July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

If Microsoft wants to win in 2013, it needs to win in the mobile realm. That much is clear. But how does it take the crown from the likes of Apple and Google?

While Microsoft wouldn’t explicitly tell me about its plans for 2013 or generally talk about what it wants to accomplish, there is a lot we can glean from looking at what Microsoft did in 2012 and from the company’s previous statements. I’ve also talked to two experts who have kept close tabs on Microsoft’s product strategy over the years.

Here are three big things Microsoft will focus on in 2013:

Tablets, tablets, tablets

With the launch of the Surface RT and the Surface Pro, it’s clear Microsoft wants to be part of the tablet conversation. Microsoft was actually one of the first players in tablets back in the early 2000s, but the market shrugged off its efforts. Now that Apple’s iPad and Android tablets like the Nexus 7 have come to dominate the slate space and PC sales are falling off, Microsoft wants to get back in the tablet game.

“Microsoft will place a do-not-fail priority on tablets in 2013,” Forrester infrastructure and operations analyst David Johnson told me.

Johnson does not expect Microsoft to release its own smartphone hardware this year, so tablets will get full priority. Besides making Surface better, he said the other big priority will be making Windows RT lighter and better.

“I’d expect RT to be the focus for now, but they could do an entirely new tablet OS as well if that doesn’t work out,” Johnson said.

Office 365 and Office 2013

Another major tool in Microsoft’s belt is Office. Outside of Windows OS and Windows Server, Office has been the most important product in the company’s history. The latest version of the productivity suite for consumers just hit the market this week, and it’s actually quite nice.

Microsoft is pushing its Office 365 subscription service, which runs $100 per year, as the best deal you can get. A subscription to Office 365 lets you install five copies on your PCs or Macs and deeply connects to the cloud to back up your documents. Office 365 also gets you Office on Demand, which lets you stream a copy of Office to any Windows 7 or 8 PC and doesn’t count toward your number of installs. There’s also a version for students — Office 365 University, which costs $80 for four years of use.

The new versions of Office 365 and 2013 are more touch-friendly, so it’s somewhat better suited for tablets and touch-screen laptops. The most basic version of the latest Office comes pre-installed on the Surface RT tablet and will be able to be installed on the Surface Pro tablet, which hits stores on Feb. 9. A mobile version of Office also comes pre-installed on Windows Phone devices, one of the biggest selling points for that OS.

There have been perpetual rumors that Microsoft will release native Office apps for iOS and Android some time this year. But Microsoft has routinely denied these rumors.

“It’s not certain, but I’m betting on Office for iOS and Android,” Johnson said. “Enterprises won’t be proactively buying Surface Pros. Employees might not want to buy Surfaces, but they could buy iPads for work.”

Avi Greengart, research director for consumer devices at Current Analysis, also believes iOS and Android apps for Office are on the way.

“If Microsoft doesn’t put Office on those platforms, it risks losing that franchise,” Greengart said. “It’s also important for Microsoft to develop a more touch-friendly version of Office for Windows tablets. The version today is not there yet.”

Windows 8 and Windows Phone apps

The third pillar for Microsoft’s mobile success in 2013 will be apps built for Windows 8 and Windows Phone that help get people better interested in those platforms. Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 together have millions of users, and the two even share a kernel so it’s easier to develop for both platforms at the same time.

“It’s all about apps,” Johnson said. “Apps on Windows Phone are good, but they’re not quite as complete as iOS and Android apps. 2013 will see a big push on app development.”

Windows 8 especially needs apps to get people excited about tablets like Surface and hybrid laptops like the Lenovo Thinkpad Helix or Samsung’s ATIV Smart PCs running that OS. A number of good applications already exist for Windows 8, but will the company invest further to make Windows 8 a must-have OS?

And better apps on Windows Phone certainly wouldn’t hurt either. Windows Phone sales haven’t been particularly impressive, but they could get better with smart productivity apps and imaginative Xbox games. Hell, the success of Microsoft’s Xbox console could arguably be traced back to exclusive titles like Halo and Halo 2, so why not have an exclusive set of games on Windows Phone to help turn heads?

Greengart thinks Microsoft needs to bring an exclusive Halo game to Windows Phone and improve the overall presence of Xbox on Windows Phone.

“Game exclusives could drive adoption of the Windows Phone platform,” Greengart said. “Why isn’t there a Halo application for Windows Phone? Where are the games that are branded with more than just your Xbox Live avatar? These issues need to be addressed.”

What do you think will drive Microsoft’s mobile destiny in 2013?

Steve Ballmer photo via Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

This is a guest post by entrepreneur Alastair Mitchell

Think of standalone social business software like a point-and-shoot camera.

Cameras are perfectly suited for achieving one singular thing: taking a picture. Now, pick up your mobile phone. Right there, jammed into just four ounces, is a camera that not only rivals many point-and-shoots when it comes to picture taking, it can do so much more. You can edit images, share them instantly with countless people via any number of channels and add endless comments and captions. For many, point-and-shoots just don’t make sense anymore — as Kodak’s decline has demonstrated.

Standalone social business software companies may soon find themselves in a similar situation.

About five years ago, standalone social software defined a new class of business software. Yammer, Jive and countless other companies saw a new market emerging that seemed to answer one of the most frequent questions in the modern workplace: how can we make workers as communicative, engaged and connected as they are in their personal lives thanks to tools like Facebook? The promise of the social business was, and still is, compelling. By connecting workers, businesses can unlock and distribute siloed worker knowledge and information, thereby increasing collaboration and achieving boosts in productivity, creativity and efficiency.

In some ways, these standalone social business tools were great. The interface mimicked consumer platforms that were quickly becoming ubiquitous, like Facebook and Twitter, ensuring rapid adoption. Instantly, workers around the world had a space, outside of email and personal social networks, where they could communicate and share ideas with colleagues. Those were the days when activity feeds seemed somehow magical—and proved useful.

And then, suddenly, it happened. Noise began to fill the once-glorious activity feed as coworkers started to chat idly about their cats or favorite lunchtime sandwich. Suddenly, the useful business conversations that the platform was purchased to foster were made obsolete.

Businesses began questioning whether there was any measurable ROI, or if they had simply provided an online location for water cooler conversation.

A little less conversation, a little more action

So, why, given that “social” is still a popular buzzword, will 2013 herald the end for standalone social software?

Primarily, it’s because social software facilitates communication but doesn’t facilitate action, making it difficult for businesses to determine ROI. Business action, that is, workers getting work done, is typically how businesses determine ROI. As content (documents, files, multimedia, webpages, and so on) is central to all of the work we do, effective collaboration must unite conversations and content to create context.

Communication is only as useful as the context that exists to enable workers to act upon it. Elvis Presley summed it up perfectly when he said, “A little less conversation, a little more action please.”

Indeed, in 2011 and 2012 we started to witness a shift in standalone social business software as content management providers augmented their offerings with powerful social features (or vice versa) and standalone social software providers declined or saw themselves consumed by bigger businesses. Just look at the following examples:

• Microsoft purchased Yammer for $1.2 billion to incorporate Yammer’s social functionality into its decidedly unsocial SharePoint content management product.
• Salesforce augmented it’s “Chatter” social offering with a file-sharing and content management offering, “Chatterbox”
• Google Apps for business began integrating with a business version of Google+, Google’s flavor of social network.

Fortunately, the business software marketplace is maturing. This is evidenced by these acquisitions and other developments, including the U.S. Federal Government shifting billions of dollars in IT budget away from inherently “unsocial” legacy technologies and into cloud content collaboration services that have social features baked in.

In my opinion, the future of social software isn’t as a standalone service, which simply becomes a fire hose of irrelevant conversations for workers, but as part of a suite of applications that enable workers to collaboratively share information and act upon it. So, perhaps it’s less of a death and more of an evolution — after all, where would Instagram be without Polaroid?

Alastair Mitchell is the cofounder of Huddle, a cloud-based content collaboration and content management provider. As CEO, he has raised more than $40 million in funding since 2007 and has grown Huddle to more than 150 employees in London, San Francisco, and New York.

