On Saturday, this website turns 10 years old. The changes its writers and editors have witnessed and chronicled have come fast and furious—the creation of Facebook, YouTube and the iPhone; the seemingly inexorable rise of Google and Apple; and the growth, everywhere, of connectivity.

At ReadWrite, we continue to grapple with the deeper implications of technological change. We make annual predictions about the future of technology, many of which have proven prescient and timely. But now, at the verge of ReadWrite's second decade, it makes sense to look even farther forward and imagine what ReadWrite will cover in 2023. Expect to hear a lot about these trends from us in the years to come.

Something To Anticipate

Think of anticipatory systems as really smart artificial intelligence. Computers won't wait for explicit inputs, like search queries; instead, they will draw on internal and external data—your entire history of interactions—to supply context and predict what you'll need. Google Now, the intelligent assistant function on Android, and Apple's Siri provide glimmerings of such functionality today.

A decade from now, anticipatory systems won't just predict your next move; they'll smartly feed data back into the system to improve themselves. There will no longer be a concept of a check-in, for example; some future version of a Foursquare-like app will simply know where you are and for what purpose, and they'll log that and share that appropriately across your social graph, which they will likewise adaptively update as your social connections shift and change.

Kill Your Gadget

We won't own smartphones, tablets, or smart watches. There will be a surfeit of screens at our disposal that roll up into a watchband form or roll out and stiffen to form a screen. Or ring-sized computers will project an image on any available surface. This will have an impact on architecture: White walls will be everywhere, with colors or patterns seen as either an indulgence or a countercultural statement.

Ambient Electricity

Moore's Law, the dictum that processors improve continuously will every generation, will continue to thrum. But instead of using these improvements to process bits faster, we'll harness them to lower power consumption and extend battery life. Meanwhile, innovations like radio-wave battery charging will mean we'll never have to plug things in again.

Park The Car 

Self-driving cars will peak in 2020, when they will start being seen as an inefficient use of resources. Why, for example, do they still have a driver's seat and a steering wheel when no one even remembers how to activate manual driving mode? Post-car vehicles will link themselves into trains on dedicated lanes—or even tracks.

A Nation Of (Unemployed) Programmers 

All those efforts to teach people how to code will succeed past their creators' wild dreams, to the point that it will be hard to find work as a professional coder. Meanwhile, new programming languages will have added so many layers of abstraction that the act of coding will resemble a formal mode of speech—or just a drag-and-drop process that's not much more complicated than downloading an app.

Undersea Data 

We'll be generating and processing unfathomable amounts of data in 10 years. The so-called "cloud" comes to ground in the form of data centers, where all these bits are stored and shuffled. The challenge is finding spots with lots of land and cheap electricity or other means of cooling servers. The answer: the sea.

Google started using ocean water to cool its data centers in 2011. A dozen years later, this will be commonplace—and we'll start putting data centers not just next to the water, but under it.

What Else?

There will be changes born out of current trends that seem obvious. There will also be surprises along the way. One thing, though, I believe will be true of ReadWrite in 2023 as it is now—we will find our way through the change with each other's help, through an interplay and exchange of ideas.

Tell me yours.

The dust has yet to settle in the wake of the contentious International Telecommunications Union's (ITU) conference in Dubai, but its repercussions could spit the Internet into two parts: One free and open one, the other closed and censored, depending on which country you are in. Even here in the U.S., pending legislation could further challenge how citizens communicate online and via phone, and how and by whom those communications be me monitored and retrieved.

Here's your need-to-know: 

ITU Fallout

While the ITU treaty isn't legally binding, it sets a precedent and tone for Internet regulation, warned Ambassador Terry Kramer. Diverging opinions on Internet governance, content regulation and network security forced the United States to refuse to support it (see 5 Reasons Why The U.S. Rejected The ITU Treaty). 

Bottom line, giving sovereign nations the ability to manage and monitor the Internet could result in a splintering of the Web. "The Internet could break up into a series of smaller Internets," said Sean Sullivan, a security advisor for F-Secure Labs. Sullivan echoed Ambassador Kramer's rhetoric about autocratic regimes wishing to take more control of the Internet, "to shift control of the Internet from the geeks, and give it to governments."

Still, it's not clear this will happen. Decisions made at the debates aren't set to take effect until January 2015, and individual governments still have to ratify the decisions. Upcoming 2013 conferences like the WTPF policy forum in May and the IGF forum in the Fall could be opportunities for dissenting governments to change their minds (and policies) about the future of the Web. But most observers see countries like China and Russia working to gain as much online control as possible to silence dissenters and control the spread of information.

FISA: Intercepting Email

In November the Senate Judiciary Committee passed the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), which makes any email more than 180 days old off-limits to law enforcement without a warrant. While this move was hailed by many Internet watchers, a similar bill is becoming a head-scratcher.

The FISA Amendments Act - a little-known law set to expire at the end of this month - grant the U.S. government extensive power to intercept emails and online conversations of people the Feds believe are foreigners — without a warrant. To many observers, it's a back-door loophole to keep tabs on people and get around constitutionally protected rights. The law was originally implemented by the Bush administration in 2008 under the auspices that it could help target foreign targets overseas, but it can also ensnare innocent Americans engaging in harmless communication with foreigners. And detractors have called the bill a violation of the fourth amendment. 

In September 2012, the House approved a 5-year extension of the bill by a vote of 301 to 118. Now the Senate must vote by the end of the year or the authority expires. 

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, wants to put a hold on the bill, meaning it can't be passed by unanimous consent but must go through the full legislative process on the floor. "What he wants is a debate," explained members of Wyden's office. "In return for listing hold, the Senator would ask for shortened debate time, but would seek votes on his amendments regarding ammount of communications accepted and closing backdoor searches."

But it looks like Wyden's not going to get that. In a rushed session Thursday, the Senate rejected three attempts to add privacy safeguards to the amendment. The final vote is slated for later today, and it's expected to be voted down. That means the amendment will create a very major civil rights quandary. And from Reddit to the non-profit digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Web is up in arms.  

Jim Fenton, chief security officer at digital identity service OneID, said this issue encapsulates the tension between personal privacy and law enforcement interests. "How do you determine that a particular person is a foreigner," asked Fenton. "Are there exceptions for people who are foreign [citizens] operating in the U.S.?"

CALEA: Murky Telecom Access

The FISA Amendments issue dovetails to the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), which requires telephone and Voice over IP (VoIP, or Internet telephony) providers to give police the ability to access the content of communications, which includes stored email, also without a warrant.

Obviously, CALEA brings up major questions of hosting location and searches. It's likely that any major email service provider would provide records, but what about servers in your own home? Who would have jurisdiction ?

"Does it matter if you host your email at Gmail or maybe if you're a geek you have your own email service at home," asked security expert Fenton. "A lot of people wouldn't expect different protection for these two situations, but there is. My understanding is [the government] would have to obtain a search warrant for your house in order to obtain the server."

3 More Things To Worry About

In addition to those three big issues, other concerns revolve around whether Congress will revive a version of the failed SOPA bill in 2013. Since the bill's author, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) , was named the next Congress' new chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology committee, it could very well happen. 

On the other hand, it's probably not worth losing sleep over Rep. Darrell Issa (R-California)'s doomed Reddit proposed bill calling for a 2-year moratorium on new Internet legislation. 

But there's another major issue not making headlines that could have a serious impact. Right now Congress is engaged in an inquiry investigating the practices of collecting and selling marketing databases and sales contact lists. It's looking at data collection methods, which Congress plans to use in considering new regulatory legislation.

The results could lead to bills that fundamentally change how data is stored and sold to third-party companies. Or it might not lead to anything but more hot air, as well-funded lobbyists work to convince Congress that more regulation is not needed. 

There's no certainty that any of these regulations will take effect in 2013 - or ever. And even if they do, their effects may turn out to be far different than we expect. But make no mistake, national and international regulations could have profound effect on the Internet in the coming year.

Protect From Without

As the Eastern Seaboard continues to deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, data centers up and down the coast are performing after-action reports on how they could have handled the storm better. When ISPs in Lower Manhattan were down to bucket-brigading diesel fuel up 17 flights of stairs, it may have dawned on them that there should be a better way.

There was, and Hurricane Sandy and other man-made and natural catastrophes should have driven that lesson home: anyone with a mission-critical or even a mission-gee-it-would-be-nice-to-be-on-the-web needs to give serious thought to re-architecting for the cloud. No company is truly safe from the possibility of disaster, so you have to be prepared to get the hell out of the way when trouble comes, and to have a way to get back on your feet if you do get knocked down.

There will be a lot of approaches IT managers can take: site replication, database backup, or a full-on cloud architecture to nimbly jump from one cloud instance to another. Whether the new server is on the next rack or on the other side of the continent, it should be able to be picked up and moved with some notice.

In 2013, I predict, we'll be hearing about more success stories of cloud disaster mitigation than in years past, as IT managers start cluing in on the fact the world is a dangerous place.

Protect From Within

Cloud is a bit paradoxical: on many levels, it's very complicated. Getting compute, storage and application management components configured to work together in an environment that actively provisions itself elastically as workloads change is, well - let's say it's no picnic.

But that's from the admin's point of view. From the user's side of the house, cloud computing can be very easy. Just sign up with Amazon Web Services or some other public cloud, fill in some credit card info and push a few buttons and boom! You've got yourself a website.

That's a pattern seen repeated in companies all over the world. Instead of waiting for the IT folks to finally answer your umpteenth request for a server on which to host the new team blog, just fill out an expense report and fire up an instance on Rackspace or Google. What could be easier?

Unfortunately, there's an even chance that you'll come out looking like the goat just as much as the hero. Sure, you've got your cloud instance up and running, but is it properly configured? More importantly, is it secure?

A lot of people don't realize that when a company like Amazon says its public cloud is secure, they're not talking about the instances themselves -- they're only talking about the infrastructure that supports the cloud instances. So, if you're running a Joomla or Tomcat cloud server to handle some task, it's up to you to lock that server down, says Rand Wacker, VP of CloudPassage.

