Last year I predicted that social media would lose its sizzle. Since then, the bubble has burst for companies such as Facebook, Zynga and Groupon.
The tablet computer market, on the other hand, is booming, voice recognition is becoming a standard feature in new computing devices, and there have been, as I alluded to in 2012, notable cloud-computing failures andsecurity breaches in the past year.
I am glad to have been wrong about LinkedIn. It is a great company with a stellar management team. Also, tablet prices haven’t quite hit the $100 mark in the U.S., as I predicted they would. But I still anticipate they will, and likely very soon.
So, what else lies ahead for 2013? There is nothing as spectacular as the Facebook IPO, at least at this point, but expect gradual technology progressions of greater significance than have been seen in years past. The Post’s Hayley Tsukayama has outlined the trends in tech for the coming year — a year I believe will be one of transition for the sector.This year, expect tech innovators to set the stage to solve global problems, since technologies in fields such as medicine, robotics, artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, 3D printing, and nanomaterials are advancing exponentially. Like the processors in our computers, they are becoming increasingly powerful while their price drops precipitously. This will enable startups to take on problems in fields such as energy, health, education, and security that only government and big research labs previously could.
Most recently, the big rewards have gone to startups developing relatively simple social media platforms and applications. In the upcoming era of exponential technologies, expect the rewards to go to players that solve big, global problems.
Here are the big innovation trends that I believe will gain traction in 2013.