It's Prediction Time

By Tony Clark, 2-Dooz Inc. – January 7, 2013 (Original Publication Date) 

The New Year brings with it an opportunity to do a timely consult of my trusty high tech crystal ball.  In this week’s Strategy Talk, I reveal three macro trends that I believe will respectively take center stage in mobile, cloud, and nanotechnology.

Mobile Display Wars

While the operating system, number of available apps, size of display, physical dimensions of the device, and/or weight will continue to be key determining factors for both smart phone and tablet computer market share success, I believe that a primary battle ground in 2013 will be the display resolution.  Apple started the competitors down this path with the introduction of the Retina display.  This year, display resolution will be a key way for all manufacturers to differentiate their products.  In addition to high definition (HD) claims, by the end of the year consumers will be sensitized to the importance of response time, contrast ratio and pixel density.  And, in spite of the fact that the human eye is incapable of discerning differences in resolution beyond a certain point, this will not deter smart phone manufacturers from producing displays that exceed 1080p in mobile devices.

Clouds Adoption Rate Slows

Cloud (and social) dominated the discussion in 2012.  In 2013, clouds will move beyond the hype phase and into the implementation reality phase.  As customers begin to grapple with important concerns regarding cloud outages, security holes, and the lack of interoperability between cloud providers (which incidentally facilitates customer lock-in by inhibiting movement from one cloud to another), I predict there will be a slowdown in the cloud adoption rate.  Contributing to the slowdown will be more high profile failures like the Amazon-Netflix Christmas Eve outage.  Customers will be reminded that clouds can bring storms.

Medical Testing Enters Hyper Innovation Phase

The days of having to take time out of a busy day to go to a local laboratory to have blood drawn for medical testing could soon be a thing of the past.  In 2013, I expect the accelerated development of nanotechnology based biosensors that make it possible to detect small concentrations of target substances, e.g., cancer specific proteins and hormones, in saliva.  This will usher in a new era of non-invasive and potentially more cost effective medical testing, which should inch us forward towards the “medical tricorder” used by doctors in the fictional Star Trek series.  Nanotechnology based biosensors will enable a number of new applications which include the remote (and possibly in-home) collection of real time medical data that can be used to assist diagnosis and treatment.

Those are my 2013 predictions.  As always, I invite and look forward to learning what you think.

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