A very busy Sunday night trying to get ahead before week starts. I have been getting lots of calls and emails from organizations that want to discuss equity partnership with Idea Couture last few weeks. They range from agency holding companies to big tech players. Will continue with these dialogue and in the meantime work out our 2 year plan. Just reviewing our latest trend forecast for the next 18 months and I thought I would share some of them with you here.
Widget Culture: I don’t know how many new widgets are being produced daily, expect this to continue and expand into mobile. The life span of these widgets will be shorter but adoption will be much faster. It is like fashion. We will be flooded with branded widgets. Including strange one that allows us to figure out what causes sudden jumps in searches for some of the strangest topics and/or people.
Crowd Madness: We will see crowd-based business model pops up everywhere. Although many are not exactly feasible or scalable, expect to see a few big winners. This is the most powerful trend that most companies underestimate its impact and implications.
Eco-Maniac: We will get so tired of these messages and claims. Eco-message will become so uncool as consumer can see through the talk and want the walk. There will be Eco-maniac communities that monitor what companies do or what they say they will do.
Privacy Frantic: Digital intrusion is becoming a big issue as we make our way through everyday life, data is collected from each of us, frequently without our consent and often without our realization including surveillance cameras, location-based system and social graphs. It doesn’t take much to put the pieces together. The other problem is when our intimate information is removed from its original context and revealed to the publics, we are vulnerable to being misjudged on the basis of our most embarrassing, and therefore most memorable, tastes and preference.
Nearly Free: I am not referring narrowly to free content. There is a big disconnect between people who are in the business of content, the law and digital culture. We see studio moguls, recording executives all seeking to impose what Lessig calls an 'extremist' agenda by divorcing copyright law from its moorings in the Constitution as a balanced copyright bargain struck between creators and the public. Instead, we're now seeing a new brand of intellectual property, where digital 'property' rights are valued above all else and "piracy" is portrayed as the common enemy. Outside of this, many things can still be free? According to Chris Anderson, “Today it's digital technologies, not electricity, that have become too cheap to meter. It took decades to shake off the assumption that computing was supposed to be rationed for the few, and we're only now starting to liberate bandwidth and storage from the same poverty of imagination. But a generation raised on the free Web is coming of age, and they will find entirely new ways to embrace waste, transforming the world in the process. Because free is what you want — and free, increasingly, is what you're going to get.” I don’t think that will the case. There is now such a thing as a free lunch as I often tell my kids. We can expect a free version for everything but once you are seriously about using it, you will pay. It is nearly free only,
