Many websites and blogs publish their predictions for the year ahead. Not many of them review their predictions at the end of the year though. Even fewer score their previous set of predictions.
It would have been difficult to forecast what happened this year. But let’s see how those 2020 predictions fared in the oddest of years.
1. Alerts from voice assistants
I said that “At the end of 2019, the Google Home device in our kitchen started answers requests with more suggestions of other skills.”
In the UK, 5.5 million homes (around 20% of all homes) now possess a voice activated assistant.
20 per cent of 3-5-year-olds now own their own iPad.
Google and Facebook have more than a fifth of the world’s advertising spending (they have 50-60 per cent of digital advertising spend).
The terms and conditions for Amazon’s Kindle are 73,198 words long and would take around 9 hours to read. I checked this out (link) and the terms are made up from 20 documents, plus the privacy notice.
Compared to the 400 deaths per year from terrorism, more Europeans drown in their own bathtubs, and ten times more die from falling down the stairs.
It’s time for my annual blog/ RSS feed clean up, and to share my preferred thought-provoking digital news feeds:
1. Chris Matts (The IT Risk Manager). Chris regularly updates his blog with practical advice for technology teams and senior managers such as “executives and transparency”, and he focusses his agile transformation articles on business managers rather than technology teams. That said, there are also a fair number of more technical articles about automated testing and development. https://theitriskmanager.wordpress.com
2. Doc Searls. Doc has several interests, mainly in privacy, photography and technology. Whilst I don’t agree with his extreme views on privacy and anti-advertising, his blogs and other feeds are very interesting to read occasionally. http://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/
3. Google Webmaster Blog. there are several skills everyone in the digital industry should have, and one of them is an overview of search engines and how they work. The search engines are the key footfall, entry point, gateway and provider of revenue to almost every digital company. Stay up to date with Google on this blog. https://webmasters.googleblog.com/Continue reading Top 10 favourite digital blogs→
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Tesla stock was $312 on New Years Day 2018 and finished the year at $333, so on the face of it, the prediction was incorrect.
However, on 7 August, Elon Musk made the headlines by tweeting that “funding secured” at $420. The share price jumped 10% to $379. He was personally fined $20 million, and the company was fined the same amount.
Two months later, the stock was $250. The stock has been relatively volatile since then, climbing back to $376 and back down to $333.
When the iPhone was launched, industry commentators predicted that everything would have a touch screen. And then Alexa came along, and those commentators predicted nothing would have a screen – everything will be Internet-enabled and voice controlled.
And the latest version of Alexa – has… a screen! Sometimes I think Amazon’s product strategy includes Jeff Bezos’ sense of humour.
We have had a Google Home device in our house for a year now. Actually, my son bought it and it stays in his room. Everyone in our house has an Android phone, and the Home device tries to be extra clever by automatically linking our phones to the speaker. I remember the first time I worked from home after he bought the Google Home and I kept hearing something upstairs. When I went to investigate, all my alerts were being announced by Google Home in his room!
Has Google become a content provider that can ban certain types of advertising? Until now, Google was purely a search engine selling pixels on user’s search results. They weren’t responsible for any of the signposted or copyrighted content.
(The same applies to Facebook and pretty much any other advertising funded content platform).
Note that my issue isn’t with the cryptocurrency companies. My issue is that Google and Facebook have shattered the professional journalism industry, only to then lay down their own moral advertising code of conduct when they are among the last remaining mass publishers.
The 30 second summary of this year’s Deloitte TMT Predictions
On Tuesday I went to the Deloitte TMT predictions (that’s Telco, Media and Telecommunications) event at CodeNode in London.
I’ve covered several of Deloitte’s events in the past – they’re often thought-provoking and insightful, based on some decent consumer research and with a good amount of humour thrown in.
Smartphones
“We’ve entered the beige phase” of mobile phones – they’re all looking the same, with consumers unable to differentiate new features.
One of the stand out quotes was that smartphones are now in an area of “invisible innovation”. That is, the connectivity (e.g. 5G), camera, processors and so on, are all improving, but consumers don’t see these. Continue reading The future for smartphones, digital media and AR→
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Here are my predictions for the ‘digital’ industry for the coming year. I’ve been making digital predictions since 2010 and at the end of each year I review how the predictions fared – see the digital predictions for 2017 and work backwards.
1. Tesla share price to drop significantly
The Tesla Roadster 1 – yes it’s lovely. What will 2018 have in store for the car company? Photo credit: randychiu.
Each quarter, Tesla’s costs keep increasing by hundreds of millions of dollars.
Its profit margin keeps slipping further into the red.
Other companies, both traditional and new entrants, will catch up to Tesla in 2018.
Finally, 2017 was generally a good financial year, and if consumer confidence drops in 2018, people will buy fewer cars. There’s also the debt pile-up in the US car loans industry. Total auto loans in the US have increased 70% in the last 7 years to $1.17 trillion – and much of it is subprime, with some buyers opting for 7(!!) year loans (think about the value of the car at the end of 7 years).
