What's Hot in 2012

Wow.  That was fast.  Blazingly fast. No, we're not referring to how quickly 2011 went by, but rather how quickly technology trends moved and disrupted entire industries in 2011. Name the industry and it was vastly affected: newspaper, film, retail, publishing, the list goes on.  Need proof?  Newspaper sales dropped for the 6^thstraight year in row, with a steep decrease of 9.5% in the first quarter of 2011 alone, leaving traditional companies to adopt digital versions like we saw with The Daily. Amazon came out with multiple versions of the Kindle, while at the same time developing easier e-publishing synthesis, resulting in larger consumption and self-publishing of e-books, essentially forcing entire chains out of business.

2011: What we got right and where we went wrong

As we wrote (borrowed really) in our 2011 trends to watch, “The Internet isn’t written in pencil, it’s written in ink”.  We have a reference to go back and review.  To that end, we're happy to report that none of our 2011 predictions were really too far off the mark. Tablets did gain significant traction, HTML5/CSS3 began making the death of Flash a reality, NFC was truly established in the US, mobile video was a bit more prolific, and will continue to grow so for years to come, especially as 5G Wi-Fi appears, and finally, natural motion controls garnered more attention and adoption (Robots in labs using Kinect and facial and audio recognition went mainstream.

The good news though is that technology trends typically don’t just end within the year in which they began, but rather take years to grow. So in 2012 we’ll see all of the trends from 2011 continue to flourish, and perhaps several will finally become part of our everyday lives.

So, what will we be trending in 2012?

2012 will be another exciting year for technology and technological innovation. At Havas Drive, we typically follow more far-reaching technologies that trigger the greatest transformations. Without further ado, our top technology trends for 2012:

Remote monitoring- Over 200 million people in the US and Europe suffer from one or more chronic diseases where home remote monitoring is a treatment option. Some of the conditions being monitored include cardiac arrhythmia, sleep apnea, diabetes and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).  By the end of 2011, over 2 million patients globally used a home-based remote monitoring device. According to a recent report, that number will more than double to nearly 4.9 million by 2016. This is innovation that is long overdue, as the benefits are significant, ranging from improving access to healthcare, alleviating the burden on the health delivery system, lowering costs, and generally improving health and well-being. Most of the systems available today, such as those from Parental Health and Care Innovations, are geared towards the senior market. Future systems will be targeted even more broadly, covering things such as medication adherance and activity logging and will expand to capture both rational and well as emotional inputs to drive more productive, longitudinal health experiences. We expect to see entirely new care models arise out of these kinds of technologies. 

New digital ecosystems – For years, there has been the promise of “The Internet of Things”, whereby we’ll live in a world where every object, from a simple toothbrush to your refrigerator, will be alive and living on the Internet. All reporting important data back to you, in real-time. Beautiful vision, but obviously for the most part, it never came true. 2012 will begin to change that. Why? Mobile and cloud computing. Mobile smartphone devices ushered in an era that pushed connectivity everywhere. Telecom companies raced at breakneck speed to up their bandwidth services and support the exponential growth of consumer consumption. GDSM, 3G, 4G, WiFi hotspots were the result. Now, with Internet everywhere and the cloud, we can begin to see the connectedness of objects. In fact, by 2020, GSMA, the mobile industries trade group, predicts that there will be 24 billion connected devices. This has the potential to powerfully transform brands and marketing ecosystems. Cars, televisions,household appliances, even medical devices, will all be connected.

More recently, a technology startup called Supermechanical developed a product called Twine. Twine is basically a circuit board with WiFi, temperature and vibration sensors, a USB port and an expansion port. The module remotely connects to software they developed that collects data from the module and reports it to the user via texts, email, or tweets.  For example, it could detect if your basement is flooding or the temperature in your house is too hot or alert you if your laundry is done. Basically, it connects just about any object to the Internet. “The Internet of Things” just got a big step closer to reality.

