Ten predictions for 2010

Posted by Jaan on November 25th, 2009 | 2 comments

Wild guesses, qualified guesses, some analysis based predictions and a bit of wishful thinking. Here goes…

The easy one

The iPad and Courier (and all the other pads/tablets/booklets) will change our behavior and challenge our thinking on interaction, location, entertainment, communication, payments, value and engagement, to name a few. Crazily exciting, and a certainty.

Update: The CrunchPad was declared dead on November 30. Bummer, I wanted this one really badly.

The other easy one
Chrome OS will be next year’s best attempt at making sense of the disparate inventions, concepts, networks, events and information habits that make up the web of today and that are making old tech and behaviors obsolete.

The third easy one
Spotify will thrive, and be acquired by Apple. Spotify is a threat to iTunes (well, sort of, …ish), it would be a good complement to selling tracks, the businesses would probably see eye to eye on innovation, and there is a lot of crossover among us fans. And Apple has the cash to spend.

Update Dec 4: Apple has acquired that other really good music service, Lala. My guess is Apple still have their eye on Spotify.

The maybe
More and more ad agencies join their progressive industry peers in teaching clients that…

• People beat consumers
• Topics are better than messages
• Something useful, entertaining or informative trumps everything else

The probable one
Twitter goes all stable on us! Less of the Fail Whale in 2010, then.

The other probable one
Facebook keep making weird changes that baffle everyone. Butthat’sokbecauseweloveyou.

The let’s-hope-so
Newspaper publishers everywhere learn from the  brilliant “stacks” presentation by The Guardian’s Open Platform advocate @jaggeree.

The unlikely-but-I-can-dream one
Proper Swedish/Finnish style broadband comes to the US, or at least San Francisco. That way I don’t have to be embarrassed when fellow Swedes come to visit. “Yes, 5 meg down and 1 meg up is considered FAST!”

The likely one
The LinkedIn Platform will help businesses understand social. They will still need help though…

The one to end the list on
Most of my predictions will turn out to be wrong.

But that’s ok, we work in an industry that is all about change, innovation, and evolution. Making qualified guesses, and acting on them, is part and parcel of what drives our industry. I predict that won’t change in 2010.

Thank you for reading! What are your predictions for 2010? Fire off a quick one via Twitter (@orvet), I’d love to hear them!