Huddle is currently being used by more than 100,000 organizations around the world. 

Alastair lives in the San Francisco Bay Area where he regularly hosts DrinkTank and HuddleUp networking events for tech entrepreneurs. Reach him at @alimitchell and on the Huddle blog at http://www.huddle.com/blog.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Vivek Wadhwa is a vice president at Singularity University and a Washington Post columnist.

Last year I predicted that social media would lose its sizzle. Since then, the bubble has burst for companies such as Facebook, Zynga and Groupon. The tablet computer market, on the other hand, is booming, voice recognition is becoming a standard feature in new computing devices, and there have been, as I alluded to in 2012, notable cloud-computing failures andsecurity breaches in the past year.

I am glad to have been wrong about LinkedIn. It is a great company with a stellar management team. Also, tablet prices haven’t quite hit the $100 mark in the U.S., as I predicted they would. But I still anticipate they will, and likely very soon.

So, what else lies ahead for 2013? There is nothing as spectacular as the Facebook IPO, at least at this point, but expect gradual technology progressions of greater significance than have been seen in years past. The Post’s Hayley Tsukayama has outlined the trends in tech for the coming year — a year I believe will be one of transition for the sector.This year, expect tech innovators to set the stage to solve global problems, since technologies in fields such as medicine, robotics, artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, 3D printing, and nanomaterials are advancing exponentially. Like the processors in our computers, they are becoming increasingly powerful while their price drops precipitously. This will enable startups to take on problems in fields such as energy, health, education, and security that only government and big research labs previously could.

Most recently, the big rewards have gone to startups developing relatively simple social media platforms and applications. In the upcoming era of exponential technologies, expect the rewards to go to players that solve big, global problems.

Here are the big innovation trends that I believe will gain traction in 2013.

Tablet explosion to computing revolution

The entry price of tablet computers will almost surely drop to under $100 in 2013 — especially if the rumored $99 Acer tablet gains traction this year, as I believe it will, or if theIndia Aakash tablet finally lives up to its potential. I also anticipate that the tablet price tag will keep dropping until it reaches close to zero over a 2-to-3 year period. We will reach the point where it makes sense for companies to give tablets away just as mobile carriers give phones away in exchange for plan subscriptions. More broadly, we can expect to see tablet computers almost everywhere in this decade—our kitchens, bathrooms, cars, supermarkets, schools and elevators.

Apple currently owns the high end of the market, of course, and I don’t expect cheap tablets to put any dent in the company’s sales this year. But, if Apple fails to keep innovating, the company will surely feel the pain in 2014 and beyond as Samsung continues to nip at its heels. The PC laptop vendors — Dell, HP and Lenovo, among others — should worry since tablets will continue to cannibalize their higher-priced products.

The biggest winner in this revolution will likely be Google, with its free Android operating system. Unsurprisingly, the loser will probably be Microsoft, which licenses its mobile operating system, Windows RT, for around $80 — more than the hardware will eventually cost. In the long term, expect the billions of new users that come online over the next few years to be doing Google searches and using Google’s applications.

The ‘quantified self’ goes mainstream and creates a new regulatory battlefield

We saw a trickle of sensor-based medical devices in 2012, but these were just the start of the “quantified self” movement. As sensors become smaller, more powerful, and cheaper, we will see many new types of devices that help us monitor our health. These will be embedded in our iPhone cases, bathroom scales, toothbrushes, and even in our jewelry.

In 2013, expect to be able to purchase sophisticated new devices like the AliveCor Heart Monitor, which I have been testing and the FDA has approved for use by licensed U.S. medical professionals. If I had a device like this 10 years ago, I may have been able to avoid the heart attack that I had.The device will cost $199 when prescribed by a physician. Today, we need physicians to analyze the data the device provides. But, given the rate at which technology is advancing, computers may be able to do a better job. Witness the way IBM’s Watson defeated Jeopardy champions. It had far more data available to it.

Eventually, I foresee cloud-based systems that have access to the latest medical knowledge and to data from hundreds of millions of people analyzing medical data. I would trust these systems more than I trust my cardiologist, and the app to access these will be available anytime and as often as I need it.Even before we reach this stage, consumers should be allowed to purchase these devices off the shelf to see and analyze their own medical data. This is where the battle lines will increasingly be drawn between technologists and regulators.

Users will begin to demand greater control of their own data and more ways to monitor it in order to improve their lives. That means, in the coming year, one should expect to see the regulatory battles over these types of technologies become more frequent and heated.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Our team will be off to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas soon, and we’ll get plenty of glimpses of the future of technology there. We’ve all heard a lot of promises. But here are some things we’d love to see and use in real life in the near future — whether or not they’re at CES.

We’re not sure if we can get our wish, but this is the list of the coolest technologies that we can’t wait to use. I’ve relied on staff recommendations and other big thinkers for these tips. Thanks, all.

Tell us which one is your favorite in the poll, or suggest your own in the comments.

Google Glass

This technology is one of the truly inspired products coming down the road. It combines an eyeglass-style display with computing power and wireless technology that can deliver information to you based on what you look at in your surrounding environment. Project Glass promises to deliver information to you the instant you need it, like identifying the face of someone standing in front of you. Or so we hope.

Self-driving cars

Another innovation from Google is going through rigorous testing and the regulatory mill. These cars drive themselves based on computing, wireless, and camera technologies that can make a robot-driven car safer than a human-driven one. You can sit in the driver’s seat and do your email, but you can also override the controls if necessary. Once it’s polished, we’d love to take the car for a spin. But not before they get the bugs out.

Apple television

Okay, this mythical beast doesn’t really have to be made by Apple. But we need a TV that truly combines the best of the Internet and the best of traditional cable television. Apple has hinted something is coming that will transform the living room. We want to be able to play free or 99-cent apps on the high-definition screen and access our favorite TV shows and first-run movies. We have no clue, though, when this rumored Apple device will really arrive (if ever).

A 72-core Tegra 4-based tablet computer

Nvidia hasn’t announced anything yet, but the rumor is it will describe its next-generation Tegra chip at the Consumer Electronics Show next week. If that happens, you can expect that dozens of tablets and smartphones will follow. Tablets thrive on efficient battery use as well as performance. But Nvidia has been moving down the path of creating Tegra technology that offers both low-power consumption and outstanding 3D graphics and processing power at the same time. It’s time for another great leap that could put tablets on par with — or ahead of — the traditional PC.

Cool wireless technologies that don’t make us glow

The bottleneck in delivering fast Internet service to homes and mobile devices has strangled a lot of innovations. Bridging the last mile and delivering blazing-fast speeds to both home and mobile users is one of the great challenges facing us. It could be done with a huge investment in infrastructure, but smart technology might make it a reality as well. Steve Perlman (of Rearden and formerly the head of OnLive) has demoed Project DIDO, a distributed wireless Internet technology that gets around bottlenecks and delivers awesomeness in the not-so-distant future. We hope it’s real. And it would be great and necessary bonus if these technologies were really safe as well.

Cheap rides into space

I’m still waiting for the Southwest Airlines of space travel to arrive. Maybe $99 to the moon and back? After all, we want to be space tourists one day. The space shuttle has died, but maybe private companies will make it happen.

Better robots

It would be nice if we could count on the help of household robots and maybe get all of these great gadgets made by robots working in factories in the U.S. I’d like to try out a few personal robots, once they slim down in size and become a little more humanoid.

Indoor location

CSR’s Sirf Technologies division has figured out how to map indoor locations when you’re walking with your mobile phone inside a building. Now we have to see it in practice. Companies like WifiSLAM are hoping to make this real. We can’t wait until we can find our way through the giant hotel-casinos of Las Vegas without getting lost.

4K televisions that cost $500

I know that 4K TV, or those with four times as many pixels as today’s high-definition TVs, are going to be plentiful at CES. In the past year, these so-called Ultra HD TVs have debuted at prices at $25,000 or so. Can we skip the whole learning curve part and jump to the $500 model soon?

