Welcome to the 2nd and final installment of 1 man's perspective on what's to come...
Augmented Reality: Our real life environments are beginning to be augmented by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data. Expect to roll your phone over a restaurant menu to see a picture of the dish on your phone. Click here to see an interesting example of AR.
Klout Power: Klout provides social media analytics to measure a user's influence across his or her social network. Like it or not, anyone involved in social media has a Klout score. Companies can view your Klout score and then determine if you are high-influencing enough to respond to your requests or negative statements. Klout is like a rewards program for the entire web…gain VIP access with a vibrant community and a far reach. Perhaps people will be hired or fired based on their Klout score in the future.
Phablets: A hybrid of a smartphone and a tablet.
Sensors: Sensors are making there way into everything! Eye-tracking sensors in laptops. The latest fitness gadgets have accelerometers and heart-rate monitors. Video game gesture control sensors will continue to grow and get better. New TV sensors that know to pause your show when you leave the room. Car sensors that react to drifting or other traffic. Expect sensors to enrich our lives further.
Social Collectiveness: As social networks become more plentiful, tools that aggregate the data across multiple social platforms for easier viewing (i.e. RebelMouse) will be valuable. As well as tools that aggregate a users data to tell a larger story.
Wearable Multi-tasking: Access notifications, game play, pay with credit card and view content from your phone and its apps on your watch. It's just the beginning but the smartphone friendly watch, Pebble, raised $10 million on Kickstarter which was the most successful of all-time.
Tri-ti-tasking: Technology is literally rewiring the next generation's brains and has enabled multi-tasking so the next logical evolution is doing 3 things at the same time. Hello productivity!
Holograms: Will.i.am on CNN, TuPac on stage and the Japense pop star, Hatsune Miku, who dances with a live band in front of thousands of screaming fans are all holograms and are just the beginning.
2nd Screen Revolution: Many folks consume content on a 2nd screen (smartphone, tablet or laptop) while watching the TV screen. Nintendo's new Wii U game console is betting on a more advanced experience with the use of a second screen and other companies will follow. Some TV shows offer apps that sync with the show using the show's soundtrack to provide character analysis and plot synopsis in real-time.
The Millennials continue to drive many of these innovations so embrace these trends to better position your brand for next generation success.
Question: What 2013 trends are you most stoked about?