This kind of thing is what Wacker and his team call "unsanctioned cloud": instances of cloud computing that have been launched by non-IT personnel in order to take advantage of the relative ease of starting a cloud instance.

Unsanctioned clouds are not some abstract concern, Wacker emphasized. When one CloudPassage client started a marketing blog running WordPress on Amazon Web Services, hackers were able to break into the WordPress site and make off with the site admin's login information, credentials the staffer also happened to use for their corporate network. Using the clear shot to the corporate network, the hackers were able to conduct a massive security breach into the company's firewalled infrastructure.

In this instance, the cloud is not at fault; the poor practices of the user are to blame. But the cloud makes it much easier for tech-savvy but not tech-professional workers to spin up servers as needed, providing all sorts of new and interesting problems with which IT managers must contend.

Developers, for instance, can be particularly vulnerable to the problem, since you would think (and so would they) that they know their way around a server.

"They may be IT savvy," Wacker explained, "but they're not security savvy. DevOps guys don't know security, either. They're more interested in automation than IT policies."

Moving forward, IT managers will need to proactively work with employees to make sure they understand that all instances created should follow the IT policies in place for the company. They might, Wacker added, want to build IT-approved instances that will protect cloud-based servers on the same level as the rest of the company.

Unfortunately, this is one of those problems that may get worse before it gets better. Like new drivers, cloud users are going to find out it's a lot harder to drive a car than just start the car. In 2013, we will be seeing more cloud-related breaches until IT departments can get in front of this problem.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

One key reason is that small business optimism is already rising. According to the Fall 2012 Bank of America Small Business Owner Report, more than half of small business owners project sales will grow in the next year, and almost one-third plan to hire. Just 7% expect sales to drop and only 3% plan to lay off employees. And entrepreneurs typically believe they're local economies are doing better than the nation as a whole. (That can't be true for everyone, of course, but it still speaks to increasing optimism.)

That's not all. Some 45% of business owners in a recent Kauffman survey believe consumer demand will grow in 2013. Record sales over Black Friday weekend sales suggest consumers have "frugality fatigue" and are ready to spend again. Consumer debt is falling, the housing market is improving, and even the job market is showing signs of recovery-all of which could increase consumer spending by 3.5% by late 2013, according to Moody's Analytics. With pent-up demand for everything from housing to personal services to travel, there will be plenty of opportunity for small businesses who aren't afraid to seize it.

As always, though, technology trends will make a big difference in determining which businesses will be most successful. Here's what to look for:

1. Death of the desktop? Mobility will increasingly change how we do business. Already, according to The Mobility Edge: CDW's 2012 Small Business Mobility Report, 36% of small business IT managers say some of their employees have replaced a desktop or laptop computer with a smartphone or tablet. An additional 20% predict even more employees will do so by 2014. Adoption of tablets in the workplace is projected to grow a whopping 117% by then, while smartphone adoption at work will surge 33%. Smart entrepreneurs will tap into mobile's potential to work faster, more efficiently and more effectively.

2. Understanding your tech options will be critical. While small businesses recognize the opportunity technology presents, they're often confused about how best to implement it. In a Techaisle study, 54% of small and midsized businesses say their technology "pain points" have increased in the last three years, and that they're most mystified by cloud computing, virtualization, business intelligence, remote managed services and marketing automation.

3. Competition for talent will get tougher. It's never been easy for a small business to compete with big-company salaries, perks and bennies, and in 2013 it will become even more difficult, as employees are eager to search for those greener pastures. That's especially true for technology experts, so small businesses will have to find other ways to meet their tech needs.

4. Outsourcing will become an even better option. Freelancers and contractors, on the other hand, will be easier to find. MBO Partners' second annual State of Independence in America study projects the number of independent workers (contractors, consultants, freelancers or solo-preneurs) will grow from nearly 17 million to 23 million in the next five years. That will make it easier to hire the talent you need on a temporary basis.

5. SoLoMo goes shopping. Social/Local/Mobile is becoming the standard way to shop. People shopping on their mobile devices, "showroomg" (use their phones to compare in-store products with prices online), and use local search to find retailers and social media to find products. In a new study from the Advertising Research Foundation, nearly one-third of shoppers said social media affects their choice of brands; meanwhile, a survey by YP says 40% of consumers use local search daily. Making sure your website is optimized for mobile viewing and (if appropriate) developing a mobile app are the bare minimum of what you need to do in 2013.

6. Connected millennials - and their moms - matter more than ever. Much of the change in shopping behavior is driven by two key consumer groups: Millennials and moms. Both groups are constantly connected, rely on their friends' opinions (as well as those of social rating and recommendation sites) and aren't shy about sharing their own opinions of your business online (and in person). In 2013 it will be more crucial than ever to monitor and reply to what's being said about your business online.

7. Social means more than Facebook. Facebook and Twitter are still the big names in social media, most used by both consumers and businesses. But 2013 could see a shakeup from newer social sites as Pinterest, Tumblr and other visually oriented social media grab the attention of Millennial and younger consumers. And don't rule out Google+: The site's unique visitors grew by 80% in 2012, says a report by NM Incite.

What are we missing? What do you think will matter most in small business technology in 2013?

Traditionally, Microsoft has built itself around the PC, anchoring itself by its core operating systems: Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and now Windows 8. But in the last few years, Microsoft’s Server and Tools division has generated the highest revenue and profits in the company, followed by the traditional pillars of the company, Windows and Business Tools, or Office.

How will Microsoft fare in 2013? Financially and overall, just fine. But be on the lookout for softness in the company's traditional businesses as Microsoft evolves into a services company.

Windows 8: A Mild Flop

Any Microsoft predictions need to start with Windows 8. So let’s get this out of the way: Windows 8 will flop in 2013.

Not hard - the new operating system probably shouldn’t be compared to the catastrophe that was Windows Vista. But Windows 8 will likely be seen as overly ambitious, a risk that many potential customers won't be willing to take. In all, though, Windows 8 will sell slightly fewer copies than Windows 7 during 2013.

That’s not because Windows 8 is bad. It isn’t. To its credit, the new OS hasn’t been plagued with the sort of slowdowns and crashes and user interface mistakes that afflicted Vista. 

But the break from previous version is sharp. Windows 8 doesn’t launch to the desktop, the most familiar interface (and - perhaps to speed the transition to the new user interface - Microsoft is refusing to let users configure it to go direct to the old-style desktop). Years of interacting with smartphones and tablets have taught users how to navigate the Metro interface, and swiping left and right along the main Start screen is easily understood. But most consumers don’t quite seem to get what they need to do when they want to “work,” i.e. use the desktop. The back-and-forth between the desktop and the Start menu, the navigation between apps, the lack of a traditional Start button and other interface changes will frustrate users. Unlike Michael Dell, I see a significant chunk of enterprises still choosing to standardize on Windows 7. 

Typically, Microsoft halts sales of the previous operating system two years after the new version goes on sale, which would mean that Windows 7 would fade away in Oct. 2014. (Windows 7 mainstream support will expire in January 2015.) I think we might see a “toned-down,” more transitional edition/service pack of either Windows 8 (or 9?) that will help consumers shift over to the new OS. 

Basically, what consumers will accept is a Windows 8 tablet interface on top of a Windows 7 desktop environment. They don't have it. Yet.

Surface: A Nice Idea, But...

If Microsoft could deliver a full-fledged Windows 8 experience at the $500 price point of the Surface RT, the company would sell a ton of its new tablets. So far, it's not even trying - the Surface Pro starts at $900.

Windows tablets - from Microsoft or others - will be lumped together with Windows Phone: lovely experience, but without the variety of apps that users are used to on the leading platforms. Sorry, but developers are going to support Android and iOS first, and then maybe Windows and BlackBerry. That leaves Web apps as the saving grace.

In that environment, Surface will survive, but not thrive. Windows tablets from other manufacturers will barely survive. Expect some hardware makers to try a consumption-oriented “Surface Mini” form factor, though, with modest success.

Traditional clamshell laptop form factors will still be the most popular for business, with convertible/detachable hybrid tablet/laptops making headway among consumers. That means it's hard to see a sweet spot for the Surface Pro to catch on.

Finally, Touchscreens will become a standard necessity very quickly. Logitech and other peripheral manufacturers are in trouble. 

Server Tools and Office: Under Pressure, But Still Dominant

At this point, most people use Office because they use Office. It’s a habit. Most consumers don’t really need Office for basic Word processing, but there’s always just a bit of formatting that the free alternatives can’t manage. Businesses, meanwhile, have made Word, Excel and PowerPoint into staples of everyday business life.

There’s no reason any of that will change in 2013. Office for Windows RT and Surface remains one of the compelling selling points for the platform. And, revenue concerns or not, it makes perfect sense for Microsoft to ship Office for the iPad and the Mac. So it no doubt will do just that. It’s in Microsoft’s best interest to keep its .DOC, .PPT, and .XLS formats (and their XML equivalents) front of mind for most of the Web’s population.

It’s also difficult to see Microsoft’s Server and Tools business disintegrating. This has been one of the company’s most stable businesses, and should continue to be so for years to come.

Xbox: The Top Dog’s Getting Long In The Tooth

Will there be an “Xbox 720” by Christmas 2013? Hard to say. But with each passing year (the Xbox turns seven in 2013) the possibility becomes more and more likely. 

Either way, the Xbox is becoming even more important to Microsoft. The Xbox’s function (as a games console) has evolved into an entertainment console. I think we’ll probably see that recognized as a rebranded “Arcade” version, reimagined as a sort of beefed-up Roku. Cloud services remove much of the need for local storage, but the Kinect provides a compelling user interface as well a gaming controller. Microsoft could strip out cost from Kinect, possibly making it audio-only. I think a stripped-down Kinect Arcade bundle is likely.

Kinect for Windows, though a fascinating idea, probably doesn’t as make as much sense, given Windows 8's a touchscreen interface. In general, however, Microsoft will have to stumble badly to allow Sony, Nintendo or others back into the console game. 