A.I./brains

I need a better brain. Or a brain enhancement. I’m counting on Jeff Hawkins’ Grok technology, which promises to deliver “big data” analysis based on the processing that resembles what happens in the human brain. Or something like it. It’s like those chips in William Gibson’s novel Johnny Mnemonic.

Personal gaming

Will Wright shared a vision last year for personal gaming, or a mobile game that was smart enough to know your interests, know your location, understand your context, and then deliver a surprising, fun gaming experience to you. The game collects a lot of big data about you and processes that. Then it creates a custom experience, a game made for just one person. You.

An awesome game console

How about a great video game console? One with free-to-play games with both traditional game controls and gesture recognition. I’d love to have a wide variety of indie games as well as blockbusters, and I’d like to extend my play to mobile game platforms and the web. Add backward-compatibility and cloud computing. Let’s hope that Sony and Microsoft are listening. Nintendo’s Wii U doesn’t quite do it for me.

Quantified self gadgets that automate calorie counting

We’ve got devices like Striiv that can count our steps. Other gadgets (like the Basis Health Tracker) can monitor our sleep, record our heart rate, and sync with the cloud. But we’d really like to get a device that photographs our meals (or does something like that) and calculates how many calories we’ll consume. This kind of technology could complete the loop in terms of figuring out our physical activity and our food intake, giving us the data we could use to calculate whether we are exercising enough and eating right. (VentureBeat’s John Koetsier supplied this idea, based on the “<a href=”“quantified self” movement where people try to measure everything about themselves).

If this list of new technologies doesn’t sound ambitious enough, we’re also waiting for some pie-in-the-sky science fiction to become reality. We’d like to go for a ride in the Star Trek Holodeck, a virtual reality simulation that is indistinguishable from reality, or live in the Metaverse virtual world of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. And I’d like to use that gesture-based computer that Tom Cruise used in Minority Report. But we’re assuming it’s going to take a while before the tech and entertainment industries can deliver on those visions.

Now if Moore’s Law ever stopped in its tracks, the engine behind all of this change would grind to a halt. Then we could say that things might truly get boring. On the other hand, nanotechnology might be quite useful in replacing semiconductor manufacturing with something else. So we’re not counting on getting bored anytime soon.

Image credits: Google, cmmorrison/Flickr, guilhermescha/Flickr, Nvidia, Lionsgate Television, SpaceX, Nao, Microsoft/Bing, LG, VLADGRIN/Shutterstock, Samsung, Samir Torres/VentureBeat

The Mayan Apocalypse didn’t occur, so my 2012 predictions survived to face public scrutiny. Before I go into this year’s predictions, here are my own grades for last year’s premonitions:

• “Mojo shifts from Amazon to big-box retailers”  D+

The state sales tax amnesties needed more time to see their effects, so going big and bold on this prediction was admittingly premature.  I would have given myself a C+ if I only included Walmart, Target and eBay (up 75 percent for the year) as comparables with Amazon, but Best Buy pulled me down to a D+ since their stock is down 50 percent for the year and Amazon is up 50 percent.  Also many are expecting Best Buy to go the way of Circuit City within a few years.  For Amazon, many questions still surround the strength of their business model, but Bezos is leading them into bold new territories that my new name for him is Jeff “Cortes Magellan” Bezos.

• “RIM finally sells”  B-

RIM is still surviving like the pesky gopher from “Caddyshack”, so I want to hold this prediction out until 2013.  I gave myself a B- since RIM didn’t do anything to right their ship.  If this doesn’t happen in 2013, then I’ll change my grade to an “F”.

• “Android takes 50 percent of the tablet market”  B

The 43-percent figure by IDC is close but no cigar. The iPad mini’s launch prevented my prediction from coming true — and the fact that those 15 million-plus Samsung Galaxy Notes (I & II) are not classified as tablets is something I’m going to campaign for in 2013. Forget phablets, they should be double counted as smartphones and tablets.

• “Zynga loses half its market cap and its hold on social gaming”  A+

When I made this prediction, Zynga’s market cap was over $6 billion and now stands at $1.8 billion. With a loss more than 70 percent since that time, I gave myself an A+.

Now, here is the sixth annual edition of my technology predictions for VentureBeat.

Yahoo acquires Twitter

While Twitter can take its sweet time to develop its business model and revenues, Yahoo cannot wait. It needs an infusion of a mobile strategy, top talent, and new potential revenue streams. Some of Marissa Mayer’s prayers can be answered with such an acquisition. The question and potential hurdle is financing of such a deal and terms for Twitter’s shareholders and management team. Regardless of this issue, this is deal that could tremendously help Yahoo and the scene from Star Wars with Princess Leia calling for Obi Wan Costolo… er, Kenobi’s help keeps repeating in my mind.

3D printing goes mainstream

By the end of 2013, 3D printing will go mainstream. Staples already launched “Easy 3D” in Europe, so you will see it in the U.S. through them and other channels. This will also be the beginning of a shift in the manufacturing industry towards the U.S. again. This growing innovation in manufacturing will displace thousands of jobs in China and the “next Chinas” — so for Kenya, Tanzania, and others, I would recommend to skip traditional trade skills and focus on software engineering.

Online gaming’s black hole

With the decline of Zynga and the failure of Google+ as a gaming platform, there is a black hole in the online gaming space in the U.S. market. Who will fill this void? EA, Apple, Disney, Samsung? Maybe one of the dominant players from Asia, such as Tencent, Nexon, or Gree? Probably some mix of two or three of these different types of players within the gaming universe, so 2013 will be an interesting year for online gaming.

Quantified self space gains momentum

The launch of the Nike+ startup accelerator wasn’t a reflection of the accelerator space being inundated (which it is) but a sign that the quantified-self space is rapidly developing. The instrumentation and measurement of all things physical and within a person’s daily life will become more ubiquitous, and self-tracking and body hacking is a trend to follow for 2013.

I briefly spoke with Peter Hsing, a General Partner at Merus Capital, who told me, “The promise is that quantified self will lead to better healthcare not only for the individual but collectively as a society. The critical ingredients that are missing — the inputs: what is the individual consuming, being exposed to, how is s/he expending her/his energy, how much sleep, etc. It’s just the tip of the iceberg that we are seeing today.”

Gangnam Style hits two billion views

I’m Korean American, so I have to give props to Psy and predict that “Gangnam Style” will hit 2 billion views in 2013… “Ehhhh, Sexy Lady! Op op op op oppa Gangnam Style!”

Bernard Moon is co-founder and CEO of Vidquik, a new web conferencing and sales solutions platform, and co-founder of SparkLabs, a recently launched startup accelerator in Seoul, Korea. Follow him on Twitter.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

As the year draws to an end, Silicon Valley investors are looking for the next wave of technology after social networking.

VentureBeat spoke to a slew of the top players at well-known West Coast institutions — the founding team at Stanford University’s technology accelerator, StartX, partners at some of Silicon Valley’s most prominent venture capital firms, and others — to help illuminate what the big trends will be in the coming year.

For VCs, it’s not enough to build an addictive mobile app or game: Investors expect to see more, something worth building a venture-funded company around. So in 2013, get ready for mind-blowing, nerdgasmic tech, whether it’s augmented reality, 3D printing, self-driving cars, or space travel.

For later-stage startups, 2013 will be the year all hell breaks loose. The IPO pipeline is already brimming with contenders: Venture-funded companies like Twitter, Box, and Square are ready for Wall Street. With heated competition for customers and users, there may also be some mammoth failures when some venture-backed companies that have received hundreds of millions of dollars simply buckle.

Most of the investors we spoke to agreed confidence in the tech industry is sky-high and 2013 is a year to take bigger risks. This time last year, we predicted entrepreneurship would be an engine to drive jobs creation and stimulate economic growth. With the global economy beginning to stabilize, we’re ready to take more risks and push technology into new verticals, like education, government, financial services, and health care.

