Trying to stay ahead in the digital world.
Every year we (bravely) have a stab at what’s going to be big during the year. This year we weren’t a million miles out.
We predicted: Wearables, Internet of Things, Client-centric Marketing, Design Frameworks, Collaborative Economy, SmartPay and Privacy and Security. I reckon that’s a solid four-and-a-half out of seven; could have done better.
And here are the predictions we made back in January.
Wearables exploded this year with a dozen or more Smartwatches and a plethora of health and lifestyle bracelets. Ok, they weren’t the biggest thing this year, but from a standing start adoption was pretty impressive – we expect this to continue to grow, despite taking a post-early-adopter dip. We got this one right.
Internet of Things moved centre stage with the connected home seeming to be the main driver. Streamed video via internet-connected TV now represents the largest portion of data moving on the internet. However, it’s still early days so probably only deserves half a point.
Client-centric Marketing didn’t make it to the big-time, despite hovering on the edge. It required large corporates to migrate their CRM systems and, as ever, the corporate end of the marketplace sure moves slowly. So, this was nil point.
Design Frameworks also didn’t quite make it – it certainly gathered momentum and lots of new design frameworks appeared in 2015, but many companies still think the web is about online brochures and, as a result, tried to differentiate themselves by using abstracted design. Shame, another nil pointer. However, we’ve seen the green shoot of standardised design based on function (for example, Apple changing their system font).
The Collaborative Economy got a huge boost in 2015. We saw the rise in tools such as Slack (doubled in value to $3bn), the reinvention of Basecamp, Uber’s continued rise and addition of collaborative tools to many commonly-used applications. Yay, a point for us.
SmartPay had a huge year with the successful launch of Apple Pay and the uptake of other phone-based payment systems and the alternative crypto-currency market. And another solid point scored.
Privacy and Security was, by some margin, the biggest thing of 2015. Despite key industry players trying to drive adoption of increased security, many companies were hacked, lost data and paid the price of not moving to solid secure practices such as HTTPS/TLS much earlier. A good solid point for us.
We’ll stick on the tinfoil hats and see if we can come up with predictions for 2016 – and that’s likely to include Ad-disruption, Business transformation, Machine Learning, Privacy, Europe, Business Intelligence and the return of Microsoft. We’ll try to cobble together another half-cocked prediction item by January. Just don’t bank on us doing better than this year!
