A new year, a new prevision ;-) Like last year I'm going to give a prevision on what is going to occur in the next 9 monthes of 2008 and what the IT-Industry is going to prepare.
Tops:
Multitouch and iPhone
The first trend of 2008 will be the usage of the multitouch technology. This will lead to brand new user interactions. It will be interesting to see if designers will also be able to take a little distance to the Apple iPhone interface concept. What we currently have seen from the mobile phone market is a will to "copy of the Apple's iPhone interface" but with a medium success rate (e.g LG Prada or HTC Touch).
Second hype of 2008 will be the multiplication of apps for the iPhone thanks to a well designed SDK. And there is no doubt that Sun or Adobe are currently implementing their own player to enable developers to test J2ME or SWF apps.After this strategic move of releasing a full featured SDK based on multitouch and enabling Open GL, it will be interesting to see the reaction of the Symbian partners (including Nokia and Samsung). The AppStore is also killing a very lucrative market: the over the air providing, how will the phone carriers react ?
Deezer.com
Sharing a playlist of your favorite songs and enabling every user to listen on it (and this for free). How long will it take to get Deezer on mobile devices ? Imagine you could listen to complete albums over WLAN or even GPRS ? No need to purchase your songs, everything is paid by the ads placed on the website :-)
Satellite Radio
USA already have it, the first european Satellite Radios are going to be launched end of this year : more channel in a very good audio quality.
Flops
Google Android
To my eyes Google Android-based phones will be the first flop of Google. The platform is certainly very interesting, but there's a real marketing problem: who will want to program
for restricted Java phones where on the other side you have a very cool phone called iPhone?
Where is the fun factor of multitouch or 3D ?
Web 2.0
Web 2.0 was cool when we could count the number of useful social networking tools present on the web. Now each day there is a Facebook alike arising from nowhere claiming it will be the next "most useful tools to find new friends" (yawn)
How many other social network plateforms should I register to to finally see/discover all
the gorgeous friends I have ? I don't know, perhaps ten/twenty ? And what will happen to my personal data once registered ? Are they going to be analysed by a marketing tool? Nobody knows ...
Another annoying phenomenom of Web 2.0 are blogs : It seems as if blogs have turned to a subtile combination of cut and paste of Youtube-Flash <embed> tags added with some very well place Google Ads, so well placed that you won't be able to differenciate a link from an ad! And of course the information placed on blogs was so many times copied and recopied that noone can clearly say if the information is correct and I predict many blogs (like those collecting funny fotos or weird Youtube videos) will close their doors this year.
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