Windows Phone: We’re Number Three!

Great product, nice interface, solid hardware. Count me in the camp of people who admire what Microsoft’s done in the smartphone arena. But there’s no way Microsoft unseats either Android or iOS. Instead, Microsoft should hope to become the third option - outpacing RIM's upcoming BlackBerry 10.

Will it? Probably, over time. In the United States, BlackBerry and Symbian are dead ducks.

Microsoft Online: Bing, IE Gain Respectability

It’s probably fairer to say that Microsoft’s online services have already gained respectability, and will continue driving forward in 2013. Bing’s home page is still one of the most attractive sites on the Web, and if people were forced to visit it for every search it would do even better. They're not forced to do that, of course, and Bing continues to trail Google by a large margin.

If that's going to change in 2013, the boost will come from Windows 8. In the new operating system, Mozilla’s Firefox and Google’s Chrome are unwelcome guests, rather than a fundamental part of the OS. And integrating Bing - which has diverged into its own ecosystem, rather than follow Google - will help Microsoft gain share in search. Whether or not Internet Explorer is truly the most popular browser varies by which analyst firm you ask, but IE10 will definitely help grow Microsoft’s presence online.

The tougher question is whether Microsoft’s online division turn a profit in 2013? The answer is No. It will come closer, but that milestone will have to wait.

All the changes should work together to benefit Microsoft’s online ecosystem. The company has brought together a suite of products, from Skype to Microsoft’s Office Web Apps, that can all be tied together. How well Microsoft can monetize them, however, is anyone’s guess.

Put it all together, and 2013 is the year Microsoft doubles down on its pivot away from being a software supplier to being a services provider.

Expect some softness in Windows sales, but continued strength in back-end tools and services. How this all plays out will determine whether 2013 ends with a very different Microsoft perceived as a newly revitalized dominant player or a reeling giant struggling to regain relevance. 

Kedrosky shared six thoughtful insights about what the future is likely to bring. Most of them could be seen as warning signs, but there are some bright spots sprinkled in there as well.

1. Accelerators Will Slow Down

Startup accelerators were a big story in 2012. By the midpoint of the year there were more than 200 accelerators worldwide, attracting twice as many applicants as they did just two years ago. Recently, however, it's become clear that most accelerators were not turning out viable companies. And now we're seeing the first signs of an accelerator slowdown. Y Combinator, the world's leading accelerator, cut its funding to $80,000 from $150,000 per company and reduced its next class to less than 50, down from 84 in the most recent group.

"I think this will turn out to be the peak," Kedrosky said, "But that does not mean things will tail off dramatically" because accelerators are relatively cheap to start. "This move by Y Combinator is significant... This was not a gut decision but one that was empirically driven by the quality of the incoming classes they were seeing. And what they saw happening with their outgoing classes and their propensity to raise funding."

2. The Enterprise Will Strike Back

Revenue. What a concept. It took a few years - and a few thousand failed consumer internet startups - but investors have gone back to the basics and now demand that companies they fund have income, not just a lot of Web users or app downloads. That means more funding for startups targeting the enterprise in 2013, less funding for startups aimed at consumers.

A related trend Kedrosky sees is the return of discipline. "You won't see crazy valuations," he says. "Discipline went out the window the last few years - and it comes back in 2013."

3. The Cash Gap Will Fix the Talent Gap

The toughest job for startups in recent years was not pulling investment but attracting talented people. With funding freely available, companies launched right and left. Combine that with ever-present competition from high-paying tech giants like Facebook, Google and Twitter and you've created a severe talent shortage.

Kedrosky predicts the talent gap will be closed in 2013. "I notice that good startups are now composed of a group of people who two or three years ago would have been out doing their own thing," he said. "Now they're happy to work as team that has a real chance of going somewhere. The reason for that is the cash trade. Cash now versus cash later. It's generally accepted that cash later is going to be a lot harder to come by, whether it's in the form of funding cash or exit cash."

4. Venture Capital Will Rebound

Everyone's talking about the coming Series A funding crunch. Kedrosky thinks it will be eased by the return to the venture market of big investors like pension funds. They've been staying away from venture funding after getting burned in the downturn - but they're beginning to come back.

"That's been the story for the last six years, actually - Limited Partners (LPs) shying away from the asset class," he said. "But I think this is the end of the venture market contraction. I think these LPs will stop cutting their commitment to venture funds because they see it as a lottery ticket in their portfolios. The rate of new venture partnerships getting funded will be the highest in a decade or more next year. As a result, that will change the dynamics in the market fairly materially."

5. Startup Ecosystems Will Go Extinct

Countries from Chile to Turkey have tried to cook up their own startup ecosystems in the past couple of years. Most have discovered just how difficult it is to make a Silicon Valley from scratch. You can't simply choose a local geographic feature, attach the word "Silicon" and wait for the high-tech boom.

"My feeling is that these efforts will prove to have been mis-timed to the market peak," Kedrosky said. "I'm not optimistic about the success of these startup ecosystems and that will begin to show next year. Too often these first attempts are sheer mimicry of what's happening in Silicon Valley. 'Let's do what the U.S. is doing but let's do it years later.' That's not sustainable. It's not the basis for building a fertile ecosystem."

The upside is that a lot of young people got their first taste of entrepreneuring and may very well be more successful the next time around. "This first wave will end badly," Kedrosky says, "but they could go on in the future to do bigger and better things."

6. Big Data Will Crash

Big data startups were a big deal in 2012. But the big data sector is in for a large letdown in 2013, Kedrosky predicted. "We've hit the end of that cycle. We'll soon start to ask, 'Why there were so many startups in big data and how come so many got funded?' People will have post-funding regret in the space."

As clean-tech startups were revealed to be unsuccessful in 2012, Kedrosky forecasted 2013 will be the year that exposes big data startups. "It will be revealed that data alone is not enough for these companies to make money. In the past, the thinking was, 'If I have enough eyeballs I can make money.' That proved to be wrong. In the same way, just having the data will also prove to be wrong in terms of being able to make money... What really matters is having a paying customer."

What follows are 2013 predictions for some of the fastest growing next-generation technologies in enterprise IT. If 2012 seemed like a tumultuous year, then hold on to your hats. Next year is going to be another bumpy ride.

1. Big Data

First up is Big Data. 2013 will see companies continue to spend much more on databases and business intelligence tools to drive innovation and boost operational efficiency. Big Data technologies will have the most impact in the financial industry as well as medical and scientific research. Corporations wanting to deploy business analytics will look to those industries for guidance.

International Data Corp. defines Big Data as new generation "technologies and architectures, designed to economically extract value from very large volumes of a wide variety of data by enabling high-velocity capture, discovery and/or analysis." In 2010, companies spent $3.2 billion worldwide in Big Data technology.

In 2015, Big Data spending will reach $16.9 billion, representing a compound annual growth rate of 40% or about 7 times the growth rate of the overall information and communications technology market, IDC says. Because growth will outpace the supply of talent, companies are expected to look to vendors for cloud-based services that can offload much of the work from inside IT staff.

While software and services are expected to make up the majority of Big Data spending, companies will be spending on infrastructure at a faster rate. Spending on storage will grow the fastest through 2015 with a CAGR of more than 61%, IDC says.

2. Software-Defined Networking

On the networking side, software-defined networking (SND) will enter the refinement process needed before products are ready for production use, according to Forrester. The maturation process will take roughly five years, as SDN components are tied together and technology added for integration with management systems, orchestration software, hypervisor management products and networking protocols. Forrester recommends that companies prepare for industry adoption of SDN by starting training for IT staff in 2013.

3. In-Memory Computing

While watching carefully developments in SDN, many companies are expected to take in-memory computing to the mainstream, with the help of vendors such as SAP and Oracle, Gartner says. "Numerous vendors will deliver in-memory-based solutions over the next two years driving this approach into mainstream use." As the name implies, in-memory computing brings data sets closer to computational engines, replacing the much slower architecture that involves pulling information from a database in a separate server. This opens up the possibility of real-time or near real-time results from transactional and analytical applications running against the same in-memory dataset. A mouthful to be sure, but the process could mean big advancements in how fast companies can analyze and act up on the data they gather.

4. Social Technologies Drives Enteprise Collaboration

In the front office, employees' use of social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, is driving companies to build their own enterprise social networks to give workers secure areas for collaboration and sharing data. In 2013, IDC predicts these networks will move beyond the pilot stage and into production.

Gartner sees a similar trend with enterprise app stores for smartphones and tablets. Faced with vendors limiting stores to specific devices, companies will deliver private application stores to workers by 2014. This will avoid the multiple payment processes and licensing terms that would come from using public stores from vendors.

5. Windows 8 Doesn't Get Traction

On the desktop, Microsoft is not expected to win big in the enterprise with Windows 8 until well after 2013 - if ever. Gartner says 90% of corporations will skip large-scale deployment of the latest version of the operating system through 2015. Most enterprises and their PC management vendors are not ready to deal with the touch interface Microsoft has added to its flagship product. As a result, companies will wait until support for the dramatic OS change becomes widespread in the business technology market.

6. Gamification Wins

Finally, techniques used in building addiction to playing online games will get adopted to boost worker productivity. Measurement of performance, feedback and incentives will be used to engage employees and tie their actions more closely to business outcomes, Gartner says. The worldwide market for gamification technology and services will rise from $242 million this year to $2.8 billion in 2016. Within three years, 40% of the Global 1000 companies will use gaming techniques, a process called gamification, to improve performance and efficiency of their business operations.

Blame Facebook. Blame Groupon and Zynga. All of them had a discouraging year and their flaccid performance caused a lot of investors to cringe and scroll feverishly at their touchscreens in search of enterprise startups to fund.

For perspective on 2012, we talked to Jeff Fagnan, partner at leading venture capital firm Atlas Venture and an investor in early-stage startups since 2000.

