11 Predictions for 2011

With a new year upon us, it’s time to move to a new set of pre­dic­tions for what might be com­ing next.

Over the last cou­ple of decades, we’ve seen tech­nol­ogy have a major impact on all aspects of our soci­ety and I’ve tried to chron­i­cle some of those impacts. This year, I’m start­ing some­thing new by try­ing to clas­sify the trends I’m look­ing at and attach them to the broader cat­e­gories of interest.

So with­out fur­ther ado, here are some of my pre­dic­tions for this com­ing year.

Pol­i­tics

Wik­ileaks, the phenomenon

Last year, Wik­ileaks showed that gov­ern­ments may now have to find new, and more trans­par­ent, ways to oper­ate in the age of the inter­net. How­ever, long-time inter­net observers may have noticed that the US efforts to shut Wik­ileaks down seem very sim­i­lar to the RIAA’s efforts to shut Nap­ster down exactly a decade ago. I sus­pect that the net impact will be sim­i­lar, with more Wikileaks-like orga­ni­za­tions aris­ing left and right.

Mean­while, the cable­gate scan­dal will con­tinue to rever­ber­ate as more rev­e­la­tions from the cables will lead to details about the inner work­ing of gov­ern­ments around the world. This will even­tu­ally lead to internet-organized protests mak­ing it into the real world, prob­a­bly start­ing first out­side the US and even­tu­ally mak­ing their ways around the globe. The protests out­side the US will lead to the top­pling of at least one gov­ern­ment either in the mid­dle east, Africa or South America.

Inter­net reg­u­la­tion at a crossroad

This year will be a year marked by sev­eral fights over inter­net leg­is­la­tion. I sus­pect that the US will see increas­ing clashes between Repub­li­cans and Democ­rats over the level of con­trol the FCC has the right to assert on the Inter­net and over how much the gov­ern­ment can force com­pa­nies to main­tain a level play­ing field on inter­net lines. Along the way, we will see a more aggres­sive and active FCC, mak­ing many heads turn as it starts becom­ing a stronger enforcer.

In sev­eral coun­tries, we will see dis­cus­sion of reg­u­la­tions try­ing to patch leg­isla­tive holes cre­ated by the rise of Wik­ileaks and there may be some renewed attempt to increase the con­trol of gov­ern­ment over press orga­ni­za­tions as a result of these regulations.

The fight over online piracy will also extend from dis­cus­sions of music piracy to increas­ing movies, tele­vi­sion, e-books, and e-magazine piracy. This will be the start of a new push by the enter­tain­ment indus­try to reg­u­late the inter­net further.

Busi­ness

The public-less IPO

With last-year’s announce­ment of large-sized fund­ing rounds by the likes of Groupon and Twit­ter has shown that there may be a dif­fer­ent way for early investors to get some cash out of a com­pany than a sale or Ini­tial Pub­lic Offer­ing. I sus­pect that it’s only a ques­tion of time before some­one cre­ates a Spe­cial Invest­ment Vehi­cle (SIV) that allows for a pri­vate investors to invest in pri­vate com­pa­nies like Face­book, Zynga, Twit­ter, GroupOn, etc… Along with the rise of sec­ond­mar­ket, I believe that 2011 will see large privately-held com­pa­nies offer stock to investors through means other than a pub­lic offer­ing or a sale.

Update: I wasn’t fin­ished writ­ing this entry that Gold­man Sachs announced a Spe­cial Pur­pose Vehi­cle to allow some of its clients to invest in Face­book.

NFC pay­ments come of age

It’s been many years in the mak­ing but I sus­pect that 2011 will finally be the year of touch-payments via Near Field Com­mu­ni­ca­tion devices (NFC). A few years ago, I was involved in an effort to bring NFC, the lit­tle key-fob or spe­cial­ized pay­ment cards, to the New York taxis. Sim­i­lar tri­als have hap­pened in the New York sub­way sys­tem, and in some point of sale sys­tems but, over the last few years, peo­ple have often asked me about my key fob pay­ment tag as it appeared I was the first user they wit­nessed using one.

With NFC chips slated to be put into the next gen­er­a­tion of iPhones, Android phones, and Black­berry phones, 2011 may finally be the year when the poten­tial of NFC com­merce is enabled.

A dent in ownership

Net­flix and Red­box have almost destroyed the con­cept of own­ing DVD disks. Pan­dora has low­ered the need to buy music.  Zip­car has made not own­ing a car pos­si­ble for a lot of urban­ites. The real estate cri­sis has made own­ing your own place seem less cool.

All and all, it seems the trend is mov­ing, to a large extent, away from phys­i­cal own­er­ship of goods and towards either shar­ing mod­els or out­right rentals. We will see this trend con­tinue to grow over the com­ing year. Some of the things to watch out for are the rise of the cord-cutters, where peo­ple replace their cable TV offer­ing with an online only offer­ing because of the a-la-carte pric­ing nature of online efforts. Another trend to look at is e-book lend­ing with the ini­tial efforts or the Nook and Kin­dle read­ers offer­ing shar­ing capa­bil­i­ties on select titles.

