maybe, but I‘m not seeing this technology being adopted en masse any time soon.