It has come to that time of year when we start looking forward to the year ahead and excitingly a new decade. There are various commentators out there thinking about what the emerging trends are going to be in 2010, here are my ideas below:
Emerging super powers and developing nations drive innovation
Due to the rise of mobile technology people in areas that have not been able to get connected now can. For example the growth on Internet usage in Africa over the last decade has grown by over 1, 300%. All the new users have new needs and most exciting of all new ideas. Speaking at a recent conference, Wikipedia co-founder, Jimmy Wales said that the new cultures, languages and ideas would “mix and match in amazing ways.”
Location based social networks
We have seen many location based applications emerge on the iPhone and established ‘Web 2.0′ sites include location based services – for example GeoTagging on Flickr. The beauty of the Internet is that anyone can contribute to any topic but that inevitably means a lot of information that isn’t relevant to a user at a moment in time. Give information a contextual quality, such as a location, means that relevant information should be easier to find and crucially more useful to the user.
As the decade progresses it is thought that this will emerge into a big industry, APIs such as those provided by Google for Google Maps and sites that you wouldn’t necessarily associate with open APIs, such as Trip Advisor enable useful applications and websites to be created.
Real-time search
It could be argued that this has started to progress and take off quite nicely, but it hasn’t quite entered everyday public use. As touched on in a previous blog post, real time search will help provide more relevant search result for users.
Magazine and Newspaper Apps
This topic has also been covered in a previous blog post but I believe we will see a lot more of these in the coming year. They have the ability to provide people with what they want, when they want it and most importantly it gives newspapers and magazines an opportunity to make money.
Someone…somewhere…will find an effective use for Google Wave
Google Wave has many detractors but as it rolls out to more and more users I think people will find it a useful tool, and that’s the point, it is a tool, it will not replace email (at least I hope not)!
Talking of finding a use we have a few ideas so watch this space.
So there you have it, we will check back in twelve months to see what happens!
I will leave you with a few other predictions from my colleagues:
- Simon predicts that the move to ban Google Analytics in Germany will fail
- Steve predicts that cloud computing will take off in a big way
Tags: Analytics, Cloud, developing, internet use, location, newspaper apps, predictions, Real-time search, Social Networking
