The International CES 2012, as it does every year, presented an enormous array of gadgets, technology innovations and a feeding frenzy of consumer electronics commerce.
But looking above the fray of the convention floors, we see several disruptors to shape the macro trends of the coming years. Major technology and consumer behavior shifts are emerging that are changing the business of consumer electronics, media and entertainment and digital-online media. As social and mobile adoption mainstreams for consumers and marketers, new platforms, technology and media will emerge shaped by these fundamental disruptors:
APPIFICATION: The term "product" is evolving as mobile, online and tablet applications open up a new market for entrepreneurs, brands and businesses to create new services, utility and enhancements to existing products.
POST-SOCIAL WORLD: Social media and social networks, having reached mainstream, become less of a point of focus and integrate into consumer and marketer toolbox. New space races will emerge from combined social, mobile, local and digital enabled products that are accessed in new ways via tablets, ubiquitous smartphones and portable ultrabooks.
UBIQUITOUS CONTENT & DATA: Data is everywhere and content can be accessed in multiple forms. This overwhelming choice and abundance of invisible data collection is presenting opportunities and obstacles for people and brands to filter through clutter to get better information, more product and service relevance, and new social connections while retaining trust in providers and a promise of privacy.
UNIVERSAL ACCESSIBILITY: Technology, media and entertainment companies are finally unlocking content portability for consumers, so ownership and access of media can happen anywhere on any device in many forms. Once thought to be a barrier to success for the media industry, open and integrated content platforms are leading to smarter strategies to own media ecosystems with content, devices, online media and valuable data assets to monetize. Technology devices will also become more accessible, with low cost of entry of tablets, ultrabooks and feature rich mobile devices for middle and low income consumers.
GAMIFIED VALUE: Privacy concerns abound in a world where so much behavior happens in the digital space and new predictive and analytic technologies can understand personal behavior in new ways. However, as laws and standards come into place for data privacy and trusted data centric brands emerge, some of these fears will erode. As part of this, people will increasingly be willing to give up even more personal information to brands and online services for the return of rewards, social currency and "gamified" value.
CLOUD TECHNOLOGY & MOBILE: The coming years will see a major shift of how technology and data is stored and accessed. Where processing power and media storage once was primarily housed on local hard-drives and servers, most of this data will shift to wirelessly accessed networks that store content and data invisibly, automatically in large, enterprise driven server farms of Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook. Over time, these server farms may translate to insight mines that store valuable, anonymous data the individuals, marketers and institutions will want to understand and access.
TRENDING IN 2012
Disruptive technologies are driving tangible product innovations and market-shifting invention. This is all possible as:
- Smartphone adoption accelerates
- Cloud computing proliferates
- App markets thrive
- New hardware and interface technologies become more accessible
- Social networking becomes embedded into daily life
Given the accelerated nature and unknowns of these events, in 2012 we'll likely see start-up driven activity and new product introductions from that major players (Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc) that will create new dynamics in the market. Judging several categories of the CES Innovation Awards over the last three years has revealed five patterns we, at UPSTREAM, believe will impact the business of innovation for digital, physical and experience designers in the near term:
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