My 2016 Shortlist
Happy first day of the civil year in the Gregorian calendar used by most countries!
Each year I spend the time between December 15th and January 1st to think about a few areas of focus for the coming year.
When I say focus I am referring to my job which is a pretty big part of my life. As a creative technology leader I need to help keep us focused on high growth areas that are as culturally relevant as they are technology wise.
Creative expression, innovative application and attention mining are three vital aspects to what I do daily. So today I am sharing my shortlist with the world. This list has been sanitized for obvious reasons and my personal copy is much more robust.
Sharing my innovation shortlist is my contribution in helping others look at things through a bit of a different lens.
Here we go…
VR: In 2016 making VR will be more popular than consuming VR. This will make everyone nervous until someone makes something so basic and so awesome that consumption is no longer free and forced (NYT). Happens every time. So be on the look out for young companies who are making VR Dev platforms and VR asset management and deployment systems. Then look out for the creators, they are coming.
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Altchain: Altchain (stop now and go look up blockchain) is going to be used for really interesting things outside of Bitcoin. Like car ownership/access, hard to get things, insurance plans, business acquisition, transference of digital items, and much more! Altchain is the ultimate digital, gamified bureaucratic experience. Embrace it.
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Slash Commands: Slack will be THE next big, huge, gigantic social network with tons of services like YELP and GOOGLE vying to be everyone’s favorite Slash Command. Apps and websites are so 2015. 2016 is gonna party with Slash Commands for a bit. The rise of a Social Markup Language is happening https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201259356-Using-slash-commands
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Tech discretion: 2016 is when wearables become invisible. People are going to start to be more discreet with the technology used to power their lives. It’s what you don’t see that will be really helping people. What you do see might just be a decoy. Also look for wearables to be more enterprise focused.
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Uberfied Experiences: Uber officially becomes a lifestyle brand. It knows enough about us now to start getting really smart about where we are going, what we want to be doing or how to bring the party to us… Look out for an UberAI product.
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Cars: Every single car manufacturer is going to announce a driverless model. No one will care, maybe some, but until they are made publicly available and people can get in one and take it for a spin it won’t become a reality. Bill Gates nailed it with this quote: “if GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon.”
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2016 will be the year that the term “Programmatic” gets a new name. Right now it’s like Big Data, no one knows what the hell it is or what it does except those companies who think they do and fail to deliver on its promise. Look out for those young and eager companies looking to own the space and rebrand it as something that can actually deliver value. Hint, it won’t be coming from the ad industry.
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Texting: Text message-based e-commerce and on-demand delivery through private numbers that will be difficult to attain outside of a niche audience. As primitive creatures we tend to want to couple our hunting and gathering instincts with the methods in which net us the best results. Texting works really well, it’s simple and comes standard on most connected devices. It has location based capabilities, it’s fast and we don’t feel like it is being stored on a server somewhere waiting for a robot to pick up the message. Texting is as human as tech gets and we want to preserve and extend that to many things that we do.
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That was just a taste of what is going on in my head. If you want my full list with detailed technical descriptions then I suggest you go find and join a multipool (because your iPad is not strong enough) and start figuring out how to mine the answer to the name of the Slack Channel that will accept the Slash Command that will unlock the full list.
Kidding… that list is personal.
/happynewyear
