Review of 2012 and Trends to Watch in 2013

Paula Hane's article in ITI's newsletter NewsBreaks provides valuable information on important technology trends in 2012 and an insight into what to expect for 2013. Here is a brief overview:

Hot Topics in 2012

• Big Data was the buzzword of the year
• Data analytics
• Smartphone adoption skyrockets (45% of U.S. adults now own a smartphone)
• Mobile apps
• Blending of offline-online worlds
• Gesture-based computing
• Increased geo-tagging of information
• Watching news on multiple devices simultaneously—TV and (mobile) internet
• Fewer Americans read print newspapers and magazines (some big titles such as Newsweek move to online only)
• Voice interfaces
• MOOCs—Massive Open Online Courses
• Increasing business engagement with social media
• Video, video, video… (“Video is the fastest-growing digital content category; we forecast that more than 90% of the online population will regularly watch online video by 2017.”
• Ebook self-publishing market grows (and is expected to surge in 2013)
• Growing popularity of e-singles (“stories somewhere between 5,000 and 30,000 words, usually nonfiction, and sold as inexpensive ebooks”)
• Tablets sales rise, sales growth of dedicated e-readers slows
• Apple maps—big blunder and embarrassment (with iOS 6 Apple dropped Google Maps)
• Facebook’s botched IPO
• Publisher consolidation
• Web-scale discovery for library collections
• Evolving roles for librarians
• The rise of monograph e-platforms (Books at JSTOR, University Publishing Online, University Press Scholarship Online, University Press Content Consortium Book Collections of Project MUSE )
• Privacy and security concerns dominate policy discussions
• Government tries to regulate the internet (SOPA and PIPA, ACTA, WCIT)—expect more battles in 2013
• Progress in Open Access initiatives

Looking Ahead to 2013

• Apple versus Google versus Facebook versus Amazon—battling on hardware and search (“The Lines Between Software and Hardware Continue to Blur”)
• Battle of the mobile devices (Apple iOS, Google’s Android, Microsoft Windows)
• Intelligent objects—The Internet of Things
• More predictive personalization
• Expansion of peer power
• Growth in open source innovation/problem solving (e.g., more installations of Solr)
• Expansion of cloud computing and thus a greater need for security and data center redundancy (outages are much more a problem than data breaches)
• Work anywhere
• More Big Data (as one search technologies expert said, “There’s plenty of hype around big data, but underneath there are compelling applications to be implemented which combine the best of enterprise search and business insight technologies.")
• Publishers will use metadata in more sophisticated ways
• Publishers will still grapple with testing new business models—library pricing, subscription models, DRM-free sales, etc.
• Companies will increasingly have to deal with Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) issues
• Looking forward to Microsoft Surface Pro with full version of Windows 8
• Enterprises may choose to bypass Windows 8 (because of interface issues) and wait for “Windows 9”
• Anticipated launch of “iPad 5” and “iPhone 6”
• Anticipated next Android launch—“Key Lime Pie”
• More sales of near-field-communication (NFC) enabled mobile devices—and adoption of customizable NFC tags
• Biometric security becoming more prevalent
• T-Mobile targets AT&T customers
• More publisher consolidation
• Consumers with content stored in the cloud may encounter problems when they want to move to another provider

Read the full article here