Financial firms will finally embrace innovation

David Blumberg, managing partner, Blumberg Capital 

“The financial services sector should be highly attractive to IT entrepreneurs and investors for its size, growth, high margins, and dramatic need for greater innovation and efficiency. At more than 8.5 percent of the global GDP, the industry is measured in trillions of dollars.

“Despite rapid growth, the financial industry is burdened by outmoded IT systems and legacy software, extensive and increasingly punitive regulations, and taxes as well as a negative public image as being too expensive, inflexible, and inefficient. It is an industry consumers and politicians love to hate — hence it’s ripe for innovation to improve outcomes for all.

“And fortunately, startups are leading the way forward. Go for innovation in financial services, young entrepreneur — it’s where the money is!”

Ones to watch: Square, Credorax, Lenddo, LendUp, SoFi, Addepar, Zanbato

 Computers will get smarter and more autonomous

Mike Maples, founding partner, Floodgate Capital

“I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the next big tech cycle after social networking. One of the things we did right as a firm is to see that trend early [Editor's note: Maples is an early investor in Twitter and Reputation.com]. We use the term ‘hypernet’ to describe this notion that technology will no longer be characterized by one world wide web or one search engine.

“Computers will exist in billions of nodes and millions of clouds. In 2013, people will expect to be hyperconnected on the hyperweb: They will want to manage content on any device. We will see user experiences that are no longer assumed to be windows on a computer screen or a smart phone. Some of my favorite examples are Google’s self-driving car or Nest‘s thermostat, which learns the temperature you like and turns it down when you’re away.”

Ones to watch: Nest, Google’s self-driving car, IFFFT, Grok, Genwi

‘Big data’ won’t be a buzzword; it will be part of life

Ross Fubini, venture partner, Canaan Partners

“‘Big data’ is the buzzword of the year, but 2013 will be the year that big data will be a reality across many application areas.

“Big data allows the user to experience magic. Anyone can ask questions of the data, and soon we’ll be using these technologies for everyday decision-making, whether it’s pricing, hiring, or managing our finances. These new applications are going to require more than an open-source computing framework like Hadoop. The shift to ‘big data’ will herald an entirely new set of infrastructures to store and process all that data.

“Data has been a big deal and a big market for years — SQL, hello!. But ‘big data’ is a big deal because of the sheer volume of trackable data and because it’s cheaper than ever before to build an application to make that data valuable. By the end of the year, we will see some big winners emerge leading up to some splashy 2014 and 2015 IPOs.”

Ones to watch: Kaggle, Splunk, Platfora, Grok, Intuit, Quid, LendUp, GNS Healthcare

Storage will get even sexier

Bipul Sinha, investor, Lightspeed Venture Partners

“The enterprise storage market is experiencing a tectonic shift led primarily by virtualization and storage media disruptions. The incumbents are slow to respond, and the startup activity is at an all-time high. The new year will witness two significant trends: an acceleration of storage and compute hyper-convergence and a bifurcation of performance and capacity tiers for shared enterprise storage.

“These trends will eventually commoditize the storage layer of the enterprise information technology stack and essentially propel the emergence of software defined, agile enterprise datacenter.”

Ones to watch: SimpliVity, Nutanix, Zadara, Exablox, Bitcasa

The developer ecosystem will go mainstream

Peter Levine, partner, Andreessen Horowitz

“The shift from the web to an app-based computing architecture is reinventing the entire developer ecosystem. Until recently, Microsoft and Java controlled all software development and services because developers could only write for those APIs. With 2013 on the horizon, we believe those days will soon be over.

“The old way of computing has been eroded by and replaced with special-purpose, easy-to-integrate backend services. These best-of-breed services also innovate at a breakneck pace, which means applications can take advantage of many additional services, thus paving the way for a new developer ecosystem.”

Ones to watch: GitHub, Mixpanel, Pixelapse, Okta, Parse, Bizness Apps, Urban Airship

Hardware companies will raise larger rounds

Naval Ravikant, founder, AngelList

“The declining cost of building tech startups has finally reached hardware. We’re seeing accelerators like Lemnos Labs turning out very interesting seed-stage hardware companies.

“Some of the coolest I’ve seen this year include Momentum Machines, which builds burger-flipping robots; UnmannedInnovation, which builds an operating system for UAVs; NanoSatisfi, a Kickstarter-funded project to launch and rents CubeSats; and Nomiku, which makes sous vide [machines] affordable.

“It used to be that for a hardware company, you’d have to raise lots of money from the get-go. But now you can start small with a seed, as AngelList alum Leap Motion did, and then go on to raise significant rounds from large investors later.”

Ones to watch: Maykah, Goldiebox, OpenRov, Momentum Machines, Unmanned Innovation

Indoor location will be the next billion-dollar market

Don Dodge, developer advocate, Google; advisor, Google Ventures

“Indoor location will be bigger than GPS, which only works outdoors. We spend 90 percent of our time indoors, whether it’s in shopping malls, offices, schools, restaurants, and so on, where GPS doesn’t work or is inaccurate. In 2013, you’ll use your smartphone to find the exact store aisle location for every item on your shopping list.

“With indoor location, you can find people, products, or services plotted exactly on a floor plan with walking directions to get there. You could receive coupons, advertisements, or free offers for products based on where you are in a store. Imagine playing indoor location games like capture the flag, tower defense, or other games based on real-life indoor locations. There are thousands of applications in many different market segments that will be built using accurate indoor positioning technology.”

Related: Read VentureBeat’s roundup of indoor location technologies.

Ones to watch: WifiSLAM, ByteLight, Neuaer, IndoorAtlas

Health care will begin to feel personal

Cameron Teitelman, John Melas-Kyriazi, and Divya Nag (pictured, left), StartX leadership team

“In the medical space, advances in bioinformatics, genomics, regenerative medicine, and proteomics [the large-scale study of proteins] have propelled us into an era of truly personalized medicine. Many med-tech startups are harnessing innovation in these fields to prevent diseases, increase health outcomes, and tailor medical engagement on an individual level.

“With a rising number of med-tech companies launching personalized medicine platforms, we are going to see a greater demand for individual treatment options around the world as these options become increasingly accessible.”

Ones to watch:Morpheus Medical, Ubiome, Wellness FX, GenapSys, Numedii, The Chordoma Foundation

A.I. and human-computer interaction

Brian Singerman, partner, Founders Fund

“We are always highly suspicious of trends. The best investments are often in companies and industries that others do not consider hot or trendy. Therefore, a theme for 2013 will be to not invest in trends, but rather long-lasting value. Trends come and go, but the best companies will be the ones that buck the trends and don’t look like all the others, companies that don’t appear to have much competition.

“To that end, we think 2013 will see some major technological breakthroughs through new ways of interacting with machines. Interface breakthrough Leap Motion will change the way we think about and operate computers of all types. Google will make huge strides in self-driving cars. We will even see the beginnings of a sophisticated A.I. The new year will be a true revenge of the nerds year, with product giving ground to actual technological innovation.”

Ones to watch: Leap Motion, Metaio, Ouya, Deep Learning technologies, Google Glass, self-driving cars, anything involving space travel

Top image courtesy of Smileus, Shutterstock

2013 is going to be an exciting year for designers. We’ll be involved in the tight personalization of services across a connected web of content and devices. And we’ll be challenged to make several new experiences intuitive to users. Above all, the following five trends will have the most impact on what we do in the new year.

Contextual Design

Contextual Design will be the next “secret sauce” in digital marketing.

For those of you new to the notion of  ”contextual design”, imagine this scenario: You’re walking into BestBuy to shop for a new camera. You have your iPhone with you and location services are turned on. You’re phone “knows” you’re at Best Buy. You find a few cameras that seem like the perfect fit for your needs, but you’d like to see some reviews to be sure.

So you ask Siri on your iPhone for information on the new Nikon you’re holding in your hand. She returns data in the form of public reviews, reviews from your trusted friends on Facebook, information served from Best Buy on accessories and product details, and pricing from BestBuy, Amazon, and a local camera shop. You browse the information and confirm that this is the camera for you.

