My original plan to update this blog every two weeks almost worked out. NOT :p
This will most definitely change in 2014. My new goal is one blog post per month, starting with this one for January.
Because looking back is boring, I will use this blog post to take a look forward on what I am currently most enthusiastic about for 2014.
Cryptocurrencies
Most exciting will be how Bitcoins and Cryptocurrencies in general are going to play out. Seeing the amount of money and brain power that is poured into this direction in start-ups worldwide, makes it one of the top mega trends. The potential goes from providing a better Web 2.0 version of PayPal to completely disrupting the financial industry. Wow! Top investors explain bitcoin
Mobile
Another big still ongoing trend is mobile. Even though it has been talked about for years, the smart phone market penetration has reached a level, where a lot of new exciting things become possible, that did not work even two or three years ago. Like the success of mobile multiplayer quiz apps shows.
Mobile first will be the norm for most use cases and not something special worth mentioning. New innovative forms of delivering content for mobile users will get more relevant like the chunked news approach by Circa or the Launch Ticker. Who wants to read whole magazine articles on a bus?
Also new, much more simplistic ways of user interaction will become more relevant. Like the simple left and right swiping functionality in Tinder or the “one button calls you a taxi” approach of Uber.
Meta services like Google Now will become more useful. The fears of technology skeptical people of information overload and attention burn-out will be countered by smarter apps with higher abstraction layers, that will give you the information you need at any given time and location without requiring much concentration or deeper knowledge of functionality of certain apps. Some day people will think about manually installing and starting apps, like you think today about installing and configuring display drivers to start a computer game 20 years ago.
In short: Taking the step of removing clutter from content, user experience and design for mobile even further.
Of course these are just random thoughts induced by some “after new years” franconian beer. There is more things going on in areas like B2B, smart devices, 3D printing, transportation, travel services and so on. I am looking forward to be surprised.
The only thing I am completely sure about is, that 2014 is going to be yet again an exciting experience for everyone involved in technology =)
Cheers!