The 2012 Crystal ball

With a new year kick­ing in, it’s time for a new batch of predictions.

Busi­ness

One of the eas­i­est pre­dic­tions to make is that Face­book will go pub­lic this year, and it will man­age to do so in a very suc­cess­ful IPO. I sus­pect that this may actu­ally be the high water­mark for the cur­rent boom cycle as Face­book is the most suc­cess­ful of the com­pa­nies that were born of the Web 2.0 cycle. In a fash­ion sim­i­lar to what hap­pened with the Netscape IPO in 1995, the Face­book IPO may cre­ate a small win­dow of oppor­tu­nity for many other com­pa­nies to go public.

On the pri­vate end of the spec­trum, I think we will see the fol­low­ing com­pa­nies see some form of liq­uid­ity event via either acqui­si­tion or IPO: Twit­ter has a strong chance of being acquired by Apple, which will quickly merge the offer­ing into all of its prod­ucts; Another pos­si­bil­ity is that Twit­ter and Tum­blr merge to cre­ate a mico-blogging pow­er­house span­ning both ends of the coun­try. Mean­while, Foursquare will either IPO or be acquired by Face­book or GroupOn in a share-only deal. Meetup will go pub­lic, cre­at­ing another great story for the New York tech­nol­ogy scene.

When it comes to Google, we will see the com­pany con­tinue its inte­gra­tion of Google+ into every­thing it does, with the biggest impact being the move to migrate all Orkut users to the new ser­vice. This will cre­ate an out­cry in coun­tries like India and Brazil, where Orkut has been pop­u­lar but will leave many in the Amer­i­can media to won­der what the big deal is as Us cus­tomers have mostly left already.

Mean­while, a lot of the com­pa­nies that went pub­lic in 2011 will meet some strong head­winds as the rigor of the pub­lic mar­ket make it much more dif­fi­cult for them to maneu­ver. Expect some changes at GroupOn and Zynga, with many peo­ple ques­tion­ing their busi­ness mod­els and long term viability.

Media

For a cou­ple of years, there’s been a slow ramp up to the inte­gra­tion of the Inter­net with tele­vi­sion. The rise (and to some extent fall) of Net­flix, along with the entrance of new play­ers like Hulu and Ama­zon, have made video dis­tri­b­u­tion on the big screen one of the areas where the Inter­net and tele­vi­sion have already intersected.

How­ever, other areas of inter­ac­tion have, so far, not been quite as suc­cess­ful. Apple is still treat­ing AppleTV as a hobby, Google has mostly failed so far with GoogleTV, and other play­ers like Roku and Boxee have, to date, been only adopted on the fringe.

In 2012 all that changes as the TV screen takes cen­ter stage in a way that a new gen­er­a­tion of smart phones arose after the 2007 iPhone announce­ment. First of all, we will see some increased stan­dard­iza­tion around how to deliver con­tent to TV screens, with agree­ments from TV set man­u­fac­tur­ers like Sam­sung, Pana­sonic, Sony, and Vizio agree­ing to some level of stan­dard­iza­tion. Apple will also announce a large screen prod­uct it will posi­tion in the TV mar­ket: The set will have AppleTV’s tech­nol­ogy built-in, be acces­si­ble over WiFi, and con­nect directly to the iTunes store as well as inte­grate with the iPhone and iPad and other Air­play com­pat­i­ble devices. The set will run iOS and will be man­aged by a remote that runs on iPod touch, iPhones and iPads.

Mean­while, cable com­pa­nies will start open­ing up their plat­forms with some soft­ware devel­op­ment kits allow­ing to access con­tent on the set top boxes they use. Once the Motorola acqui­si­tion is com­pleted, Google will start tran­si­tion­ing the Motorola set-top boxes, which are a large part of the cableTV mar­ket, to GoogleTV, increas­ing the foot­print of the ser­vice in the mar­ket­place. Along the way, we will also see GoogleTV become more stream­lined and less ambi­tious, focus­ing on deliv­er­ing Android apps to the big screen instead of try­ing to rebuild the whole TV industry.

The con­cept of cord-cutting will con­tinue to gain sup­port but will not yet jump into the main­stream con­scious­ness. With shows now being avail­able exclu­sively on the likes of Net­flix, we might see some inter­est­ing posi­tion­ing whereas some TV car­rier will offer Net­flix as a pre­mium service.

Pol­i­tics

Social media will dom­i­nate the polit­i­cal cycle in 2012, with Twit­ter, Face­book, YouTube, Tum­blr, and Meetup becom­ing part of the polit­i­cal oper­a­tive tool belt. How­ever, tra­di­tional elec­toral mod­els will con­tinue to be dis­rupted by the rise of dis­trib­uted net­worked orga­ni­za­tions like Occupy Wall Street, Wik­ileaks, or Anony­mous. Except those play­ers and new ones built on a sim­i­lar model to have a sub­stan­tial impact in terms of reg­is­ter­ing new vot­ers and get­ting those vot­ers to the polls in elec­tions in Europe, the Mid­dle East, and the United States.