You could order the camera on Amazon because it’s five to ten percent less expensive than in the store, but because you are in Best Buy, and have accessed the data served to you through Siri from Best Buy, Best Buy decides to sweeten the deal buy sending you a “live” promotion in the form of a 15 percent discount on accessories for the camera if you purchase it from them while in the store today. Sold! You grab the gear, and make your purchase in store using your Best Buy Rewards app to apply the offer and collect your reward points.

Possible? Absolutely! Everything mentioned in this scenario is absolutely doable with today’s technology, but it hasn’t been designed or executed yet. The opportunity to supply users with contextually relevant content on the go is huge! What you do for your customers requires you to understand them and cater to them… which you should already be doing, right?

The Internet of Things

When we combine contextual design with the intelligent, web connected, stuff that exists around us, and we’ve got an extremely powerful source of data. Enter products like Twine, a simple, Internet-connected sensor that can be easily programmed through the web to collect data and send messages.

By using Twine to monitor a simple thing like the moisture level in your basement, you could be notified via text or email that your sump pump isn’t functioning properly. Combine this with a simple iPhone app and you could have an emergency preparedness system to protect your home while you’re away.

The Nest  thermostat is a more developed example of this same concept. Capable of learning users’ preferences,  Nest helps them control the temperature of their homes in a way that’s beautiful, simple, and powerful. By using Nest in their homes, consumers are already saving some serious money.

As we open our lives to these new connected devices, the “Internet of things” relevant to each of us becomes more diverse. Data in our day-to-day functions as human beings is captured, recorded, and processed. How that data is leveraged and used is up to us as designers and technologists. There are wonderful opportunities for this information to enhance our lives if we aren’t intimidated by devices watching and learning about how we live.

 Responsive web design

This is an obvious one, but it still merits mention. Responsive web techniques will move from experimental to mainstream in 2013. A mobile-first approach with responsive web techniques will allow your consumers to access content in a contextually relevant way on their terms. For the enterprise, a responsive approach will allow for a more centralized management of content and help to mitigate desktop only or mobile only approaches to content delivery.

In your responsive approach it’s important to consider a system that is based on content first. It’s easy to get caught up in the graphical solution of your designs prior to considering the contextual relevancy of the content you are designing for. Therefore, design your experiences from the inside out. Work out the relevant content only, for a mobile user, a tablet user, and a desktop user. Leverage a consistent grid-system of your choice. Then, layer on the graphical solution. You’ll find that by taking this approach, you’ll have a flexible system that is serving content contextually important to your audience while still maintaining your brand experience.

Second screen experiences

Many have tried, but few have found great success with the second screen. The opportunity however, is too great to ignore. In 2013, the secrets of the second screen experience will be unlocked.

Content distributers and advertisers are constantly looking to differentiate their products. The challenge for a second screen option is in the focus of the viewer. Simply having content that enhances the experience on the big screen is interesting but has proven a challenge.

When watching a game on TV, I’m only interested in statistics during a break in the action. While watching a movie, I’m not interested in the depth of the character that I can look up on my iPad — I’m watching the movie! So how do content providers introduce the extraordinary amount of supplemental content to people in a way that doesn’t interfere with the primary viewing experience? Universal Mind is working closely with some exceptional content providers on this very thing! Stay tuned this year to see some exciting headway in this space.

 A return to simplicity

With Jony Ive at the design helm on all things Apple (hardware and software), we’re likely see some shifts in the user interface appearance of the Mac OS, iOS, and Apple created applications. These shifts will drive a design trend towards Apple’s new UI design aesthetic — just as they’ve done in the past.

Simple, clean, UI design will make a strong presence this year. You can already see the influence of Microsoft’s Metro UI on applications both for Windows and other platforms. The focus of “content over chrome” is an approach that fits very well within the concepts of contextual design, mobile first, and responsive web.

Even though I have a terrible track record for predicting the future, I find making predictions irresistible. It’s such an exciting time in the game industry that just about anything can happen. Things that I never thought would occur — such as Apple dominating in the sheer number of games on its platform — have now come to pass. The industry is full of disruption and change, from the smallest startups to the biggest companies, as the digital revolution sweeps through the industry. We are, after all, in the crossover era, when game companies invade new platforms. With so much change, the predictions become harder, but they’re also more fun to make.

We’re looking forward to announced games like Grand Theft Auto V and unannounced (but likely) titles such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4. But many of these predictions below go beyond the impact of single launches. (Check out how I did with last year’s here). I have tapped some of our staff for help with them. And please vote for your favorites in our poll (in the web version of this story) and leave comments. Also, check out where we’ve been in the past in our predictions about the road ahead in gaming.

Mobile gets bigger

This trend isn’t a bubble. The growth of smartphone and tablet gaming is an inexorable trend. It’s a no-brainer that it will gather momentum in 2013. Mobile games account for 42 percent of all new game investments, according to investment bank Digi-Capital. Mobile devices are growing fast throughout the world, and we’ll soon have multiple billions of devices that are capable of playing games. Every company is adapting to this change by launching new versions of mobile titles, and many startups are focused on a “mobile first” or “mobile only” strategy. So far, nobody dominates this market.

Hardcore online games will match the quality of console games

Games like League of Legends and Hawken have shown that it’s possible to create great free-to-play hardcore online games as downloadable titles. Soon, you might be able to play these without downloads thanks to better browser technologies (such as WebGL or Chrome Native Client), which make use of 3D graphics hardware on a computer without the need for plug-ins. When the better rendering technology gains traction, then one of the last quality barriers will fall between online games and console titles. The ability to play high-end web games without delays will neutralize the advantage that console companies have had in the home. It will lower the cost of distribution and democratize gaming further. But once this new web publishing platform is more evenly distributed across the development community, the focus will have to be on making better games, not shoveling more out.

The battle royale for gaming will commence

To deal with the invasion of hardcore online titles, console makers will have to respond with something exciting and new. It’s going to be a world war of gaming in 2013 as big players duke it out. Traditional console makers Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft will go to war with the likes of Apple, Amazon, Samsung, and Google. Microsoft has already set up a broader entertainment network on Xbox Live, but it could lose that position if it maintains its current high subscription fees and a dearth of free-to-play titles.

Apple and Google in particular may not launch “consoles” per se. Rather, if they compete in gaming, it will be an accidental byproduct of a strategy to compete for the hearts and minds of consumers on whatever platform they use. Those companies haven’t designed specifically for gamers, but their platforms have been ideal for developers and publishers trying to reach larger audiences. An Apple television would naturally be a platform for games. The newcomers will use free or 99-cent titles — as well as technologies that transfer images from a smartphone or tablet to a TV — as their wedge into the console space. We’ll see a battle for the living room like never before. And this battle royale will happen on all platforms wherever they’re used.

Microsoft and Sony will both announce and launch their next-generation systems

Chasing the Nintendo Wii U, Microsoft and Sony will announce their new consoles at E3 2013 in June, and at least one of them will introduce the new machine in the fall of 2013. Microsoft may not launch in 2013 since it has a leadership position now. But it shouldn’t try to milk that position and should instead get out ahead of its new challengers such as Apple and Google. Sony has more motivation to get into the market sooner since it came in third place in units sold in the last generation. But developer activity suggests that Microsoft is moving ahead faster with a broader group of allies.

Introducing a new console isn’t just a matter of willpower. It’s the result of mobilizing a whole ecosystem of suppliers, partners, developers, and publishers to support the effort. So while it may be a no-brainer to introduce sooner, the console makers may be forced to wait until 2014. They will also have to build their consoles around a new innovation, such as much better gesture controls, to make the gameplay more magical than it is today.

And if Sony and Microsoft know what’s good for them, they’ll embrace cloud gaming to reduce the cost of their consoles and deal with backward compatibility. And they will give users plenty of options for free-to-play, platform-agnostic gaming. (GamesBeat writer Kat Bailey is a fan of this idea.) They will both embrace free-to-play and cloud gaming. Any new console will thus have to be a hybrid of tradition and the new digital platforms. (Dan “Shoe” Hsu, the editor-in-chief of GamesBeat, fed me a version of this prediction.)

