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

After the recent focus on “real-time” search it is important to point out that this is not it, but you tell Google where your profiles are and they do the rest. It shows posts, updates or reviews that people in your “Social Circle” have made that are relevant to your search and shows them alongside usual listings.

It appears that the idea behind it is that the opinions or views of those that you network with will be more relevant to you as they should, in theory, have similar things in common. This idea does raise a few of issues though:

• It assumes that everyone in your immediate social circle have things in common and their contacts too. In reality users of social networking sites often add contacts/friends to increase their numbers or for political reasons. For those of you who are here from my LinkedIn profile I value you all
• Related to the above point it does not seem to take into account that you will communicate with some contacts more than others. By definition the opinions and posts of these people should be ranked higher than the others
• Some people may not be comfortable with their posts being made publicly searchable or they may not want other people to be aware of their contacts.

Saying that it is an interesting development and we need companies like Google to keep pushing the boundaries and to explore new avenues and I see this as a welcome addition. Oh and it’s only a matter of time before we get that real-time search.