Ever since I read “The Art of the Long View” many years back, I have been a big advocate of scenario planning. Scenario plans enable you to ‘begin with the end in mind’ (Covey-speak) so that you can better plan out and orchestrate specific strategies relative to your personal and professional goals.
By having a sense of what tides are rising or falling you can think more crisply about what ‘boat’ in what ‘body of water’ you want to be plotting your course within in the days, weeks and months ahead.
Me personally, the body of water that I am focusing on these days is digital media services; namely, the intersection of rich media, community and advertising/marketing in a mobile broadband enabled world.
Thus, unsurprisingly, my trend watch is decidedly titled towards this arena. What follows are five macro trends that I expect to grow in impact over the course of 2008:
1. Privacy/Personal Data gets its ‘AHA’ moment: There has been a lot of ink spilled over the past couple of years on the topic of privacy, online security and its relationship to our personal data (here’s my swag). Until recently, the topic was sufficiently abstract and complex that the average person did not even ‘know what they did not know.’ That is changing as buckets like “identity theft,” “targeted marketing” and “social networks” become part of our lexicon and provide clear framing from which narratives can be articulated, meaningful policies can be crafted and better products can emerge. This is the 2000-pound elephant on that table the few have intelligently talked about, but they will in the year ahead.
2. Mobile Starts to Look like the Web: There is an analogy about dogs walking on their hind legs. While they can do it for short intervals, no one would ever claim that that is what they were designed to do. Until recently, such has been the story about the web on mobile devices. Clunky interfaces, limited bandwidth, stripped down functionality and proprietary (read: closed) networks have all resulted in the mobile equivalent of the dog walking on its hind legs. That is changing, as Apple’s iPhone has raised the bar not only for handset manufacturers, but service providers as well. Expect to see new classes of web-ready smart phones proliferate the market in 2008. As service providers and handset makers are forced to open up what has historically been a closed platform model, look for new, innovative mobile services to trickle into the market. Also, expect to see mobile marketing and advertising models move out of diapers and into adolescence, powered by the intersection of locative/GPS data, richer device-level media content and meta-information culled from users’ formal and informal social networks.
3. ‘Open’ is the New Black: Everyone talks about the goodness of open platforms, but the Internet and technology industry has generally been dominated by proprietary platforms, walled gardens and closed services/networks. That seems to be changing as the premise of getting third parties to plug into and extend your platform (read: Facebook’s F8, Google Maps API, Google Open Social, Twitter) represents a new ecosystem model that is essentially the opposite of Microsoft’s legendary ‘embrace and extend’ approach. Here the goal is to get others to embrace your platform so that you can extend its utility, thereby increasing your target users’ reason for and return on engagement. This is one trend that could hit a wall and be relegated to faux trend or emerge as a transformative engine for innovation in the year ahead. I am guessing the latter, but worth watching regardless.
4. Convergence Emergence: What do you get when you combine YouTube’s library of sports videos with Yardbarker’s sports information service and integrate it with GTalk into the ESPN360 broadband sports network? Perhaps a great collaborative entertainment service for rotisserie league fanatics (see my past blog post on this topic). Or, imagine a network of virtual DJs programming the music on your iPod touch and serving up other news and information based on your profile of interests and viewing/listening behaviors. In 2008, we will start to see new services emerge that combine your favorite voice, data, video and information services into new-fangled service ‘recipes.’ Convergence has been long anticipated but as of yet undelivered. The combination of open platforms with an endless stream of web sites and web services starts to make convergence ready for prime time in the age of ubiquitous mobile broadband.
5. M&A Heats Up Again: My final trend is not so much of a tech trend as it is an industry driver in the year ahead. My thesis is as follows. Too much funding has led to lots of innovation but too few breakout, financially viable businesses. At the same time, the IPO market has not opened up, and likely won’t in the coming year, forcing many a startup to look for an exit. By the same token, lots of larger companies that once dismissed the Web 2.0 model as a passing fad or a simple feature add are having the ‘come to Jesus’ moment that this trend is a lifecycle problem that they will need to institutionalize into their online strategy. For those late to the party, buying versus building will be a hard requirement, as this is a land grab. For those who have already fallen on their faces in rolling out the 1.0 version of their Web 2.0 strategy, they understand that they lack the manpower and know-how to deliver a credible solution that both meets external market requirements and reconciles internal IT resource constraints in a manner that empowers marketing personnel to win the market battle. Therefore, startups that have built solutions which can be readily customized, administered and optimized by non-technical personnel are likely to find a motivated market to acquire them. I call this the motivated buyer, rational seller scenario.
As I like to say, while I may not be right, at least I am not confused. ;-)
Are there any trends that stand out for you in 2008?
Related Links:
- M&A: More Deals Worth More $$ in Q1 (@ Silicon Valley Insider)