Unlimited Potential is kicking off the New Year in fine style with its annual Bloggers Predict event. Bookmark Tues 27th January and start contributing your own predictions by adding some comments below.
Our picks for this year:
1. 2009 will be the year of the community exemplified by the growth of enterprise use of Web 2.0. The most successful cloud applications, blog sites and gaming venues will be those that cultivate an active community of interest around their services. “The network creates the value”. The same applies to real life communities such as UP!
2. Twitter will blossom as an important mainstream social media application provided it addresses capacity constraints, manages spam and adopts a business model that does not disenfranchise users. Likely to receive an attractive takeover offer, but may choose not to sell initially.
3. The first generation of (real) semantic web applications will emerge in 2009 in response to user needs to organise ever increasing amounts of web based content. Applying semantic search to real business problems will be the focus for developers and investors.
4. Plunging commodity prices and declining consumption will hurt investment in recycling and other clean technologies and will shift the media debate away from green issues. Creation of web-based problem solving technologies around water conservation and energy management will leap to the fore however.
5. Gesture driven multi-touch interfaces such as Fingertapps (that we featured at W2W) will be adopted increasingly in a variety of electronic consumer goods and services.
6. Our domain registrar site iWantMyName will experience huge growth on the basis of its easy functionality and through the deployment of innovative value added services during 2009.
So…post your own predictions below, register for the event and see you there on Tues 27th Jan.
Apple’s newly launched Mac Book Wheel looks promising.
http://tinyurl.com/8r3pxh
2009 will see continued massive investment in infrastructure- particularly roads, railways, public transport, and ports- renewable energy, and lots of cool, new environmental stuff like water conservation and recycling, and general rural development in China. Might be a good idea for Kiwi companies with innovative stuff to offer in those areas to look China-wards.
I would also not be surprised to see stricter limits put on online speech in China, and depending how the economy goes and how China is affected, both the hyper-nationalist “angry youth” and those dumb enough to question government policy running into some very solid walls.
Stability will be maintained at all costs.
Interesting to note that China is embarking on a huge solar power development.
http://wangbo.blogtown.co.nz/2009/01/08/solar-power-in-yanqing/
Yep, and wind, too, especially in Gansu Province, although there’s plenty of potential wind and solar in Xinjiang, the Tibet-Qinghai Plateau and Inner Mongolia as well.
I predict that mobile internet will finally become mainstream. many services will realise that potential and start pushing into the mobile market.
… written on an iPhone
Definitely agree with the prediction about semantic web apps. I especially see this happening in certain verticals – e.g. Jinni (http://www.jinni.com), semantic search for film.
Hi Phoebe. Great looking site and cool concept. Following you on Twitter now.
Nice to meet you tonight Paul – it was a fun evening!