Tag Archives: prediction

2014: The Year of Big Stuff

new-years-eve-2013

Over the closing days of each year, or the first few days of the coming one, prognosticators the world over tell us about the future. Yet, while no one, to date, has yet been proven to have prescient skills — despite what your psychic tells you — we all like to dabble in art of prediction. Google’s Eric Schmidt has one big prediction for 2014: big. Everything will be big — big data, big genomics, smartphones will be even bigger, and of course, so will mistakes.

So, with that, a big Happy New Year to all our faithful readers and seers across our fragile and beautiful blue planet.

From the Guardian:

What does 2014 hold? According to Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, it means smartphones everywhere – and also the possibility of genetics data being used to develop new cures for cancer.

In an appearance on Bloomberg TV, Schmidt laid out his thoughts about general technological change, Google’s biggest mistake, and how Google sees the economy going in 2014.

“The biggest change for consumers is going to be that everyone’s going to have a smartphone,” Schmidt says. “And the fact that so many people are connected to what is essentially a supercomputer means a whole new generation of applications around entertainment, education, social life, those kinds of things. The trend has been that mobile is winning; it’s now won. There are more tablets and phones being sold than personal computers – people are moving to this new architecture very fast.”

It’s certainly true that tablets and smartphones are outselling PCs – in fact smartphones alone have been doing that since the end of 2010. This year, it’s forecast that tablets will have passed “traditional” PCs (desktops, fixed-keyboard laptops) too.

Disrupting business

Next, Schmidt says there’s a big change – a disruption – coming for business through the arrival of “big data”: “The biggest disruptor that we’re sure about is the arrival of big data and machine intelligence everywhere – so the ability [for businesses] to find people, to talk specifically to them, to judge them, to rank what they’re doing, to decide what to do with your products, changes every business globally.”

But he also sees potential in the field of genomics – the parsing of all the data being collected from DNA and gene sequencing. That might not be surprising, given that Google is an investor in 23andme, a gene sequencing company which aims to collect the genomes of a million people so that it can do data-matching analysis on their DNA. (Unfortunately, that plan has hit a snag: 23andme has been told to cease operating by the US Food and Drug Administration because it has failed to respond to inquiries about its testing methods and publication of results.)

Here’s what Schmidt has to say on genomics: “The biggest disruption that we don’t really know what’s going to happen is probably in the genetics area. The ability to have personal genetics records and the ability to start gathering all of the gene sequencing into places will yield discoveries in cancer treatment and diagnostics over the next year that that are unfathomably important.”

It may be worth mentioning that “we’ll find cures through genomics” has been the promise held up by scientists every year since the human genome was first sequenced. So far, it hasn’t happened – as much as anything because human gene variation is remarkably big, and there’s still a lot that isn’t known about the interaction of what appears to be non-functional parts of our DNA (which doesn’t seem to code to produce proteins) and the parts that do code for proteins.

Biggest mistake

As for Google’s biggest past mistake, Schmidt says it’s missing the rise of Facebook and Twitter: “At Google the biggest mistake that I made was not anticipating the rise of the social networking phenomenon – not a mistake we’re going to make again. I guess in our defence were working on many other things, but we should have been in that area, and I take responsibility for that.” The results of that effort to catch up can be seen in the way that Google+ is popping up everywhere – though it’s wrong to think of Google+ as a social network, since it’s more of a way that Google creates a substrate on the web to track individuals.

And what is Google doing in 2014? “Google is very much investing, we’re hiring globally, we see strong growth all around the world with the arrival of the internet everywhere. It’s all green in that sense from the standpoint of the year. Google benefits from transitions from traditional industries, and shockingly even when things are tough in a country, because we’re “return-on-investment”-based advertising – it’s smarter to move your advertising from others to Google, so we win no matter whether the industries are in good shape or not, because people need our services, we’re very proud of that.”

For Google, the sky’s the limit: “the key limiter on our growth is our rate of innovation, how smart are we, how clever are we, how quickly can we get these new systems deployed – we want to do that as fast as we can.”

It’s worth noting that Schmidt has a shaky track record on predictions. At Le Web in 2011 he famously forecast that developers would be shunning iOS to start developing on Android first, and that Google TV would be installed on 50% of all TVs on sale by summer 2012.

It didn’t turn out that way: even now, many apps start on iOS, and Google TV fizzled out as companies such as Logitech found that it didn’t work as well as Android to tempt buyers.

Since that, Schmidt has been a lot more cautious about predicting trends and changes – although he hasn’t been above the occasional comment which seems calculated to get a rise from his audience, such as telling executives at a Gartner conference that Android was more secure than the iPhone – which they apparently found humourous.

Read the entire article here.

Image: Happy New Year, 2014 Google doodle. Courtesy of Google.

Predicting the Future is Highly Overrated

Contrary to what political pundits, stock market talking heads and your local strip mall psychic will have you believe, no one, yet, can predict the future. And, it is no more possible for the current generation of tech wunderkinds or Silicon Valley venture fund investors or the armies of analysts.

From WSJ:

I believe the children aren’t our future. Teach them well, but when it comes to determining the next big thing in tech, let’s not fall victim to the ridiculous idea that they lead the way.