"We've seen a pendulum swing in where the early-stage money is going," Fagnan said. "I don't know if we saw a full-scale shift among the entrepreneurs themselves away from the consumer to the enterprise but I did start to see a blurring between the two spaces. There is no shortage of interesting consumer Internet ideas that will get funded, but I did really see a shift in the public mentality and VC mentality away from the consumer side."

Series A, Not to B

 The 2012 Bad-Timing Award goes to those founders who launched consumer startups - and to the investors who funded them. A lot of these companies will not land follow-on rounds. So where do they go from there? Some may join forces, because the constraint in today's market is talent more than money.

On the other hand, "some people will say, 'I'm done. I've got a failed startup. I'm going back to work at Google,'" Fagnan said. "There is huge amount of seed velocity and there can only be so many Series A companies, so there will be a lot of seed startups that don't make the leap."

Worse, that leap is harder than ever, because the bar has been raised. A lot of companies have been funded, a few have gained traction and soared - and made the rest appear insignificant by comparison.

Touched by an Angel

AngelList transformed the startup landscape in 2012. The site, which enables startups to connect with investors and talent, has channeled more than $2 billion in funding for early-stage innovation. It has facilitated over 20,000 talent matches.

AngelList has demystified the black box of venture capital and flattened the old geographic barriers to funding. "Sitting here in New England, I used to have a hard time hearing about startups in Calgary or Louisville," Fagnan said (Disclosure: Fagnan is an investor in AngelList). "Now, suddenly, I hear about them, because they're presented in a taxonomy and social graph that I recognize. Tech entrepreneurship used to be this coastal phenomenon of the Bay Area and Boston. AngelList is democratizing the angel universe across geographies."

Crowding In

By some estimates, crowdfunding platforms will one day provide startups with as much as $300 billion, ten times the amount now deployed in the venture sector. Crowdfunding is not there yet, but the total will still hit$3 billion this year, says Crowdsourcing.org, with the crowdfunding market growing at an annual rate of 63%.

"That is hugely exciting," Fagnan said. "Yes, some people say it's bad for VCs. But crowdfunding s is good for society in terms of creating hell of lot more innovation and entrepreneurship."

Desperately Seeking Talent

The final big startup story for 2012 is talent. It's now the coin of the startup realm, as attracting good people has become more difficult than getting investment. It's simple supply and demand. Thousands of startups are launching and hiring, at the same time that giants like Google, Twitter and Facebook are hoovering up any and all competent tech people.

"The talent issue has been going on for a few years but this year was the most challenging and severe," Fagnan noted. "It definitely took the cake."

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

When thinking about the future of data centers, the problem is one of scale. For the past few decades, relational databases and the attendant hardware that runs them have been able to manage pretty much anything a company could throw at them, but those days are coming to an end.

When Relational Ruled The Land

In the beginning, and for the first 20 years or so, data was heavily transactional, and was managed in discrete and very secure ways. Speed was less important than making sure the data was safe as houses.

In the 1990s, data began to be used in a slightly different way, as comapnies placed analytical demands on the data being gathered. Instead of being retreived in discrete packages, data became as a strategic asset to be analyzed, leading to the disciplines of business intelligence. Databases grew into massive data warehouses, and parallel querying arose as the only way to effectively manage the staggering workloads placed on information technology.

Through the early years of electronic data, growth in the volume of data may have been rapid, but data tools and infrastructure were pretty much able to keep pace.

That's not so true anymore. Software soon will not be able to cope with the overwhelming volume of data being generated, says Mike Hoskins, chief technology officer of Pervasive Software. What's coming is a real break in how data is managed.

Breaking The Old Model

To give an idea of what kind of scale we're talking about, Hoskins points to U.S. retailer Wal-Mart's estimated 1-petabyte data store.

"That's the accumulation of 40 years of Wal-Mart sized business," he said. "Facebook? Facebook generates that much data in a week."

There's always a collection of data behind each transaction. But in e-commerce today, a customer can be clicking around quite a bit before buying, which leads to useful data sets tens, hundreds or thousands of times larger than "so-and-so bought widget X with credit card Y." Add the fact that the machines handling these activities are also recording machine-to-machine transactions, and the data workload explodes beyond the capacity of any traditional data center. 

"We are reaching the end of the useful life" of our data centers, Hoskins said. "The bottom line is, it's a death march."

Even if conventional software could manage this explosion, no company could afford it. Not to mention the energy costs invovled in buying, running and cooling the hardware.

Indeed, it is innovation in hardware that's going to provide the evolutionary break that Big Data requires. Servers with ARM-based processors, which absorb something like 20 times less power than Intel-based processors, are the next wave in data center infrastructure. Lower power requirements, after all, mean less resistance and less heat. Less heat means less money wasted on cooling and the ability to compress ARM-based systems closer together.

As energy and general hardware costs coem down, hardware is lined up to take care of the new data workloads of this new massive scale of data.

First Hardware - Then Software

On the software side, Big Data will increasingly be handled by Hadoop systems that can store data and manage and analyze Facebook-scale loads.

If you're wondering why this is supposed to be big news, think about it this way: Relational databases have been handling data of all shapes and sizes for decades, and now there will be a certain level of data that the traditional data center architecture will simply be unable to handle. It's the first stratification of data management. 

On one level of data management, relational databases will still be around, supporting smaller, less complex and more tactical workloads. But on this new level, whole new architectures will be created to deal with this scale.

What's The Data Center Endgame?

This half-way approach is not the end game, though.

Eventually, Hoskins believes, tools will be built into the Hadoop framework that will enable data managers to run applications and analysis right where the data lives, inside the Hadoop clusters.

It's no accident then that the latest iteration of one of Hadoop's core components - MapReduce 2.0, code-named YARN - includes the beginnings of a framework that will let developers build exactly those kinds of tools inside Hadoop. This is something that the VP of Apache Hadoop Arun Murthy confirmed to me early this year at the Strata Conference in Santa Clara, California. When the YARN application framework is robust enough, Hadoop will be able to let developers code those applications.

This will be the new way of working with data as it gets too big for relational databases to handle: a new architecture of low-cost, low-power servers that will keep applications and data as close to each other as possible, in order to maximize efficiency and speed.

"Relational database technology has had a good run," Hoskins said. But the days of the relational database being a part of every data solution are fading fast, as a new kind of data center becomes the new sheriff in town.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Tablet gaming is still mostly Angry Birds, the big titles are incremental improvements - nothing earth-shattering. And E3 was pretty dull, too.

2013 promises to be more interesting. It will still be a transitional year for the industry, but those transitions will come faster and be a lot more obvious. Here's what to look for:

1. Sony Will Continue To Flounder

Nintendo's 3DS outsold the Playstation Vita 46-to-1 from November 5 to November 11. One more time: 46-to-1.There are plenty of reasons for that (the game catalog being the biggest), but the upshot is that Nintendo is crushing Sony in an already-brutal handheld market. Sony's PS3 lineup isn't doing much better, failing to generate any mojo in its later years.

The PS4 is still far, far away, and despite a predicted return to profitability, Sony as a whole is still in pretty rough shape. Beyond the usual franchise previews at E3 and some teasers about the PS4, don't expect to hear a lot from Sony next year. 2013 is about regrouping for one last big shot.

2. Free-to-Play (F2P) - And Some High-Profile Failures

The trend of Free-to-Play games is inevitable, but it's going to force developers to think – and build – differently. The frontloaded revenue of unit sales allows developers to go nuts in ways that Free-to-Play doesn't. That's fine for an indie shop building a small game and trying to make money on in-game sales, but the AAA publishers used to gorgeous cutscenes, pristine graphics and endless hours of linear content available at launch could find themselves in a bind. Creating Call of Duty isn't cheap.

It's guaranteed that someone will fail to learn from the Star Wars: The Old Republic flop (and that was with retail sales) and will overbuild a F2P ghost town.The good side is that, by the end of the year, we'll see a renewed focus on storytelling, with nonlinear narratives that encourage multiplayer cooperation and replay – the kinds of behavior that forgive corner-cutting elsewhere and ultimately lead to the in-game purchases the F2P model requires.

3. The Ouya Changes Everything, Even If It Fizzles

The Ouya, Kickstarter's darling, will launch on schedule, with a host of titles, a great price point and a ton of fan support. While the GameStop, in the short term.

4. The Resale Market Lives Another Year

Digital downloads are already having an effect on the market for used games, but with no new XBox or Playstation on the horizon, there will still be plenty of low-cost playthrough on existing systems. That means a lot of swapping through back catalogs and playing the games you missed the first time around. That's good news for a banged-up GameStop, in the short term at least.

5. Augmented Reality Takes Off

Back in 2009, ReadWrite readers already knew Augmented Reality would be a big deal. Sony's Wonderbook was an interesting (if limited) foray into AR gaming in 2012, but the real push will be on the mobile side. 2012's AR Defender 2 (trailer video below) was a cool new take on tower defense, but 2013 will be focused on getting us outdoors.

Plan to see a slew of location-based mobile games like Ingress that also add full AR via smartphone cameras. Primitive-but-cool combat and cooperative mechanics will show up, as well. Just don't step into traffic while you're playing, and look out for the cops. 

And Microsoft did gear up and execute on a series of milestones: Windows 8, the Surface tablet, Windows RT, Windows Phone 8, Windows Server 2012, and Office 2013 (at least within Surface). But what are the big trends behind those headlines? What's really shaping Microsoft right now?

1. The Headline: Windows 8

Beginning in February 2012, Microsoft launched the Consumer Preview of Windows 8, followed by the Release Preview of Windows 8 on May 31. Microsoft was out in front of reporters and analysts, explaining via blog posts how it built Windows 8 and what its goals were. The company touted how Windows 8 was built for a variety of screen sizes and delved into the touch keyboard through discussions of the new apps. But Microsoft has been surprisingly cagey about Windows 8’s success so far: We won’t really find out the final results until January, when Microsoft reveals its sales numbers as part of its first-quarter results.