Nintendo’s Wii U console will fail

So far, the Wii U is selling out, but not in astounding numbers. And while games such as ZombiU are fine, they’re getting weak reviews on Metacritic. In fact, the highest rated game on the Wii U this season is Mass Effect 3: Special Edition, a retread of a game that has already been available on the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3. This isn’t the right way to launch a brand new console. While initial supplies may sell out, what will happen three months or six months from now as the novelty wears off and gamers await better-looking titles on the upcoming consoles or the PC?

Nintendo embraced the consumer love for tablets with its tablet-like controller, but that hasn’t put a dent in demand for tablets. In the context of a more competitive industry with multiplying choices, I don’t see the Wii U as a survivor. The best thing Nintendo can do is cut the price, and that’s never been a winning formula for long-term success. I’m hoping Nintendo surprises us, but I am not counting on it.

Smart TV games will finally become a reality

This prediction crystallizes several of the trends already mentioned. Apple still hasn’t introduced its television. If and when it does, apps will come to the connected TV, nicknamed the Smart TV, in a very big way. But while Apple may eventually validate this trend, the market won’t wait for one company. In the meantime, Google will keep pushing on Google TV. Manufacturers like LG, Samsung, and Vizio are pushing hard on cloud gaming on the TV, where all you need to play is a web connection and a game controller. Ouya hopes to enter this market with a $99 box in the spring that will move Android games onto this same screen.

The business model enabled by apps on the TV is very attractive for consumers. Free-to-play or 99 cent apps may be good enough for a lot of players, particularly if there is a path to high-end hardcore games as well. Gesture or voice-recognition technologies will add novelty to the Smart TV gaming experience. Given the option to forgo the expense of $60 games and $300 consoles, many consumers are likely to prefer playing unified apps on TVs that can also be played on tablets and smartphones. That could ignite a huge wave of gaming consumption.

Gesture technologies will take off

Motion-sensing technologies like the Nintendo Wii remote, Microsoft’s Kinect for the Xbox 360, and the Sony PlayStation Move were just the start. Intel calls the new era of gestures “perceptual computing.” Controlling a game or computing device with your hands, body, or voice could become much more accurate in the next generation. Kinect’s accuracy trailed off if you got too close to the TV. But startups such as Softkinetic have demonstrated that gestures work well just inches away from a laptop’s webcam now. This helps make general computing easier just as touch screens do with Windows 8. But the possibilities for gaming become much more interesting with precise technologies that can detect small finger movements as well as the activity of everyone in a room. And these gestures don’t have to be limited to PCs or consoles. They could also be integrated over time into smartphones and tablets. Intel itself promises to launch perceptual computing in 2013.

First-person shooter games will grab market share on tablets

Based on what I’ve seen so far of The Drowning (pictured right), which is being developed by Scattered Entertainment and will be published in 2013 by DeNA’s Ngmoco, I’m convinced that first-person shooter games will finally take hold on tablets. The Drowning has a clever gesture-based user interface that works with touch screens — something that shooters haven’t done well so far. If you tap two fingers on the screen, your weapon will fire at the midpoint. Tap one on the screen, and your character will move to where you tap. And swipe the screen to turn your characters head. It’s simple, and it is just one example of how the multibillion-dollar shooter business could make its way onto tablets. And it means that mobile games will be playable without a game controller.

The game controller will become the king maker

Startups like PrimeA (maker of Moga controllers) and Green Throttle Games want to turn the humble game controller into something more important. They can do so if the above trend doesn’t work out so well and gamers prefer to play their mobile games with traditional handheld controllers.

Green Throttle is creating a cool user interface app that allows you to use its controller to play Android apps on a TV, connected to your smartphone or tablet via a HDMI cable. (If better Wi-Fi technology comes along, this will get easier to do.) With controllers used in this way, Android games can invade the realm of the $60 console game. The controller could blast a hole through the barrier between two segments of the game market.

The barriers will come down between real-money gambling and social casino games

Likewise, the barriers are coming down between real-money online gambling and social casino games, where the winnings are merely virtual casino chips.

Startups like Betable enable social casino games to be converted to real-money online gambling in territories where it’s legal. Zynga is counting on changes in U.S. laws to enter the real-money gambling market, but it will launch in the crowded United Kingdom market first. Facebook has also embraced real-money gambling by allowing Gamesys to launch such games in the U.K.

This will set up a clash. The social casino game operators have the biggest games like Zynga Poker but the lowest revenues per paying user. Online gambling firms make a lot of money from relatively few heavy gamblers.

But marrying the two businesses will make it much easier for the online gambling firms to recruit potential high rollers for low costs. Meanwhile, U.S. states and the federal government are loosening the restrictions on online gambling. This trend may take years to play out, but it will gather more momentum in 2013.

eSports will take off

Gaming has been a professional sport for a while, but with releases such as League of Legends from Riot Games, it is gathering momentum. Rising in parallel with this trend is the livestreaming of games enabled by Twitch, which has been integrated into the online shooter Planetside 2 (pictured right). Community has also become a much bigger deal in ensuring the success of a game, according to gamer social network Raptr. That’s because the improved engagement that comes with promoting the community around a game leads to higher awareness, revenues, and profits.

ESports have been growing in countries such as China and South Korea, but Major League Gaming, WCG, and other leagues are offering bigger prizes and more venues for gigantic tournaments. And it’s no surprise that Activision built livestreaming, shoutcasting (narrated games), spectating, and league play into Call of Duty: Black Ops II. Gamemakers should already know that you don’t just milk your users. Give them what they want, and they will pay you back many times over. Let’s hope that more companies are going to learn the lesson: It’s the community, stupid. (GamesBeat writer Rus McLaughlin suggested a version of this prediction.)

Gamification will continue to spread the influence of games

Gamification, or the use of game mechanics to increase engagement in nongame applications, is the path to spread game thinking far and wide. It has applications in everything from fitness devices that encourage you to exercise to enterprise applications that reward you for completing tutorials.

Badgeville, Big Door, and Bunchball are providing the services for all kinds of companies to embrace gamification, either by rewarding consumers and employees with achievements or leading them to compete with rivals through leaderboards. A lot of these efforts will fail as many games do. But the ones that are done right could lead to a big expansion in engagement and usage. Gamification is in its hype stage, but the reality will start setting in during 2013 as to what works and what doesn’t. And it will carry the flag for gaming into all circles of business.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Folia Grace recently conducted research with analysts and enterprise customers about upcoming trends the cloud.

Here’s what the SAP Cloud’s VP or product marketing says are the top 10 trends for 2013. Grace talked with VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall about her research. This is his edited version of her summary.

Folia Grace, SAP Cloud VP of product marketing

1. Hybrid cloud growth

About half of all new enterprise IT spending will be on hybrid cloud by 2016, up from 40 percent this year, according to a survey by Saugatuck. Another 39 percent will be on pure-play cloud, up from 11 percent. This trend toward hybrid isn’t new. But what’s really new is the movement by third-party integrators to do these hybrid cloud integrations for customers. Not everything that people want exists in the cloud. They have concerns about security and outages. More companies are looking at private clouds as part of their mix.

2. Growth of mobile cloud computing

The first generation of mobile apps didn’t work very well because they were still formatted for laptops and keyboards. The first enterprise apps suffered from the same limitations. Now we have these wonderful capabilities — gesturing, maps, location — and we’re going to take advantage of these. We’re going to build ubiquitously native beautiful apps for the iPad for the mobile work force. Usage stats on the growth of mobile devices in the enterprise are eye-opening. Everyone has an iPad. And people are working from different locations. When they are at the coffee house or at home putting kids to bed, they want something easy to use so they can manage their life easier.

3. Focus on beautiful applications

This continues from the second trend and the mobile cloud. We think people want the same sort of flexibility and experience that they get on their iPad — the drag and drop — in their enterprise experience. They want it to be very simple, almost like a consumer experience: fun, engaging, and interesting. Enterprise companies are going to want to put their own skin on their apps.