Yes, I’m talking about Snapchat.

Last week my colleagues reported that Facebook FB -2.71% recently offered $3 billion to acquire the company behind the hyper-popular messaging app. Stunningly, Evan Spiegel, Snapchat’s 23-year-old co-founder and CEO, rebuffed the offer.

If you’ve never used Snapchat—and I implore you to try it, because Snapchat can be pretty fun if you’re into that sort of thing, which I’m not, because I’m grumpy and old and I have two small kids and no time for fun, which I think will be evident from the rest of this column, and also would you please get off my lawn?—there are a few things you should know about the app.

First, Snapchat’s main selling point is ephemerality. When I send you a photo and caption using the app, I can select how long I want you to be able to view the picture. After you look at it for the specified time—1 to 10 seconds—the photo and all trace of our having chatted disappear from your phone. (Or, at least, they are supposed to. Snapchat’s security measures have frequently been defeated.)

Second, and relatedly, Snapchat is used primarily by teens and people in college. This explains much of Silicon Valley’s obsession with the company.

The app doesn’t make any money—its executives have barely even mentioned any desire to make money—but in the ad-supported tech industry, youth is the next best thing to revenue. For tech execs, youngsters are the canaries in the gold mine.

That logic follows a widely shared cultural belief: We all tend to assume that young people are on the technological vanguard, that they somehow have got an inside scoop on what’s next. If today’s kids are Snapchatting instead of Facebooking, the thinking goes, tomorrow we’ll all be Snapchatting, too, because tech habits, like hairstyles, flow only one way: young to old.

There is only one problem with elevating young people’s tastes this way: Kids are often wrong. There is little evidence to support the idea that the youth have any closer insight on the future than the rest of us do. Sometimes they are first to flock to technologies that turn out to be huge; other times, the young pick products and services that go nowhere. They can even be late adopters, embracing innovations that older people understood first. To butcher another song: The kids could be all wrong.

Here’s a thought exercise. How many of the products and services that you use every day were created or first used primarily by people under 25?

A few will spring to mind, Facebook the biggest of all. Yet the vast majority of your most-used things weren’t initially popular among teens. The iPhone, the iPad, the iPod, the Google search engine, YouTube, Twitter, TWTR -1.86% Gmail, Google Maps, Pinterest, LinkedIn, the Kindle, blogs, the personal computer, none of these were initially targeted to, or primarily used by, high-school or college-age kids. Indeed, many of the most popular tech products and services were burdened by factors that were actively off-putting to kids, such as high prices, an emphasis on productivity and a distinct lack of fun. Yet they succeeded anyway.

Even the exceptions suggest we should be wary of catering to youth. It is true that in 2004, Mark Zuckerberg designed Facebook for his Harvard classmates, and the social network was first made available only to college students. At the time, though, Facebook looked vastly more “grown up” than its competitors. The site prevented you from uglifying your page with your own design elements, something you could do with Myspace, which, incidentally, was the reigning social network among the pubescent set.

Mr. Zuckerberg deliberately avoided catering to this group. He often told his co-founders that he wanted Facebook to be useful, not cool. That is what makes the persistent worry about Facebook’s supposedly declining cachet among teens so bizarre; Facebook has never really been cool, but neither are a lot of other billion-dollar companies. Just ask Myspace how far being cool can get you.

Incidentally, though 20-something tech founders like Mr. Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates get a lot of ink, they are unusual. A recent study by the VC firm Cowboy Ventures found that among tech startups that have earned a valuation of at least $1 billion since 2003, the average founder’s age was 34. “The twentysomething inexperienced founder is an outlier, not the norm,” wrote Cowboy’s founder Aileen Lee.

If you think about it for a second, the fact that young people aren’t especially reliable predictors of tech trends shouldn’t come as a surprise. Sure, youth is associated with cultural flexibility, a willingness to try new things that isn’t necessarily present in older folk. But there are other, less salutary hallmarks of youth, including capriciousness, immaturity, and a deference to peer pressure even at the cost of common sense. This is why high school is such fertile ground for fads. And it’s why, in other cultural areas, we don’t put much stock in teens’ choices. No one who’s older than 18, for instance, believes One Direction is the future of music.

That brings us back to Snapchat. Is the app just a youthful fad, just another boy band, or is it something more permanent; is it the Beatles?

To figure this out, we would need to know why kids are using it. Are they reaching for Snapchat for reasons that would resonate with older people—because, like the rest of us, they’ve grown wary of the public-sharing culture promoted by Facebook and Twitter? Or are they using it for less universal reasons, because they want to evade parental snooping, send risqué photos, or avoid feeling left out of a fad everyone else has adopted?

Read the entire article here.

Image: Snapchat logo. Courtesy of Snapchat / Wikipedia.

The End of the World for Doomsday Predictions

Apparently the world is due to end, again, this time on December 21, 2012. This latest prediction is from certain scholars of all things ancient Mayan. Now, of course, the world did not end as per Harold Camping’s most recent predictions, so let’s hope, or not, that the Mayan’s get it right for the sake of humanity.

The infographic below courtesy of xerxy brings many of these failed predictions of death, destruction and apocalypse into living color.