Multimodal educational experiences - A trend that began late last year was the increase in online participation in higher learning. MIT has long offered online coursework from their OpenCourseWare website. On the site, anyone who wants to improve their brainpower can watch lecture videos from actual MIT courses on anything from Business Management (via Sloan) or Applied Materials. Stanford offers a similar program for their CS students with some variations. Apple even has a built-in educational series within iTunes called iTunes U. Perhaps the best known example, Khan Acadamy provides educational videos and lessons on anything and has delivered over 94 million lessons.

Healthcare is ripe for this type of disruption. We believe that Healthcare Professionals as well as consumers and caregivers will increasingly seek out anytime, anywhere learning modalities as they become more actively involved with health topics. And the field of potential providers is wide open - from academia to publishing to media to technology and pharmaceuticals and more.  Educational content may also interface with devices and apps for more continuous and dynamic learning opportunities. We expect to see some interesting alliances develop in this area.

Windows 8 and ARM –Windows, Microsoft’s de facto Operating System launches its latest version sometime this year. As a technologists who received an early copy, it is perhaps the second most dramatic change to the OS in its history (the first being DOS to Windows). If you’ve used the latest version of Xbox or a Windows Phone 7 device, then you already have a feel for what Windows 8 will bring. The new Metro UI is almost guaranteed to have an impact in design circles. In addition to that, Microsoft is taking a major leap by providing a single OS across multiple devices. The same version will run on desktops and tablets with Intel or ARM processors. Speaking of ARM, this year, with the support of Windows, expect to see ARM processors permeate in almost every device imaginable. It still may not be enough to seriously slow Apple iPad's march to dominance in the healthcare space, but it just got a whole lot more competitve. 

The onslaught of intelligent voice-activation –Voice activation itself is not a new technology. However, it wasn’t until Apple purchased SRI’s Siri and made intelligent voice-assisted services truly useful. The technology behind Siri may seem to be a technological marvel, and in some regards it is, but the real magic is the execution of Siri and more specifically, the humanization of the service. How Siri responds to your inquiries makes the intelligence aspect of the service come alive. This has begun an onslaught of similar services from competitors and expedited the race for voice-activation services in almost every device. From Android and Windows Phone devices, to televisions and beyond, you can expect to see intelligent voice-activation services embedded in your daily lives this year. When Apple opens Siri to developers, which I don’t expect to happen this year, it will truly revolutionize our lives.

TV 2.0 – 2011 was a challenging year for innovation in the TV space where Logitech, one of the first vendors to use Google’s Android-powered GoogleTV set-top box, lost more than $100 million in operating costs. Meanwhile, Apple TV did fairly well from a consumer acquisition perspective, but overall is a disappointment as there are no “apps” in the way that they exist on the iPhone or iPad. 2011 was essentially the stepping-stone to the true convergence of TV and the web that will occur in 2012. For starters, Google TV 2.0 is coming with new partners such as Samsung and Vizio. Microsoft has updated their Xbox interface to provide a big play in apps and on-demand video consumption (from a device-in-the-living-room perspective, it rules with over 60-80 million consoles sold worldwide). Then of course there is the speculation that Apple will indeed deliver a long-rumored Apple television this year, disrupting the market even more. But while all of the above certainly exciting, what’s perhaps more interesting is the way in which people are beginning to interact with both content as well as one-another while watching television. This new phenomenon often referred to as Social TV has the potential to give a new digital lifeline to the television business.  And there can be no doubt that the intersection of connected TVs, cloud computing, and apps makes for newly fertile ground for innovative brand marketers (and their agencies!)

Since its inception, no industry has been safe from technology disruption and the trends being closely monitored above certainly reflect that. Even if just one of these trends gains enough critical mass, it will bring enormous disruption and tremendous opportunity. At Havas Drive, we’ll certainly be participating in all of the above and will continue to report on our discoveries.