1a. The Real Trend: Metro

If there was one word that summed up Microsoft during 2012, it’s this: Unity. The Consumer Preview of Windows 8 ushered in the “Metro” interface that will define this generation of Microsoft’s products. Flat, but bright, iconic and ambitious, with a reliance on typography rather than icons, the Metro interface (now referred to, unofficially, as the “Microsoft design language”) was quickly adopted across Microsoft’s other product lines, most notably within Windows Phone, Microsoft’s Web Apps, and sites like MSN.

2. The Headline: Surface

Microsoft’s big reveal of the Surface tablet in the summer was a masterpiece of temptation: a slick demo, a quick hands-on with the product, then out the door, appetites whetted. Microsoft’s refusal to discuss pricing or even allow a hands-on until days before the product was actually released forced many buyers to pre-order a Surface sight unseen. That, combined with the uncertainty around the Windows RT operating system used on the base model Surface (how close was it to Windows 8? How did Metro apps work? Was Office RT really Office?) probably added too many questions to Surface to make it a real success, although it “sold out” soon after launch. Still, like Google’s Nexus line, the Surface launch taught us that consumers prefer the hardware that the ecosystem builder “owns.” So far, third-party Windows 8 tablets seem to have gained even less traction.

2a. The Real Trend: Owning Your Own Platform

As ReadWrite noted in July, a key lament of ecosystem control is designing the hardware, software and services so that all three work together in a unified whole. Apple does this with the iPhone, iOS and iCloud; with Google’s purchase of Motorola, it can do the same. Until Microsoft decided to build Surface, however, it lacked the hardware component. Time will tell how Surface fares (the price still seems a bit high) but Microsoft has all the pieces of the puzzle in place to control its destiny.

3. The Headline: Windows Phone 8

Living with the HTC Windows Phone 8X for a month after its October launch taught me two things: Windows Phone 8 is a bright, beautiful mobile operating system, and that it deserves more traction. Yes, there was the “smoked by Windows Phone” viral efforts. But almost more than Windows 8, Windows Phone feels modern and connected, and Live Tile integration makes it fast and easy to use. So far, the general perception is that from a quality perspective, at least, Windows Phone 8 belongs in the same category as Google’s Android and iOS. But from a sales perspective, Windows Phone 8 isn't really close to competing with the market leaders.

3a. The Real Trend: Apps And The Web

Unfortunately, apps still remain the Achilles heel of Windows Phone 8 - and, if you consider Windows RT or Metro apps in the same category - of Windows 8 on PCs and tablets as well. Microsoft has made a valiant effort to convince users and developers that optimized apps like “Contre Jour” are the wave of the future, even as detractors sniff that Microsoft’s Web browsers are the least standards-compliant of all. If Microsoft can convince users that Web apps fill the bill, then it can whitewash any apps deficiency. But critics have also loudly begged for Facebook to build an app, rather than an HTML5 mobile page. So far, Microsoft is on the losing side of this trend.

4. The Headline: Office 2013

As the name suggests, Office 2013 is a 2013 product, at least for consumers. Microsoft began making its versions of Office 2013 available to businesses in early December.  But when Windows RT launched with Surface, one of its more potent features was the inclusion of a “preview” of Office 2013 Home and Student, that quickly morphed into a final version. ReadWrite has complained about the inadequacy of Microsoft’s Office Web Apps, but Office 2013 has been well-reviewed; it just costs more. The year ended with rumors that Microsoft would begin selling Office for the iPad and iPhone, a development that looks increasingly more likely as time goes by.

4a. The Real Trend: Office 365 Subscriptions

Subscriptions. The cloud. They go hand in hand. By pricing Office 365 subscriptions more cheaply than the standalone editions, Microsoft has encouraged consumers to bury their Office payments as a recurring charge on their credit card, rather than as a major purchasing decision to agonize over. Google’s cloud services have made save-all-the-time, run-anywhere cloud office suites indispensible, and Microsoft, no dummy, has embraced the concept whole-heartedly.

5. The Headline: Windows Server 2012

Unless you’re an IT geek, chances are that Windows Server was one of the least interesting Microsoft announcements this year. But for IT administrators, the release of Windows Server 2012 on Sept. 4 was an important milestone. Boasting improved virtualization (Hyper-V) capabilities, the new ReFS file system, and improvements to Active Directory, Windows Server also simplified the number of versions, consolidating them to essentially three: Foundation, Standard and Datacenter.

5a. The Real Trend: Enterprise Is The Place To Be

From IBM ditching its ThinkPad and computer hardware business in favor of enterprise services to Dell’s transition away from “Dude, you’re getting a Dell,” the fact is that tech vendors are increasingly looking to stable, high-value, recurring contract services. Microsoft’s Server and Tools business isn’t Microsoft’s most profitable - that’s the Business Division, with about twice the profits of the server business - but both share high-margin subscription business models. And with more and more users turning to tablets, the emphasis is shifting to the datacenters powering the cloud services that connect these portable devices. Microsoft certainly isn’t alone here, but it's making a big effort to be a significant player.

Conclusion

Say what you will about the quality, utility and pricing of the products and services Microsoft launched in 2012. But recognize that those launches pretty much all went smoothly, without major availability issues, bugs or other glitches. We’ll learn the final results - revenues and profits - in the quarters to come. Microsoft has talked optimistically about its successes all year. Come January 2012, we’ll see how well all of Microsoft's hard work really paid off.

IBM's Five in Five

IBM's progress toward cognitive computing is seen in the company's annual end-of-year predictions. Rather than its usual practice of prognosticating on where five technologies will be in five years, this year's Five in Five focuses on innovations that make it possible for computers to experience each of the five senses.

The projections mark the very beginning of what will be a long journey toward cognitive computing. The first step in building machines ablet to behave, think and interact like humans is to give them the same sensory abilities. That way computers can understand their environment, learn from it and act upon it. For example, if a robot could hear a train's whistle and feel the vibration on the tracks, it might be able to figure out that a locomotive is coming and get out of the way.

The Five Senses

Touch: IBM also expects smartphones and tablets to communicate using haptics, nonverbal communication that enables people to experience how an object feels. Haptic feedback is already use to for many things, including to provide tactile sensation when typing on a glass keyboard, but that's only the beginning. Eventually, devices pointed to an ecommerce site could vibrate to simulate the feel of a fabric’s weave, for example. (Click on the images to download the infographics.)

Sight: Vision will get an upgrade, too. IBM believes computers will be able to identify images and understand what they mean without the use of tags. This will lead to systems that can help doctors analyze X-ray pictures, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine, ultrasound or computerized tomography scans.

Hearing: There will also be improvements in computers' ability to hear and understand sound. Greater sensitivity to sound pressure, vibrations and waves could lead to more-accurate landslide warnings, for example.

Taste: Computers with virtual taste buds will be able to calculate flavor, according to IBM, helping chefs improve recipes or create new ones. The systems will break down ingredients to their respective chemicals and calculate their interactions with neural sensors in a person's tongue and nose.

Smell: And, finally, according to IBM, computers will have an acute sense of smell in order to diagnose from a person's breath a coming cold, liver and kidney disorders, diabetes and tuberculosis. Similar to how a Breathalyzer detects alcohol, the computer will be able to check for molecular biomarkers pointing to diseases.

IBM believes it can blend the sensory innovations in computing with mobile devices, cloud computing and social media to create, "an unbounded set of possibilities in terms of what we can do," Kerrie Holley, an IBM research fellow, told ReadWrite.

How We'll Use Cognitive Computing

In time, cognitive computing will be able to do what people don't do well, such as understand the interactions of changing elements in huge systems. Examples include the global economy or weather patterns. With the help of a thinking, sensory-aware machine, we'll be able to cut through the complexity of these systems, helping us make more-accurate predictions and anticipate the consequences of particular actions.

In addition, cognitive systems can help us separate our personal prejudices and egos from the facts in trying to solve a problem.

"The machines will be more rational and analytic," Bernard Meyerson, chief innovation officer at IBM, said in a blog post. "We’ll provide the judgment, empathy, moral compass and creativity."

Think of it this way: The human-digital relationship will mirror the extraordinarily effective partnership enjoyed by Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock on Star Trek. 

How Windows 8 will fare in the enterprise depends on how you define enterprise computing. What defines the enterprise is rapidly changing, thanks to Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and Corporate-Owned, Personally Enabled (COPE) policies that are expanding client devices beyond the worker's desktop machine to include tablets and smartphones.

Breaking down those segmenst, we can grade Windows 8 chances of enterprise success in 2013:

Traditional Desktop: C-

It's easy to point a finger and laugh at Microsoft for throwing such a radical departure into the market. With echoes of Microsoft's history of  Fear-Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) campaigns warning that "it's too hard learn a new interface," many observers woudl find more than a little schadenfreude in watching Windows 8 crash and burn in the enterprise like Vista did.

The obvious issue is that enterprise IT - and enterprise workers - are still trying to wrap their heads around the interface formerly known as Metro. And trying to figure out how big their training budgets would have to be to re-train workers to use it. 

But it's not just a new interface. It's what that new interface represents. In an effort to make be more of a social platform, Windows 8 incorporates tiles and applets to connect users to news, social feeds and other info. IT managers, though, tend to read "social" as "distractions from work." 

So why not give Microsoft the failing grade it seems to deserve? One word: SharePoint. Specifically, the SharePoint 2013 collaboration platform, which will have more social tools built into it when released.

When most people look at Metro, they immediately see an interface geared for tablets and smartphones. And that's true. But Microsoft is not dumb - it had something else in mind with this desktop. Expect SharePoint to have hooks that help enterprise users run news feeds from SharePoint 2013 about document collaboration, company news and upcoming appointments. In that context, "social" could mean "getting more work done."

When you include SharePoint or some other enterprise content management system, Windows 8's desktop grade has to account for  potential for growth in this area. As social enterprise software grows, Windows 8 may be the best platform on which it will run.

Mobile Devices: B

According to Goldman Sachs, if you add up all of the consumer computing devices in the world, not just the PCs and laptops, but the phones and tablets too, Microsoft has just 20% of the world consumer market share - where it once dominated with 97%.

