1) We knew there would come another well-positioned company who makes a pair of smart glasses like Google Glass and that it will derive more competition and innovation. Microsoft raised their hand right away with their HoloLens glasses which are hologram based, slightly “gamified”, and seemingly better than Google Glass largely because they tied it in with known Windows functionality (broader offerings). See a video of this cool new technology here:
2) It is a fact that on average people now access more of their e-mail via mobile devices more often than on a traditional computer. This has forced websites, news makers, and companies to design their web offerings in a mobile compatible design so when you go to the web on a computer the sites are often overly mobile in their design aspects and sometimes look goofy and the buttons and frames are too big. CNN.com is a good example of a web-site that went too far with their mobile design so if you access it from a normal computer it looks more like a kids play web-site with big buttons and frames optimized for touch with little info presented. Yet their prior design was better especially if you want to read more on one screen view.
(Old vs. New CNN.com, respectively)
There is no doubt that mobile will continue to grow and will be used on smaller devices like watches, ear buds, pacemakers, and contact lenses. Web design has shifted so fast to mobile that sometimes good web design and user experience is forgotten about for non-mobile users or business users who on average spend much more time on those same sites than mobile users. Thus a better balance of the two design types is needed, and an app is a separate project all together yet still needed. I also think Microsoft will take more mobile market share away from Android and Apple since they have learned a lot from their Windows 8 release and are quickly working to release Windows 10 as a better touch based mobility optimized O.S. that many are excited to try.
3) There will be more data breaches but many of them will be supported by the Western Governments who in effect devalue security standards by corroborating with large companies to quarry vast amounts of metadata all in the name of security. Sadly we know Governments have abused this power in the past and will continue to do so thus the private sector needs to collaborate and inspire innovation in this space for better security and transparency so the masses may have security and corrupt Governments can be exposed.
As it stands now hackers are a few steps ahead of antivirus makers and they are constantly tweaking their viruses so they can’t be detected. The newest types of viruses are suspected to be created by the Equation Group, one of the most sophisticated hacking groups ever known. These new viruses hide in your hard drives firmware and are undetectable. Antivirus maker Kaspersky commented on this in their Q&A doc on the Equation Group by stating, “We were able to recover two HDD firmware reprogramming modules from the EQUATIONDRUG and GRAYFISH platforms. The EQUATIONDRUG HDD firmware reprogramming module has version 3.0.1 while the GRAYFISH reprogramming module has version 4.2.0. These were compiled in 2010 and 2013, respectively, if we are to trust the PE timestamps” (http://25zbkz3k00wn2tp5092n6di7b5k.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/files/2015/02/Equation_group_questions_and_answers.pdf).
Kaspersky went on to further speculate that there were clues that the U.S. N.S.A. was involved in the latest hard drive firmware virus and even suggested they had the cooperation of major hard drive makers like Western Digital, Seagate, Samsung, and Toshiba in order to get the code needed to write the virus. Any reasonable technologist would likely agree with this. Yet this decreases innovation and free competition and you know big money likely traded hands to make these deals happen. How can a big company now trust paying a technology company for security or services when they are just going to give it away to supposed governments here or elsewhere? More importantly, if one government has the ability to get into a tech companies data, then other more ill-intentioned governments and organizations can quickly learn how to do that as well and that is the real threat.
If you want to hire me to speak at your next event or consult for your company on these and related topics please contact me.