In the US, the 2012 elec­toral cycle will see Repub­li­cans select Mitt Rom­ney, a can­di­date most of their elec­torate is not very excited about, to run against Barack Obama. With the unex­pected sup­port of Occupy Wall Street and its splin­ter orga­ni­za­tion, Obama will win re-election as issues around eco­nomic dis­par­i­ties and job cre­ation con­tinue to be big top­ics of discussion.

In Europe, expect to see incum­bents top­pled in many coun­tries: with major elec­tions com­ing up in France, Spain, Rus­sia, and Fin­land, it is pos­si­ble that we will see a major change in polit­i­cal align­ments across most of Europe, along with an increase chance of protest in those dif­fer­ent coun­tries. In Rus­sia, in par­tic­u­lar, we may see the inter­net play a cru­cial role in orga­niz­ing protest if there are ques­tions regard­ing vot­ing irregularities.

The con­tin­u­ing protests in the mid­dle east region may also lead to sub­stan­tial changes in gov­er­nance in sev­eral coun­tries includ­ing Bahrain, Syria, and Saudi Ara­bia. Dur­ing the pres­i­den­tial elec­tions in Iran, we will see increas­ing clam­p­downs on inter­net sites as the gov­ern­ment tries to shut any means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion avail­able to large groups of protesters.

… and of course, the eas­i­est pre­dic­tion to make is that the media indus­try will con­tinue to push for more restric­tions on the Inter­net, lead­ing to more activists push­ing back.

Tech­nol­ogy

2012 is going to be an explo­sive year for technology.

First of all, we will see HTML5 roar­ing back, as many com­pa­nies real­ize that it is cheaper to build in HTML5 and that the gap between plat­form spe­cific code and HTML5 is shrink­ing. The intro­duc­tion of WebGL, and proper imple­men­ta­tion of geolo­ca­tion and caching within mobile devices will give devel­op­ers the abil­ity to develop appli­ca­tions in HTML5 that can rival some of the offer­ings of native code. This is a move that will be resisted by plat­form mak­ers like Apple and Google as it will loosen their stran­gle­hold on their respec­tive plat­forms; how­ever, the split side of this is that effort is that some large com­pa­nies will look to free them­selves from said con­trol by cre­at­ing HTML5 instances of their own products.

On the mobile end, the Microsoft/Nokia will get some real trac­tion with Win­dows Phone becom­ing a strong third player in the mobile mar­ket. Apple and Android will con­tinue dom­i­nat­ing the mar­ket with Microsoft still being a dis­tant third. RIM’s posi­tion in the mar­ket will sub­stan­tially worsen and will either be sold or go into bankruptcy.

Enter­prise cloud strate­gies will con­tinue to grow, lead­ing to a grow­ing divide between com­pa­nies that can get effi­cien­cies through the use of cloud com­put­ing and com­pa­nies that are kept by dif­fer­ent reg­u­la­tory frame­works from being able to real­ize the finan­cial gains offered by such model.

3D will be a hot buzz­word, with the intro­duc­tion of consumer-oriented 3D scan­ners and 3D print­ers that will push the idea of scan­ning and print­ing your own plas­tic parts. This will lead to some con­tro­versy around the con­cept of 3D objects piracy pop­ping up in the media, with lit­tle actual evi­dence to back those fears. On the 3D pro­jec­tion end, we will see the rise of designer 3D glasses and the first glasses-free 3D tele­vi­sion hit­ting the mar­ket, as we as a few consumer-grade 3D cam­eras. At the same time, we will see more and more tech­nol­ogy to upscale 2D to 3D, in an attempt to develop a larger con­sumer mar­ket for 3D technology.

On the PC end, net­books will dis­ap­pear as a cat­e­gory and the hot new trend will be to offer thin­books that mir­ror much of what Apple is offer­ing with the Mac­book Air prod­uct line.  Solid State Drive will aso increas­ingly become stan­dard on new com­put­ers and we will see Apple actu­ally announce they are get­ting rid of tra­di­tional hard-drive in all their prod­uct offer­ings. This will lead to their being able to announce that all their hard­ware can now run for at least 7 hours on a sin­gle charge.

Any which way, we will be revis­it­ing those pre­dic­tions at the end of the year and see how well (or badly) I did. I wish you, dear reader, a very happy new year and look for­ward to a con­tin­ued dia­logue in 2012.