That's a crazy drop, very much attributable to the rise of Android and iOS devices, with some help from BlackBerry, Symbian and Bada along the way.

So why does Windows 8 earn a B in a sector where it is clearly yet not doing that well? This is about enterprise deployments, and when comparing Android vs. iOS vs. Windows 8 devices as part of a mobile strategy, enterprises are likely to give a lot of weight to Windows 8 machines.

The reason, of course, is application compatibility. As cool as iOS and Android devices are, there's still some work to be done to get these devices to talk to every enterprise service. It's getting better all the time, which supports Dan Rowinski's prediction about Apple in the enterprise. But right now, Windows 8's near-seamless compatibility with existing Windows applications is something that enterprise managers can't ignore.

Is compatibility alone enough? No.

Microsoft and other hardware vendors need to release a very hot and not-so-expensive device to make this all work. If enteprise users don't want to use Windows 8 devices, their compatability won't matter much The Surface looks cool enough to be that device, but the Windows RT version isn't fully compatible, and the Windows 8 Pro version is too expensive.

Remember, we're grading Windows 8's enterprise potential, not where it is today (that would be an incomplete, naturally). There are a lot of ifs involved in Windows 8 earning even this middling report card for 2013. If social enterprise takes off. If there's a really hot Windows 8 mobile device... But given the task facing Windows 8 in the business word, even the possibility of success is worth a lot.

Note: This lede for this article was updated to reflect a more accurate estimation of Windows 8 licenses sold.

That said, the ReadWrite team couldn't resist the year-end opportunity to gaze into 2013 and come up with 14 things we just know are stone-cold locks to come true in the next 12 months, split evenly between consumer and business technology. In fact, this is just the first set of end-of-the-year predictions and wrap-ups we're putting together on a wide variety of important technologies. Look for them as 2012 winds down.

In the meantime, we absolutely guarantee that every one of these predictions will come true in 2013 … unless, of course, things change. Then all bets are off.

Consumer Predictions

Free-to-Play (F2P) Gaming Goes Mainstream: No longer relegated to tiny little casual and mobile games, the free-to-play concept will expand with at least one big-budget, high-profile, AAA franchise game competing with the best the industry has to offer. Instead of demanding big-bucks up front, though, this game will try to recover its investment via advertisements and in-game purchases. If it succeeds, it will change the way games are sold forever. - Cormac Foster

Louder Social Din Opens Opportunity For Aggregators: The social media din will get even louder and harder to understand. Aggregators that help curate these competing streams and tie together disparate services will become the new social media power brokers. - Taylor Hatmaker

Social Media Erases the Line Between Citizens and Journalists: Real-time social platforms will continue to amplify the voices of citizen journalists around the world, all but dissolving the line between the news as we knew it and the relevance and urgency of crowdsourced reporting.- Taylor Hatmaker

Facebook Buys Something Big: Expect some big moves - and at least one really big acquisition - from Facebook as the company tries to make up for lost time on monetization and mobile. It could be Microsoft's Atlas or some other ad platform. - Taylor Hatmaker

Twitter Gets Competition: Services like App.net, Branch and Medium will gain traction, stretching our collective attention spans beyond the mental claustrophobia of 140-character micro-thoughts. Google+ may be a joke now, but the so-called social ghost town will chug steadily into 2013 as Google patiently plays the long game, bringing its Web of products even deeper into the fold. - Taylor Hatmaker

Mobile Security Meltdown: Security experts have been warning about mobile security vulnerabilities for years, but no one has really been listening. That will change in 2013 when a massive security issue plagues one or mobile platforms, stealing personal information, bricking phones and changing the way people use their devices. - Fredric Paul

Apple Will Release a Television Set: In the spring of 2013 we will see a genuine Apple television, not just the little streaming box that is currently known as Apple TV. The opportunity to make a big splash in the time between big tech conferences like the Consumer Electronics Show, Mobile World Congress and South by Southwest means we should look for the announcement in March. - Dan Rowinski

Enterprise Predictions

The Enterprise Strikes Back: 2013 will see a continuing slump in startups that target consumer categories like social media and mobile and renewed strength in startups aimed at the enterprise. As venture capitalists come down from the bubbly days of Facebook, Zynga and Groupon, they'll return to their senses and invest in companies that emphasize solid fundamentals, like paying customers and profits. - Tim Devaney and Tom Stein

The Enterprise Inflates a Bubble: The shift to enterprise is good news and bad news. The good news is the Valley will get back to solving real problems. The bad news is we're going to see a huge bubble in B2B startups just like the one that just popped in B2C. By this time next year we'll all be wringing our hands again, wondering what happened. - Dan Lyons

Governments Tighten Their Grip on the Internet: This year set the table for the government trying to regulate the Internet, with the SOPA and PIPA piracy controversies in the US, and ACTA in Europe. In 2013, a new mutation of the Stop Online Piracy Act will be duked out in Congress. Internationally, fallout from the United Nations-sanctioned International Telecommunication Union's World Conference On International Telecommunications will likely cede more regulatory power to governments around the world, threatening to disrupt the Web's very infrastructure. - Adam Popescu

Apple Cracks the Enterprise: In 2013, driven to the brink by the seismic changes in Windows 8, the difficulty of supporting Windows RT, and lackluster Windows 8 tablets, enterprises will adopt Apple devices with orders in the tens of thousands of units. This won't be the end of Microsoft, but it will put the company back on the defensive after a year of innovation. - Jon Mitchell

Cloud Rules: The early adoption phase of cloud computing is just about over. Up until now, many cloud deployments have been the purview of small capital-poor startups and department-level teams who need resources faster than corporate procurement can move. In 2013 we will see much broader adoption of the cloud across the entire enterprise, as the cost-benefits of elastic computing become too attractive to ignore. Expect some major deployment announcements as OpenStack-based products become more prolific and Amazon Web Services and CloudStack rise to meet the challenge. - Brian Proffitt

Big Data Consolidates: Big Data - defined as companies trying to glean useful insights from vast amounts of data - will be driven by massive investments by large corporations. With all that cash sloshing around, we'll see a big uptick in merger and acquisition activity as traditional tech vendors put big-data startups on their shoping lists. - Antone Gonsalves

Google Will Become an ISP: After a successful trial run with Google Fiber in Kansas City, Google will reveal pricing and options for Google Fiber Internet service in select U.S. cities by the end of 2013. The offering won't have a mobile data component, just home and business Internet, VOIP, and TV. It will seem like a very good deal compared to existing ISPs. - Jon Mitchell

There you have it, 14 can't-miss technology predictions for 2013. Stay tuned for deeper dives into the technologies and trends that will shape our future in the coming year. 

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Due to its size and timing as the dominant generation during the spectacular rise of information technology, Baby Boomers will continue to have an out-sized influence on technology use and innovation.

That sweater will have been found on Pinterest and bought online, and that chess game will be played in the cloud against a brilliant opponent from Kiribati who gramps met in a chat room.

These are the kinds of things Baby Boomers have been doing and there's no reason to think they're going to slow down, says Dr. Karen Riggs, professor of media studies at Ohio University.

The way Boomers, which the U.S. Census Bureau defines as anyone born between 1946 and 1964, adjust the world around them is a big part of why they approach technology so differently from their forebears, the Silent Generation (1927-1945) and the Greatest Generation (1900-1926).

Here's A Nickel, Get Yourself A Real PDA, Kid

The biggest difference between the Baby Boomers and the Greatest Generation, Riggs explained, is work. The Boomer generation is the first where work outside the home became so prevalent for men and women. The Boomers also saw the exploding rise of technology in the workplace just as they were entering their mid-30s and -40s. This is why so many Boomers are technologically adept despite not having grown up with technology.

"We are expected to at least learn some of the basics of computers at the office," Riggs said. But for the older generations, "a lot of people were left behind."

Because of this relatively early introduction to personal technology, Boomers are actually more tech savvy as a whole than some of their descendants, because they paid their dues on Windows 95 and PalmPilots. They "get" today's technology more than you would expect, because they've seen and worked with earlier attempts.

As the author of Granny @ Work: Age and Technology on the Job in America, Riggs is familiar with how the aging population functions in the workplace. Their adoption of technology tends to be of necessity, especially now that Boomers find themselves competing with Generation X (1965-1983) and Millennials (1984-2002) in the workplace.

"Baby Boomers are the quintessential early adopters," Riggs emphasized, though they are discriminating. Boomers are initially more likely to take up core technologies and services like texting, Facebook and email than cutting edge products (to them) like Foursquare and other location-based services.

Boomers Can Afford It

Boomers are also less stingy than their ancestors, Riggs, who identified herself as a Boomer, said. "We are willing to spend money where our parents aren't." Sometimes, she added, to excess. "It's common to spend money on toys."

Because of this tendency to spend (though Riggs was careful to note that a lot depended on socio-economic factors) and Boomers' tendency to move homes, devices like tablets and smartphones were obvious hits with them. Boomers also like things that are straightforward and utilitarian, which explains why services such as Flipboard, Evernote and Pinterest get a lot of Boomer attention.

The Loudest Generation

Finally, Boomers are very good at communication. They are adept at interacting with their elders on a personal level and then turning around and gadgeting up to talk to their kids and grandkids.

"Boomers are used to being heard," Riggs added. They know what they want and aren't afraid, typically to go after it. That won't change as they leave the workforce. "Retirement is looked upon as an opportunity," Riggs explained. "The seduction and necessity of technology is a big part of making that opportunity happen."

With their big spending power and a drive to continue to push forward, Boomers will hugely impact services and device creation. Tech innovators who can create simple interfaces and intuitive devices should continue to prosper with Boomers in the workforce and in their personal lives.

Lead image by Brian Proffitt. Other images courtesy of Shutterstock.

Predicting a Post-App Economy

The mobile Post-App Economy would be fundamentally social, browser-based and content-driven. 

