2011 Predictions: The scorecard

Every year, I make a set of pre­dic­tions as to what the new year is going to bring. At the end of year, I also review how close or far off the mark I’ve come. It is now time to review the 2011 edi­tion of pre­dic­tions, which I made on the 3rd of Jan­u­ary of this year.

Pol­i­tics

Last year’s lead­ing inter­net polit­i­cal story was the rise of wik­ileaks and, as such, my views were impacted by it. Sur­pris­ingly, there has not been that many wikileaks-like orga­ni­za­tions aris­ing on the inter­net. This may be due to the fact that there just aren’t that many peo­ple leak­ing information.

The power of wik­ileaks, how­ever, could not be denied, and my pre­dic­tions of protests aris­ing out of cable­gate were right on the mark. This year, cable­gate high­lighted some of the abuse of gov­ern­ments in Tunisia and Egypt and some of that evi­dence was part (but only part) of what led to rad­i­cal changes in those north­ern African countries.

On the reg­u­la­tion end, the FCC has indeed got­ten more aggres­sive, with its more vis­i­ble move being its attempt to block the acqui­si­tion of T-mobile by AT&T. How­ever, to my sur­prise, there hasn’t been that much com­plain­ing from either polit­i­cal party about this reju­ve­nated enforce­ment effort.

Mean­while, the rise of SOPA is clearly in line with the pre­dic­tion that the enter­tain­ment indus­try will push for more inter­net reg­u­la­tion.  How­ever, it is rel­a­tively easy to pre­dict such thing as it appears the enter­tain­ment indus­try is for­ever locked into the con­cept of a more reg­u­lated inter­net. They basi­cally see the inter­net as com­pe­ti­tion and would love noth­ing more than to stran­gle it to death.

So look­ing at the polit­i­cal end of the spec­trum, I’ll give myself points for good prognostication.

Busi­ness

In that cat­e­gory, I decided to stick my neck out on the con­cept of a public-less IPO and while it was essen­tially some­thing that hap­pened with Face­book, the con­cept did not really take off for other com­pa­nies as they decided to go the pub­lic route instead. My expec­ta­tions were really that IPOs would not come until very late into the year and I was sur­prised by the likes of LinkedIn, GroupOn, and Zynga man­ag­ing to get into the mar­ket rel­a­tively early.

Fur­ther­more, I was pretty much off the mark when it came to NFC. NFC is (and has been) a promis­ing tech­nol­ogy but 2011 was not a break­out year for the tech­nol­ogy. At this point, only a few select Android mod­els seem to sup­port it and there seems to be lit­tle trac­tion from the mar­ket around it. While Intel invested in NFC, it may be a tech­nol­ogy that grows into usage with­out hav­ing a par­tic­u­lar break­out year.

The rise of cord-cutters did hap­pen but not in as large an amount as I sus­pected. While this is a trend that con­tinue to grow, it is still sit­ting on the edge and hasn’t gone main­stream yet. How­ever, its a trend I will con­tinue to mon­i­tor closely as I sus­pect this will move to the main­stream in rel­a­tively short order.

All and all, my pre­dic­tions on busi­ness were off the mark. Maybe I’ll do bet­ter next year.

Tech­nol­ogy

Gam­i­fi­ca­tion con­tin­ues to grow but did not really have the big break­out year I expected. While more and more com­pa­nies are con­tin­u­ing to inte­grate game-like behav­ior in their appli­ca­tions and work­flows, we are start­ing to expe­ri­ence a period of con­sol­i­da­tion in the space, with bunch­ball being one of the larger play­ers. This seems to high­light that this space is one where only a cou­ple of major play­ers will arise and smaller play­ers are already run­ning out of steam. The focus around devel­op­ing gam­i­fi­ca­tion mod­els for computer-based appli­ca­tions may be part of the rea­son for this fail­ing to move for­ward as the trend is increas­ingly to more and more appli­ca­tions mov­ing to a mobile-first model.

The scan and shoot rev­o­lu­tion I pre­dicted qui­etly made its ways into the main­stream, with smart phones being the new weapon in every shop­pers’ belt this christ­mas sea­son. It’s one of those quiet rev­o­lu­tion that arrived in 2011.

And finally, the big bet I had made on a Microsoft Nokia part­ner­ship came in mid-february, when Nokia announced that it would focus all its efforts on devel­op­ing exclu­sively for the Microsoft platform.

The inter­net back­lash I was expect­ing for this year did not come to pass. There may yet be more power in the cur­rent pos­i­tive cycle that has been cov­er­ing our indus­try and, as such, it appears that the pos­si­bil­ity of a back­lash against our indus­try remains a remote but slim pos­si­bil­ity at this time.

So all and all, I’d get a barely pass on the tech­nol­ogy side.

Arts and Entertainment

The recent multi-billion con­tract exten­sions for NFL broad­cast rights are in line with my pre­dic­tion that big event enter­tain­ment is becom­ing the core focus of the broad­cast enter­tain­ment world. The con­tin­u­ing effort to sup­port the exist­ing model will increase this trend, giv­ing more and more power to pro­duc­ers of real-time events.

Remix­ing, and Dan­ish cool­ness, did not come of age in the past year, how­ever. While ground­break­ing on Bjarke Ingels first Amer­i­can project hap­pened in New York, Danes haven’t really moved to the cen­ter of pop­u­lar con­scious­ness. The same is true of remix­ing: while super­cuts are still mak­ing their way through youtube but, as a whole, remix­ing is still not some­thing that has made it into the mainstream.

Maybe I should keep to the mar­gins when it comes to mak­ing big pre­dic­tions around arts and entertainment.

All and all, for this year, my per­for­mance at pre­dic­tions has been aver­age. I will try to do bet­ter for the 2012 year.