Forecasting Net

Recently, Frog, a well-known company in the high tech design market, released a list with the top 15 tech trends for 2012, according to the forecasting gurus of the company. This is an excellent link covering many aspects of our digital lives. My personal favorites are the following:

No 2 / 6: Taking Computers out of computing / Interaction choreography

That’s about the new ways of interacting with machines from using voice commands and voice dictation to using control gestures. In other words, it is about interacting with digital equipment in a more natural way than the current input devices can offer.

If you think about it, we have already witnessed this trend in the making, when Apple introduced the revolutionary iOS, for the iPhone and the iPad, changing forever the way we interact with machines through touch screens. Later on, Apple used the same basic principles to enhance the Mac OS with the extensive use of the touchpad. As competition, especially Android, jumped in to exploit the opportunity, Apple decided to move further on the innovation ladder by introducing Siri. Siri, by incorporating a little bit of Artificial Intelligence, understands what you are saying and transforms your voice to text or performs the designated action.

The other breakthrough of human computer interaction started when Microsoft introduced Kinect for the Xbox game console. The fundamental difference between the Kinect and the wireless game controllers used by rival consoles such as Nintendo Wii and Sony Playstation is that there is no wireless controller, just the Kinect camera that continuously monitors the player’s motion and interprets it to meaningful game commands. As Microsoft says in the official Kinect page … all you need is you... One can only imagine the numerous applications of Kinect-like devices to other areas apart from gaming. For instance, we could use a motion detection camera reading the user’s gestures to eliminate the need for a pointing device like the mouse. Furthermore, through this technology we could literally point to a 3D environment opening the way for 3D desktops and user interfaces. Microsoft is aware of the huge potential that this new technology has and that’s why it started promoting the creation of a strong developers’ network through incentive programs like the “Kinect Accelerator”.

No 3: Quantified selves

Imagine a world where almost everything you do can be measured and shared at your discretion. Where you are, what you drink or eat, your travels, your habits, your health status, the route you follow when cycling, running, or climbing a mountain, and many other things from your business or personal live. We’ve seen the first signs of this trend with services like dailymile, foursquare, and tripcase. The next step is to achieve a critical mass of users and combine data from different sources to provide a more comprehensive user profile and deliver more valuable insights about the users’ habits and actions. For instance, based on your location you could search for a restaurant nearby that is highly recommended by users of the same lifestyle with you. Or you could search for a recreational activity based on other people recommendations with similar health status. And your doctor could monitor your health from a distance and if an emergency occurs, he could direct you to the nearest hospital with the right infrastructure for your health condition. The different options and applications of such a system are practically endless. However, we should also consider the threat of volunteering having our lives continuously monitored by an electronic “Big Brother”.

No 12: Biomimicry

This trend is about using natural or biological systems to describe or design new systems in other areas. For instance, in the Forecasting Net, we extensively use competitions systems, s-curves, and other modeling methods inspired by population ecology, to describe the dynamics of systems from a diverse set of fields from technology, the environment, business, the economy, and other areas. As an example, by using the logistic curve (the well known s-curve), developed by Verlhust in 1838 as a model of population growth, we were able to model the evolution of active users of popular social media networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn, the CO2 level increase and temperature rise of our planet, and global GDP. Many other examples and more information about biomimicry can be found in the Internet.

You can see all the top 15 tech trends for 2012 here