For now, we remain firmly entrenched in the era of the App Economy, dominated by native and hybrid offerings through the Apple App Store, Android Google Play, Windows Phone Marketplace and BlackBerry App World. But developers looking to circumvent the application store ecosystem are working toward a mobile Web-driven economy where the app stores are marginalized. In the short-term, look for the emergence of a dual economy combining the mobile Web and native app stores. The question is whether or not a true Post-App Economy driven by browsers and the social Web will ever fundamentally replace today's largely native landscape.

The App Economy - as seen through iOS and Android - is a content economy. The vast majority of popular apps are media content driven: In one way or another, content is driven through a service: Instagram (photos), Spotify/Pandora/Rdio (music streaming), Evernote (content storage), Zite/Flipboard (articles), Netflix/Hulu+ (video), Words With Friends/Angry Birds (games), Twitter/Facebook (content creation and sharing).

Within this economy, Facebook and Twitter are both apps and platforms, serving as a way to discover and disseminate content. The numbers tell the tale: As of December 2011, one in every five minutes spent on the Web was devoted to social-networking sites. Facebook accounts for one in every seven minutes spent online and three-quarters of all social-networking minutes. 64% of U.S. smartphone users accessed social networking from their phones, and two out of every five smartphone owners accessed social networking every day, according to comScore.

The Post-App Economy could be driven by social interaction and discovery through Facebook and Twitter to mobile Web. "With the rise in social media applications on mobile, we're seeing a shift beyond the single-purpose application back towards the mobile Web," said Crave Labs CEO Jeff Peden.

The Near Future: A Dual Economy

In the present, content and media are being created specifically for native platforms and pushed to the varying application stores. That includes pure native apps written in native code for iOS, Android and Windows Phone, along with hybrid apps built with Web tools like HTML5, CSS and Java and then "wrapped" to take advantage of native platforms. Either way, the destination is the app store, not the Web.

For a variety of reasons, this ecosystem is starting to fragment. Content publishers, retail businesses and restaurants are slowly realizing that they do not need to have a presence in the App Store to build a successful mobile presence. For many, it is much more important to show up in search on a smartphone or tablet through the browser rather than an app. Sure, there are native apps designed specifically for local discovery and content consumption, but search remains king in both of those realms. Even Apple's Siri delivers search results through the browser by accessing online databases like Yelp. Siri results are browser-driven, not delivered from native apps.

Over time, the mobile ecosystem will increasingly be split between games and utilities that function best on native platforms (Instagram or Infinity Blade, for instance) and more traditional content and local presences that use the mobile Web. While processor-heavy apps reliant on device APIs will be better written with native code, content-driven apps can be created more easily and "good enough" on the mobile Web.

"I think there is a start of a bifurcation of apps-versus-HTML5 mobile-optimized sites that began at the end of last year," said Carnet Williams, VP of Sprout at ad firm InMobi. "And [that] is evident along lines that I would describe as 'utilities and games' versus 'content.'"

The simple fact is that HTML5 and browser-based websites and services make much more sense for many content providers. For instance, look at the HTML5-driven websites for The Financial Times and BostonGlobe.com. These kinds of apps are cheaper and more convenient to develop, deploy and deliver all the essentials of a mobile content app. The same goes for sites and apps aimed at local businesses. Several companies have lined up to provide mobile-optimized site tools for small businesses, including DudaMobile and FiddleFly.

Williams sums up the Dual Economy nicely:

"I do not see the mobile Web becoming the predominant mobile content platform as much as an additional platform for native apps," Williams said. "The immense success of both Flipboard and Instagram are great examples. Flipboard removes content from the mobile and desktop Web and presents it in a readable format in a native application. Instagram didn't have a mobile Web app that replicated native functionality."

Will We Ever Reach a True Post-App Economy?

The simple answer is not anytime soon. This is not a matter of consumer preference or business logistics, the rise of the mobile social portal or maintaining search-optimized websites. It is a technological imperative.

The mobile browser is just not ready for a true Post-App Economy. When we talk about mobile Web apps, HTML5, CSS and the like, we are talking about the quality and capabilities of the mobile browser. Currently, none of the major mobile browser providers have the capability to serve top-notch, app-like experiences that serve all user expectations. Mozilla is probably the company working most directly on this problem, with its Boot2Gecko smartphone operating system. Direct access to the full capabilities of mobile devices is the primary issue, but not the only one. Others include rendering, graphics and load time (all basically in the same category), along with HTML5 audio and video quality. 

Facebook and Twitter want to give the ecosystem the tools it will need to create mobile Web presences that will benefit their platforms. Facebook has released a suite of tools called Ringmark to help mobile Web developers create browser-based apps that can be tied to the social network. While those tools are useful, and while social discovery is an important factor in creating a Post-App Economy, the mobile Web is still limited by the capabilities of the ecosystem reliant on HTML5 and mobile browser technology.

Users don't care whether they're using the mobile Web or native apps, they just head toward the best content and utilities. So the only way to fully disrupt the App Economy is to improve the capabilities of the mobile browser so it is more competitive with native apps. That's not likely to happen for at least two to four years. And even then it will take users several more years to fully change their conditioned behavior (downloading applications from app stores). And the native platforms aren't going to be stagnant during that time. 

The true "Post-App Economy" won't debut until 2020, if ever.

Top and bottom images courtesy of Shutterstock.

There are plenty of things that we in the tech trade press - the general press, too - can learn from the science research community. Both groups formulate and test various hypotheses. Journalists try to find sources that agree with the hypothesis, scientists try to observe data to prove or disprove their theories. The two sides have very different aims, goals and approaches, but both are trying to find the "truth" in their own ways.

Mentioned during the session was the science news cycle that was part of a Jorge Cham comic, wherein a scientist's tentative findings are turned into a certainty by the evening TV news. We certainly need to do better at interpreting what a researcher finds before accidentally creating new "facts."
Comic reprinted by permission from "Piled Higher and Deeper" by Jorge Cham at www.phdcomics.com

The session explored how to make journalism more like science, and the presenters mentioned that journalists need to improve their work by using new tools - such as Storify- that include three key characteristics:

• Self-justifying, or useful to the journalist in helping us do our jobs better,
• Interoperable in a bunch of different environments, something that we can just plug into our blog, content management system or whatever, without a lot of programming or customization, and
• Easy to use, especially by journalists who aren't going to spend a lot of time trying out and learning new tools.

While the presenters didn't mention options beyond Storify, journalists already use a number of tools that fit their description, including RSS readers, site traffic analyzers and social media groups to track information and keep up-to-date on trending topics.

Finally, the duo mentioned three important aspects of science that journalists need to embrace, understand and work on improving:

• Being collaborative. Scientists take it for granted that they are working together to build a body of work. To help, there exists the Thomson Reuters Science Citation Index that can be used to measure one's reputation and lists references from 3,700 of the world's leading scientific and technical journals across 100 disciplines.

• Being replicable, meaning you can see the methodology used and how we reached our conclusions. Scientists do this with footnotes, and while no one is suggesting that journalists start adding footnotes to blog posts, there is a need to do a better job of exposing journalistic methods and how a particular fact or quote was obtained. One effort used by a few news sites is Document Cloud, where you can check out the story's source materials merely by clicking on them.

• Being predictive. The panel mentioned the "Friedman Unit." Based on the writings of The New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, the Friedman Unit is the amount of time it takes for readers to forget a journalist's predictions. It's not very long. This gets at the notion that while journalists often fill stories with predictive claims, they seldom seem to return to them to see if things really did turn out that way - except perhaps in the occasional end-of-year wrap up piece.

Journalists - and society - could use a prediction tracker to hold us more accountable, and see how our prognostications have turned out. Politifact does this on its website by reporting on Obama's various promises, as shown in the screengrab below:

Science and journalism are both about observing the world and using those observations to understand how the world will be in the future. What journalism can borrow from science is the requirement to better track how well our observations actually perform at helping us understand and predict what's likely to happen next.

This year I have 5 more predictions (and a bonus silly one). Leave a comment with your own predictions, to see if you can out-seer me!

First here's a brief summary of how I did with my predictions last year, marking myself up to 1 point for each:

• 1: Flipboard becomes the breakout news reading app of 2011. While Flipboard continued to expand, it was slow to move onto other platforms. The iPhone app didn't appear until December. 1/2 point.
• 2: eBooks will hit 20% market penetration by the end of 2011. The figure was 9.03% at the end of 2010, according to the Association of American Publishers. I got this one spot on, as AAP's most recent stats put the figure at 20.76%. 1 point.
• 3: Internet of Cars will be the surprise hit of the year. The Internet of Things continued to slowly build and car manufacturers like Ford iterated on their Internet functionality. While I'm tempted to claim Google's driverless car prototype as a win, the reality is that my bullish prediction didn't happen. 0 points.
• 4: Internet TV tips and gets huge consumer uptake. Hmmm, Google TV bombed and Apple TV remains a hobby... for now. Maybe in 2012 it will tip? I'll give myself 1/2 point for the success of TV-focused social apps.
• 5: A major pop music star will do something amazing with web technologies, that blows open the online music scene. While it didn't come from a major current pop star, like Lady Gaga or Kanye West, I believe that we saw a really amazing use of web technologies in Bjork's 2011 album, Biophilia. The album was an iOS app, with an interactive app for each song. OK, it didn't blow open the music scene. But it's a sign of the future. 1/2 point.

Result: 2.5/5. I'm a bit disappointed in that. But as I said at the start, it's all in good fun. So here I go again, with 5 more predictions!

2012 Predictions

1. This year's Best BigCo, Amazon.com, will launch a media-focused social network. Kind of like what MySpace used to be. It will be to a place for you to socialize around your reading, listening and viewing activities.

2. Twitter's usage will begin to wane, due to squeezing from Facebook and Google+. Maybe then Twitter will sell to Apple. Heck, predictions are no place for maybes. I predict Apple will buy Twitter!

3. Google's Chrome browser will make dramatic inroads into Microsoft's Internet Explorer, coming within 10-15% of it by the end of 2012. This will be due to mainstream people finally abandoning IE in droves. By the end of 2012, Chrome will have close to 30% of the market according to Net Applications (it currently has 17.6%) and IE will have just over 40% (it currently has 52.6%).

