Fireworks

Happy 2010!

It is that time again. The time for lists. It always happens at the end of one year and the beginning of the next. People list the best of this and the worst of that for the previous year and make their predictions for the next. I’m bucking that trend slightly, but not by much. I’m not too interested in what has passed, except in what it says about where we are headed, so I’m taking a pass on doing a year end list and moving right towards the future. Instead of predicting events though, I’m going to talk about some important trends I see continuing in 2010.

Economy: The economy will be on a slow burn as the year progresses with a very slow uptick in jobs towards the second half of the year. Banking as an industry will continue to be on shaky ground throughout the year as the ramifications of 10%+ unemployment for a prolonged period of time takes its toll with additional foreclosures and bankruptcies, in addition to customers locking in less profitable (for banks), lower fixed rate loans.

Social Media: Social media will occupy more and more of the mindshare of businesses as the year progresses. Fortunately, unlike Second Life, enough people participate in social media to keep the interest of businesses. Unfortunately, most businesses will use social media improperly or employ “experts” who act more like email spammers than the client liaison style public relations people that social media requires to be effective. That mistake will result in a low ROI (Return on Investment) and many businesses dropping their social media initiatives prematurely, allowing competitors that know what they are doing in the social media space to gain a competitive advantage.

Video: More and more content will head towards live streaming and on demand over the internet. That means that profits will get more and more difficult to maintain for cable and satellite companies. It also means that physical discs such as DVDs and BDs will lose sales to streaming services like Netflix Watch Instantly, Hulu and other online video services. While that transition happens, more and more dedicated boxes like Roku, Popcorn Hour and maybe even whatever product Apple replaces the current model of the Apple TV with in the coming year.

Podcasting: Podcasting will not be a major force in 2010. It will continue to grow, but probably at the same rate or maybe slower than the internet as a whole. Video will become a larger percentage of the podcasts as people move to differentiate themselves. Unfortunately, it will continue to be difficult to monetize video podcasts due to the smaller audiences, so very few video podcasts will be self sufficient. More often than not, video podcasts will be a means to market oneself or one’s company. And the trend will continue where the “mainstream” media will increasingly move in and dominate the space. All in all, podcasting will be a difficult place to profit as an independent, especially for newcomers.

Online Apps: Online apps, such as Office Live, Mint, Google Docs and Google Wave will gain users, but not nearly as fast as those in the technology space would lead you to believe. Simply put, it’s just easier to work on an app that’s on your machine, no matter if your internet connection is good or not. A good portion of the growth of the online office suites will go to businesses, but mainly in the small to mid-size businesses that are trying to save money on software licenses.

Phone Apps: Phone apps are quickly becoming a large way in which people interact with businesses, the internet and the content they consume. Phone apps will continue to grow in prominence throughout 2010, if not necessarily in profit. Part of the reason that profit won’t grow as much as some have hoped is that so many different mobile phone platforms will have apps. That means that software developers will have to split their development across the different operating systems or pick the one that they think will be the most profitable for them, preventing them from being able to sell one version of their apps to the majority of the smartphone market. The iPhone platform will continue to be the largest mover in the phone app space, but the Android platform will gain on it, but mainly because of the larger number of mobile phone models that will be available across a larger number of carriers. If the iPhone moves onto additional carriers early enough though, they will of course lose less of their advantage and enable developers to focus more on one platform, allowing for larger profits.

Disclaimer:
Now remember everyone, I’m not a professional analyst and I have not done extensive research and analysis to come up with my results, so please take my trend predictions with a grain of salt and don’t use them to make financial decisions. That being said, many analysts make ridiculous claims, so who knows, I might be closer to correct than many of them. We’ll just have to wait until the end of the year to see, won’t we? What do you think the year holds in store? Please leave your thoughts in the comments below, I’d love to see where you all think we are headed this year.

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