4. Arrival of social in all cloud solutions

Social is not new, and neither is business intelligence. But until now, they’ve been disconnected. If you’re looking at your desktop, maybe you have an RSS feed from everyone at the company talking about the new office. But then you’ve got BI in a separate dashboard. They’re separate. Going forward, we’re starting to infuse social in all of our business processes. Social is a part of the business process. There’s social recruiting, social management, social business intelligence. One of the things we noticed is that when you provide more and more dashboards and analytics reports, you don’t change the behavior of people.

5. Need for the ‘glocal’ cloud

The cloud has been accepted in U.S. But other countries have more stringent privacy laws and require companies to keep certain data within their own country. We see that opening up much more broadly and globally. In Latin America, things are definitely picking up. It has a booming economy and a tight labor market — and not enough skilled IT people to implement the technology they need. It loves the cloud. We see Europe becoming more open to cloud solutions. We call it the “Glocal”: While the global opening is great, certain parts have to be managed at the local level. Managers want to have cost-savings by having best-practice processes in the cloud while being able to take care of local compliance and reporting requirements. Finance and HR have to be managed at the local level, for example.

6. Increased importance of cloud security

The first batch of cloud purchases driven by a line of business managers didn’t have many implications for business, either because they weren’t mission critical or they didn’t have highly sensitive data. But as companies move up the chain with their purchases, we see more CIOs getting involved in the sales cycle. Core HR systems have rich employee data, including social security numbers, compensation, and addresses. CIOs need to understand what the security levers are and whether they meet their criteria.

7. Bring your own cloud (BYOC) boom

Employees are bringing in their own devices, downloading their own apps for work. Some of them in sensitive enterprise positions won’t admit publicly to some of the things they use. They may use Evernote to take notes; it’s a fabulous tool. But they use it outside of the corporate firewall. Or they may use Doodle Buddy to illustrate concepts with their finger, which they can turn into PDFs and use for business. These are examples of bringing your own cloud to do your work. There are many more examples of this blurry line between enterprise and personal devices. There’s not a lot of security around this.

8. Rise of the geopolitical cloud

As cloud computing goes global and goes beyond borders, some things are at odds — such as the Patriot Act. Some of our partners don’t like the idea that if they use U.S. servers; they are subject to U.S. government laws around their strategic data, including where it is stored. French companies are leading this resistance. They’re creating their own national cloud (see example of SFR’s French cloud) so that they can control restraints put on them. You will see more or less controls emerging, depending on where cloud services originate, where they’re delivered, and where customers are headquartered.

9. Spotlight on the clean cloud

Every company across the globe deals with the pressure to think about sustainability. This is the so-called triple bottom-line, where they’re targeting sustainability results as well as profits and social good. When you look at how much data centers account for total energy usage in the world, you’re talking about a lot of impact. Companies want more sustainable data centers.

10. Rise of the cloud-based networked enterprise

We’re seeing that our customers want to do transactions in the cloud. We used to create purchase orders and fax them. Customers are moving to doing things electronically. But it’s expensive to create these connections between companies. SAP recently purchased Ariba, which has 720,000 companies in its marketplace that lets companies do procurement online. This is an example of where we see things going. Ariba built a network to maintain connections for you. It maintains purchase orders, puts bills together, and allows trade to happen more freely between partners. The question is, how does this move into other areas? We’re living in a world where we’re ask for skills from people and companies around world, and need them for a small period of time. I may need of people to do graphic design, sometimes immediately, other times not at all. I’d like to have a global network of people I can connect with, to get a project going, and then pay them through a sort of PayPal arrangement, in a trusted environment. You can see it going beyond goods being traded, to individual services being traded. The idea of permanent employment or permanent business is breaking down.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

This is a guest post by Trak Lord 

Augmented reality (AR) may seem like a futuristic concept, but it will be a reality of our digital lives in 2013. AR is a new technology that blurs the line between what’s real and what’s computer generated by enhancing what we hear, see and feel. Next year, I predict that it will be everywhere. Here are my five reasons why:

The glasses are coming, the glasses are coming!

Whether it’s Google’s Project Glass or concept videos along the lines of “Sight”, the Internet can’t get enough of Terminator Vision. A few companies have however made some pretty impressive technological leaps this year: this fall, Vuzix debuted their monocular AR prototype for industrial use at the annual InsideAR conference; Innovega showcased their Augmented Reality contact lens prototype at the 2012 Consumer Electronic show, for which they’re currently seeking FDA approval; and researchers at the University of Washington successfully displayed a single pixel on an eye (albeit, that of a rabbit).

In the meantime, retails brands like Oakley and game favorite Valve were just as quick to throw their hats in the ring alongside patent applications from tech giants Apple and Microsoft. But don’t bother Santa with your letters – widely available (and affordable) wearable augmented reality devices probably won’t hit shelves until 2014.

Smartphones will be AR-equipped

We might not get Paul Smith AR goggles anytime soon, but expect OEMs, handset manufacturers and carriers to integrate optimized augmented reality, visual display and camera performance into the next generation of smartphones, because it’s basically already happening.

Premier-to-punchline-to-rising-star Nokia recently launched the City Lens app, exclusive to its Lumia suite of devices. UK-based chip designer ARM has had its eye on AR for a while, powering and optimizing experiences for its architecture found in the Samsung Galaxy SII, SIII and Note devices. And let us not forget Telefonica and their mad dash to serve mobile augmented reality advertisements to the entirety of their O2 network, alongside mobile coupons and location-based services.

Location, Location, Location

GPS and geodata were responsible early on for bringing augmented reality to the forefront. Applications like Junaio and Layar made a splash in the tech world, offering location-based navigational “channels” and “layers” where UFO-like billboards bobbed on the horizon, displaying information about your surroundings. In 2013 expect to see the next generation of those GPS-based experiences, incorporating not only data from on-board sensors like the gyroscope and camera, but other niche mobile technologies that rely on proximity such as NFC.

Companies like Hover are already deeply embedded in generating and augmenting 3-D maps of urban areas, and my company (AR firm Metaio) has successfully developed “snapping algorithms” that pull this kind of data from the cloud and tightly align it to the real world. Expect your city to get a lot more augmented in 2013.

The death of the gimmicky app

Disclaimer: there will always be marketers that abuse useful technology for their own nefarious, poorly designed purposes(re: QR codes), but expect to see brands move to better, faster and stronger apps that give their audience clear incentives for regular use. 3-D bunnies smiling at you from conference marketing material may have seemed novel at the time, but creating a new app for each one-off experience is neither scalable nor tolerable from a user’s perspective.

The 2013 IKEA Catalog app featured an augmented reality viewer that visualized furniture in 3-D and served related video and digital content to readers – and was the most downloaded branded app of 2012, even after launching in July. With that kind of success as a benchmark, expect other companies to start managing entire product lifecycles with augmented reality solutions- not unlike Mitsubishi Electric with their enterprise MeViewAR app that visualizes heating and cooling units in the real world. Mitsubishi Electric has already moved to the next phase for 2013, intending to visualize 3-D maintenance instructions for service technicians.

The birth of the elusive killer app

It doesn’t exist, and it probably won’t. Augmented Reality is a horizontal technology, which means that the nigh-limitless applications make it a challenging endeavor to develop the Evernote-YouTube-Wordpress-Instagram of Augmented Reality. We did however see the AR Angry Birds, and even if it isn’t official it’s still a pretty clear indication that a successful AR game could lead the way for massive adoption. There are already some good examples out there, like the new JengAR game that inserts the 3-D content into the environment itself rather than needing a printed image.

Expect more games to take this approach in 2013 as we move toward experiences that engage users in their actual surroundings. But the most amazing app for which the industry could possibly hope is only peripherally related to augmented reality. 3-D content is tough- it’s difficult and expensive and time-consuming to create, and may present the biggest barrier to producing augmented reality experiences. Augmented reality needs an app that easily generates 3-D content and exports it in major supported formats. Think “Draw Something” meets iMovie, in 3-D.