4. Facebook will have initial teething problems with its Timeline, but by end of 2012 it will be seen as a triumph - as millions of people begin to use Facebook over 2012 as their digital memory bank. I don't know if that's a brave (new world?) prediction or not, but right now there are a lot of skeptics about Timeline. So I'm firmly betting on Timeline being a big success for Facebook in 2012.

5. Music acts will start to truly tap into the power of the iTunes LP. Currently most iTunes LP releases are simply a PDF file with a bonus video if you're lucky. I predict that in 2012 many more bands and musicians will include multimedia in their digital albums and the braver ones will try to emulate Bjork and create stunning "app albums". This is a bit of a re-hash of my music prediction last year, but I really want to see widespread innovation in the digital album!

6. Bonus prediction: Bill Nguyen of Color fame will convince Silicon Valley VCs to part with $100 million, to fund an amazing new type of smart TV. It will have 4D, Internet telepathy and a revolutionary new sensing feature called Smell This®. RWW Editor-in-Chief Richard MacManus will thoughtfully blog that it "may be the next Google." The TV will flop before the ink is dry on the last VC cheque. A few months later, the futuristic telly will be re-branded as a way to consume Facebook frictionless sharing "on the big screen."

[p.s. I love Bill's spirit, I really do. I hope he does try for another New New Thing in 2012!]

Those are my predictions, now let me know yours :)

I was right that the number of people blogging would continue to fall, but I was wrong that a digital news company was going to acquire a major legacy news organization. We were wrong about a few other things, too: Mobile payments didn't become mainstream, we didn't write a post called "Flickr: In Memoriam," and there was no severe privacy breach at a location-based service.

What's in store for 2012? Here are a few of our predictions (and more of our misses from last year). Let us know your prognostications in the comments.

Abraham Hyatt, Managing Editor

1. The Associated Press released its automated style checking software this week; 2012 will see the rise of some kind of rudimentary fact-checking equivalent. Serious bloggers and journalists will flock to it but fact checking won't help the fact that there posts will stile bee filed with typos.
2. The relative success of the New York Times' paywall (and others) will drive more experiments in getting people to pay for online content. Thanks to the Times' example, a lot newspapers and magazines will realize their print product doesn't have to be an albatross around their neck. As a result of package print/digital deals, newspaper circulation rates will slow their fall? No, that can't be right.
3. The legacy journalism world finally began to steal ideas - accelerators, venture capital funds - that the tech world has been doing for many years. That adoption will continue at a depressingly slow rate in 2012.
What other 2011 predictions did we get wrong?

• Cablegate will pale in comparison to the secret information about governments and corporations that is released by Wikileaks and similar organizations, which will continue to crop up around the world.
• Fantastic new tools for analyzing and displaying big data will appear.
• Readers' Choice for Time's Person of the Year: Anonymous
• Telephony will continue to become more about messaging. Email, collaboration tools, activity stream technologies and other apps will further integrate with telephony APIs.
4. Curation tools like Instapaper will still be something that everyone likes, very few people do well, and only a infinitesimal few ever make money on. The long-awaited brawl between publishers and those tools will never happen. The audience for that kind of curation, while growing, will remain small in comparison to the number of people visiting those stories on the publishers' sites.
5. We will still be stuck with insidious buzzwords like gamification, filter bubble, clicktivism, robust and, *shudder*, mocial.

John Paul Titlow, Writer

1. Apple will release an HDTV set, but it will be little more than a television running the Apple TV flavor of iOS. The user experience will be nice, but the device won't kill cable or turn the industry on its head just yet.
2. Joining Zite, one of the other popular news reading apps for the iPad will be bought by a big tech or media company. These apps still won't be profitable.
3. By the June 2012, Instagram's user base will have doubled from what it is today. Its Android app, once it's finally released, will be a big help.
4. By the summer, Google TV will not in fact be included on the majority of new TV sets.
5. The iPhone 5 will launch and include NFC technology for mobile payments, contactless data transfer and other innovative uses. Apple's integration will begin to wow mainstream consumers, but the tech still won't be widely adopted for a few more years.
6. Location-based social networks like Foursquare will continue grow in popularity, but will still be a far cry from reaching mainstream status by the end of 2012. The concept will be made more palatable among everyday consumers thanks to their continued exposure to check-ins on Facebook and better promotional deals and coupons at local businesses for Foursquare users.
7. We'll see a substantial increase in HTML5-fueled mobile Web apps as companies and publishers learn that it frees them from app store restrictions and is cheaper since it offers cross-platform support without having to code for every mobile OS individually. Still, the iTunes App Store and Android Marketplace will also continue to grow.
8. At least three notable artists will pull their catalogs from Spotify, Rdio, MOG or all three over concerns about royalty payments.
9. Left in the dust in the mobile space and engaged in ongoing legal battles, Grooveshark will shut down or otherwise be rendered a shadow of its former self by the end of the year.
10. Your non-techie friends will finally start using Google+.

Dan Rowinski, Writer

1. Evernote will make a startlingly large acquisition that sets it up for mainstream success for years to come. Everyone will ask: how did Evernote get so much money?
2. Facebook's IPO will cause an exodus of top talent from the company that creates a new class of venture capitalist and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley in much the same way as the "Google Millionaires" did a little less than a decade ago.
3. Google+ will become a truly international platform with more than150 million users. Most people will still decry it as useless.

4. A major corporation will get in trouble with privacy violations on a scale that most users cannot even fathom yet. Forget the Apple location tracking or whatever Facebook does or does not do. Carrier IQ could be the seed of this.
5. A U.S. President will be elected and the pundits will all say, "well, he/she had a really good social media campaign that carried them through the process."
6. Barack Obama will be reelected.
7. The city of Boston will have a couple high profile tech success stories and people will begin to say "Boston is back."
8. A major breakthrough in real artificial intelligence will be made at a university, large corporation or by the U.S. military.
9. The world will not end on Dec. 21, 2012. But, the spammers will make a fortune from the hysteria.
10. Either Hulu or Netflix will be acquired. One or the other, not both.

Jared Smith, Webmaster

1. Yahoo! finds a buyer. More Yahoo! properties are divested and sunset as a result.
2. Groupon sinks as quickly as it grew. Enthusiasm for daily deals comes back to earth.
3. Apple names the next iPhone something other than the iPhone 5.
4. Google+ becomes a legitimate contender for business collaboration, making Citrix sit up and take notice.
5. Flash survives 2012 on the desktop as a vehicle for video playback as Adobe builds and refines its tools for HTML5.

Joe Brockmeier, Writer

1. Microsoft will buy Netflix, and use Netflix as a driver for its Xbox and Windows 8 Tablets.
2. Twitter goes through at least one (more) major redesign, but keeps the character count at 140 as nature intended.
3. Yahoo will finally be sold to a surprise buyer.
4. Web series, like the short series Dr. Horrible and like "The Guild" will take off in a major way in 2012.

5. Reputation systems like Klout will flounder when people realize Klout "perks" are not worth playing the status anxiety game.
6. NFC payments, at least in North America, continue to be a niche offering. People are slow to adopt new payment options, and it will take years before NFC is widely accepted or used.
7. Mozilla launches its own, federated social network as an open and privacy friendly alternative to Facebook, Google+ and others.
8. Evernote introduces a file-sharing app or add-on that competes with Dropbox and Box.net.
9. Apple introduces its first actual television. The world recoils in horror at the price tag.
10. The "datapocalypse" caused by the shortage of hard drives following the Thailand floods impact cloud services. The price for online storage stays constant, or actually goes up.

Which brings me to my 2012 predictions for Facebook, e-commerce, location and social networks, the four areas I've been watching closely since I joined the rad team at ReadWriteWeb this past October. Come along to the next page!

Facebook

In the context of the 2011 social network battle of 2011, Facebook lost in the Identity category (you can't use pseudonyms on Facebook). In the Sharing category, however, Facebook came out as the obvious winner.

At the f8 developers' conference this past September, Facebook announced the launch of new Timeline profiles, frictionless sharing, Spotify integration and its vision for Facebook's Open Graph platform. A few months after f8, Facebook hired the engineers and developers behind Gowalla. (As a result, Gowalla will shut down.)

What Will Happen In 2012? In short: A lot. Facebook is aggressively hiring and is expected to go public in 2012 with a ridiculously high $100 billion valuation. I predict that frictionless sharing will continue to ramp up, especially in the areas of news and video-sharing. With the expert Gowalla engineers and designers onboard, I can see Facebook tweaking its Timeline so it's better at actually telling stories rather than just presenting people with a ton of visual information. The news feed will probably become more customizable and personalized, giving users some of the control they demand. I think Facebook will converge its UIs into a single platform, and everything will be optimized for mobile. In fact, mobile will be Facebook's number one focus. The long-rumored Facebook phone will finally come out, but it will bomb. By the end of 2012, I predict that Facebook will hit the 1 billion user mark.

E-Commerce

In 2012, I predict that Groupon and LivingSocial will scale back on employees. Then it will increase the frequency and personalization of its deals. In fact, I predict that personalization and time-limited, location-based deals will be key for the future of daily deals.

Social networking-turned-flash sale sites like Fab.com will continue to grow.

The Facebook-EBay integration will be Facebook's last attempt at f-commerce before it finally gives up.

Digital customer loyalty programs like Belly will grow as merchants realize that they need a way to keep their customers coming back. In 2012, I predict that mobile commerce and couch commerce will explode.

Location

Social Networks

I predict that Facebook, Google+ and Twitter will grow and thrive in 2012. Pinterest, a relative newcomer to the social network game (it actually bills itself as a social bookmarking site) will also keep expand. I also predict that we'll start seeing more visually focused, tablet-friendly user interfaces like Delicious'. People will increasingly access social networks from their mobile devices and tablets.

What do you think will happen in 2012? Do you agree or disagree with my predictions? Let me know in the comments below.