2012: Top Trends and Opportunities

New year. Fresh energy. Time to take stock of trends and open problems for 2012. The most notable change this coming year is that Steve Jobs is dead. In death, however, he has become even larger than life, and his legacy will drive this decade’s technology movement for a while at least. One of his key legacies is the marriage of technology and humanities, which I believe will shape the next phase of evolution in the IT industry. I elaborated my vision in Silicon Valley: The Next Decade.

In Top 10 Tech Trends For The Decade, I outlined a set of key movements which are pretty much the driving factors for the time being:

1. Cloud Computing continues on as a dominant force in B-B and B-C domains. Experts predict as much as 60% IT cost-savings by 2020 as commodity IT gets replaced by automation. Also read: Top 10 Cloud Computing Trends For The Decade.

2. Outsourcing, also, continues to be a massive trend. One of my favorite opportunity stories from 2011 is The Million Dollar Freelancer.  Also read: Top 10 Outsourcing Trends For The Decade.

3. Social Web, unambiguously ubiquitous. In addition to Top 10 Social Web Trends For The Decade, I also suggest you read Customer Service and The Social Web. An open opportunity that I underscored recently is Social Contacts: A Hairy Problem.

4. Vertical and Local Web continues to be a trend and an opportunity. You can read Top 10 Vertical And Local Web Trends For The Decade for more. For yet another year, personalization remains unaddressed. You can also read an interview I gave to the Business of Fashion on personalized shopping.

5. Online Advertising is booming, but there is also an overflow of ad inventory out there. This is a huge opportunity, perhaps one of the biggest for this year. Read Top 10 Online Advertising Trends For The Decade and Too Much Unmonetized Ad Inventory. I would love to see some of you take this problem on.

6. Online Gaming has some of the same problems and opportunities as Online Advertising: too much unmonetized ad inventory. In general iPhone and iPad games are monetizing way better than the rest, but still, there is a massive monetization challenge that needs to be addressed.

7. Tablets and Smartphones are now mass market phenomena, eating into PC market shares. The App phenomenon is actually assisting content publishers with monetization, since even if consumers don’t want to pay for content, they tend to be willing to pay for apps. As a result, content apps is emerging to be a white knight for the publishing industry, with the iPad seeming to save their otherwise dwindling business models. Even so, the Free Rider problem persists.

8. Online Video is increasing in volume as well as ease of production and consumption. Popular TV show concepts are emerging in online formats, for example, ifood.tv is replicating the Food Network concept online with recipe videos. I am waiting for Project Runway to show up as a similar online network for designers.

9. E-Books and readers are steadily moving into the mainstream. This holiday season, Amazon’s Kindle is enjoying a superb run. And of course, what follows Kindle purchases is a lot of e-book buying.

10. Bootstrapped Entrepreneurship, thankfully, is also rising, and we at 1M/1M are relentlessly pushing the phenomenon. As inspiration, here are some of our best bootstrapping stories: Sridhar Vembu (Zoho) | Ryan Allis (iContact) | Sachin Bansal (Flipkart) | Greg Gianforte (RightNow) | Girish Navani (eClinicalWorks). There are another fifty in the curriculum.

Finally, online education seems to be on the rise, and healthcare IT is also seeing growth. I’d like to see more in each area.

Let’s keep building!

This segment is a part in the series : 2012