Tech­nol­ogy

Gam­i­fi­ca­tion

This, in my view, is part of a larger mega­trend I high­lighted a few weeks ago. I believe that 2011 will mark the begin­ning of a very large trend in tech­nol­ogy to make every appli­ca­tion more like a game. Indi­vid­ual user accep­tance has ingrained itself in our soci­ety and we will now see this phe­nom­e­non start­ing to take place in the enter­prise space. Expect much talk of enter­prise appli­ca­tion devel­op­ing game-like fea­tures this year but real imple­men­ta­tions will only see the light of day towards the end of the year at best, with more of the seri­ous imple­men­ta­tions hap­pen­ing in 2012.

The mobile rev­o­lu­tion continues

The intro­duc­tion of the iPhone 3 years ago shifted the whole online land­scape to mobile devices. Yet, for all the dis­cus­sion of mobile, it still has been a phe­nom­e­non sit­ting on the edge, as smart-phones were on the more expen­sive side of the price spec­trum. Except all this to change this year, with many Android-based phones being avail­able for free or almost free, putting any fea­ture phone at a sub­stan­tial disadvantage.

At the same time, get ready for the shoot-and-learn rev­o­lu­tion as QR-codes, tagged objects, and smart tools like Google Gog­gles gain more main­stream accep­tance. Peo­ple will increas­ingly scan or shoot to learn more about or com­pare a phys­i­cal good to infor­ma­tion avail­able online.

Last but not least in this is that I sus­pect Microsoft will make a major move in the space by either acquir­ing or team­ing up with Nokia for its part­ner­ship and dis­tri­b­u­tion foot­print, mak­ing Win­dows Phone 7 the only OS run­ning on Nokia phones.

Inter­net Backlash

The inter­net indus­try has ben­e­fited from a great amount of sup­port over the last 2–3 years. Com­pa­nies like Face­book, GroupOn, Zynga, and Google have been able to move along with high lev­els of con­sumer accep­tance. I sus­pect that this year, we may start see­ing more peo­ple rethink­ing some of their web 2.0 choices, dis­clos­ing a lit­tle less infor­ma­tion on Face­book, or becom­ing more wary of the power of Google. We will also see the rise of digital-free zones, where peo­ple agree that the use of mobile devices or com­put­ers is not allowed.

We will also see many peo­ple ques­tion­ing the valid­ity of many of those inter­net com­pa­nies and bring­ing up the specter of another finan­cial bub­ble. Much of this talk will focus around inter­net com­pa­nies that are look­ing to go pub­lic towards the end of the year.

As more peo­ple get impact by the stress that can be caused by our always-on cul­ture, we might also see the rise of inter­est in dig­i­tal down-time, time set aside to go offline and recharge before the next session.

Arts and Entertainment

Big event entertainment

There will be two major trends in fight­ing the con­tin­u­ing frag­men­ta­tion of the media land­scape. On the one hand, large media com­pa­nies will con­tinue to flock to the tried-and-true, remak­ing or mak­ing sequels to movies and TV shows that have been suc­cess­ful. Formula-based enter­tain­ment will con­tinue to be pro­duced but with an ever-decreasing return on investments.

On the other side of the spec­trum is the rise of what I would dub “big event enter­tain­ment”, where media com­pa­nies will attempt to build up their media prod­uct as an cul­tural event. In the US, the launch of the Oprah Women Net­work will be such an event. Other forms of media will try to build up those events through time-based mod­els, cre­at­ing sport-like offer­ings (think Amer­i­can Idol) through all forms of media.

Those efforts are all attempts at keep­ing the old sys­tem of release win­dows in place so that exist­ing rev­enue streams are not threat­ened by the ubiq­uity of the inter­net access.

Remix­ing comes of age

Remix­ing has been com­mon in music, and video remix­ing has been a largely under­ground phe­nom­e­non on the inter­net. 2011 will be a ban­ner year for video remix­ing as the likes of Pogo will start enter­ing the main­stream. I sus­pect that main­stream artists will start lever­ag­ing some of the same tech­niques in their efforts, bring­ing video remix­ing to the masses this year.

As the 2012 US pres­i­den­tial pri­maries get under­way, we will also see an increas­ing amount of online remix­ing of politi­cians speech, some­times mis­rep­re­sent­ing their positions.

Dan­ish cool

This is kind of my bleed­ing edge pre­dic­tion but I believe that 2011 will be a big year for Den­mark. Copenhagen-based archi­tect Bjarke Ingels has recently opened a new office in New York. Mean­while, Noma, a Copenhagen-based restau­rant, was recently named as one of the top restau­rants in the world. And many cities look to Copen­hagen as an exam­ple of how to orga­nize large-scale projects for pub­lic trans­porta­tion (one third of the peo­ple in Copen­hagen ride bicy­cle to com­mute).  And Den­mark has estab­lished itself as a leader in the wind-generation and green tech­nol­ogy space. So I think all this will add up to Den­mark being seen under a new lens and may even be con­sid­ered cool in 2011.

We’ll see at the end of the year how well I did on all those pre­dic­tions. in the mean­time, feel free to chime in in the com­ments or on twit­ter (use the #tnl­pre­dicts hash­tag so I can track things).