That would be something.

Trak Lord is the head of US Marketing for Metaio, the leader in augmented reality research and applications. Before joining with Metaio, Trak attended Dartmouth, where he first started working with augmented reality technology, only to relocate to Silicon Valley and consult for social media and augmented reality startups.

Since joining Metaio, Trak has traveled all over the world evangelizing augmented reality and Metaio’s research. He also manages Augmented Reality Blog, the most widely read source in the industry.  

When he’s not at Metaio, Trak enjoys vintage motorcycles, 19th Century French novels and coffee. Lots of coffee. 

The question is simple: Does Apple want to win, or does Apple want to be niche?

Apple’s modus operandi has been to make a limited set of very few products. It chooses those products with almost unbelievable selectivity and with extreme care and attention to detail. This has been a winning strategy for taking Apple to the top. Following this approach has made it the biggest company in the world by market capitalization as well as by the biggest profits.

But staying at the top requires a different set of strategies … which is one reason, perhaps, why Apple stock has fallen 20 percent since September of this year as Android has captured massive market share. And why analysts like Gene Munster are calling for an inexpensive $200 iPhone.

Or, perhaps, even cheaper:

“We imagine an iPhone at a low price point to capture the initial smartphone purchase from customers upgrading from feature phones,” analyst Ben A. Reitzes said recently in a research note for investors. “We believe Apple can sell a phone … below $150.”

The tip of the spear

The reality is that Apple has, to a large degree, been the spear-tip of innovation in the computer and electronics industry. The mouse, the graphical user interface, the touch interface, the touchscreen smartphone, the tablet, the immersive, unified, and elegant operating system … these are all innovations that Apple brought successfully to market when others had failed to do so before.

And all of these innovations have been rewarded by sales, market presence, and profits.

But a market-opening strategy — simple, minimal — tends to not work as markets mature and require products that spread out to fill available niches in the new ecosystem. That is precisely what Apple saw, to its pain, in the personal computing industry of the ’80s and ’90s.

Part of the challenge is that as disruptive innovations penetrate a market, the competition becomes less between “amazing vs. awful” and more between “amazing and really, really good.” Or also amazing, but in a different way.

Mac OS was crazy better than Windows 3.1. It was still better than Windows 95, but the gap was not quite so wide — and plenty of people might legitimately disagree with that statement. Even more so about Windows XP, and, by the time Apple and Microsoft had moved on to OS X and Windows 7, the gap in quality, usability, and elegance was even smaller.

(Yeah, I’m a 25-year Mac guy, so I still think it’s a big difference, but that’s a biased and a history-influenced opinion. Objectively, the gap is much smaller than it was.)

History repeats itself

Clearly, you can see a parallel in the mobile-operating system world.

In 2007, the iPhone broke our brains. It was so new, so different, so amazing, so incredible, that it seemed like an alien artifact from a technologically superior civilization. It was so much better than Windows Mobile or BlackBerry or Nokia or feature phones that it created its own market space. It invented its own niche.

In 2012, the difference between the iPhone and its competitors is much smaller.

Yes, the iPhone is smoother, cleaner, and has a more elegantly integrated ecosystem of content, operating system, apps, glass, silicon, and accessories. But it’s an incremental advantage over Android. And, again, many would find that statement controversial or just plain wrong, saying that Android  is better than iPhone because of its freedom, openness, capability, and device diversity.

And the reality in the market is that Android is winning. With 75 percent market share in smartphones and rapidly rising market share in tablets, Android seems to be an unstoppable force. Reasons abound for this, including the fact that it’s free for carriers, that carriers can load it up with their own proprietary crapware, that it supports a vast array of devices, and that it presents a way for manufacturers to fight the Apple juggernaut.

Plus, Apple’s core fans are often also Google users, sucking them toward Android devices because it all just works together (where have we heard that before?).

But Android is also pretty bloody good, especially in the last few iterations. It now has a massive app ecosystem, and it benefits from Google’s suite of web-centric services, which is slowly but surely getting more tightly integrated with each other and with mobile devices. And with the latest versions, Android is even looking pretty well designed, too.

Apple: the thin red band

Developer and entrepreneur Tom Dale puts the core challenge this way: “Google is getting better at design faster than Apple is getting better at web services.”

I agree with that, and the reality is that cloud-connected services are really the most important thing for our smartphones to do. We don’t carry a piece of glass and plastic and silicon so we can stay in the little box: We want to get into the big wide world of the Internet.

The problem for Apple, if the current sales and market trends continue, is that iOS will get less and less important, relatively speaking. And those massive profits will start to wither away, start to follow the leaders — the new leaders — and we’ll be back to the ’90s.

But there is another way.

More products, more price points, more aggressive pricing?

Steve Jobs was never afraid of changing his mind, Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a recent interview. And Jobs was never afraid to make himself obsolete, replacing the best-selling iPod Mini with the new iPod nano in 2005.

I think that if Apple wants to continue to be the leader — or, should I say, recapture the title — it will need to do something crazy. Something against its current corporate DNA. Something that it has never done in the past.

And that’s coming out with more products at more price points with more aggressive pricing. (It’s heresy, I know.)

Apple analyst Patrick Moorhead agrees, saying that “Apple has done pretty well with its ‘one size fits all’ approach. It won’t be enough in the future to keep a commanding presence like they have today in phones.”

Here’s the reality: Not everyone wants the same size phone. Not everyone wants white or black. Not everyone can afford a top-end phone. And those who want something different don’t necessarily want to have to settle for last year’s model to get it.

It’s not just about us

That’s true in rich North America and western Europe. Those markets, while they are wealthy, provide great margins for electronics companies, and are easy to focus one because, frankly, we live here. But they are not the ones to look at for growth, because our markets are saturated. Seventy-five percent of all new mobile phone subscriptions on the planet in the third quarter of 2012 were in Asia and Africa, according to a massive Ericsson study.

And guess what: The 3 billion people who don’t yet have mobile phones at all, mostly in India, China, and Africa, are not going to be buying iPhone 5s, or 6s, or 7s when they their first mobile device. They’ll be buying a feature phone, or more likely in the next few years, a cheap Android phone.

So what, you might say, there are no profits there — just look at Nokia, which still sells a ton of feature phones but can’t make money at it, having to hock its own building just this month. That’s true today. But consumers in developing nations who are poor today may not be poor in the future. Chinese middle class, anyone?

Trends like this have contributed to people like Jay Yarow saying that “Tim Cook has to be worried that his company has become a niche player in the biggest global computing market” and economist Jack Bass reminding us that market share matters and that Apple should make changes to its product and pricing strategy.

Market share does matter

Market share does matter, because ecosystem health — diversity of apps, availability of content, compatibility of services, and more — depends on it. Without market share, a platform loses developer share, and a virtuous circle turns vicious.

That’s true even though Apple continues to grow. The problem is that Android is simply growing much faster.

Which is why analysts like Moorhead are saying that Apple needs “features like larger screens, NFC, enhanced security, and even pen support,” because they are attractive to buyers. And if market share is important to Apple, “they will need to more greatly diversify their iPhone portfolio to attract more kinds of consumers and businesses.”

That’s antithetical to the 1984-ish Macintosh-announcing ad’s “garden of pure ideology” that some feel Apple has now come to embody. It’s antithetical to what Tim Cook has stated very very recently: doing a few things very, very well.

Frankly, it’s not what I expect Apple will do, because I think Apple likes making just a few amazing, excellent, exclusive products. But I think that for the company to get back on top, it must do something crazy. Without a change, those market-leading profits will slow and eventually begin to contract. Apple’s market-leading ecosystem will cede leadership to Google and Android. So even if Apple’s mission in life is defined by creating just a few iconic products, the company might want to remember the lesson of the ’90s and start to change its tune.

The events of the past weeks, in which Apple stock lost $35 billion, then $19 billion, and then dropped below $500 for the first time since February might make this a little less crazy than it sounds.

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