Review of 2012 and Trends to Watch in 2013

“Paula Hane’s article in ITI’s newsletter NewsBreaks provides valuable information on important technology trends in 2012 and an insight into what to expect for 2013. Here is a brief overview:

Hot Topics in 2012

• Big Data was the buzzword of the year
• Data analytics
• Smartphone adoption skyrockets (45%  of U.S. adults now own a smartphone)
• Mobile apps
• Blending of offline-online worlds
• Gesture-based computing
• Increased geo-tagging of information
• Watching news on multiple devices simultaneously—TV and (mobile) internet
• Fewer Americans read print newspapers and magazines (some big titles such as  Newsweek move to online only)
• Voice interfaces
• MOOCs—Massive  Open Online Courses
• Increasing business engagement with social media
• Video, video, video… (“Video  is the fastest-growing digital content category; we forecast that more than 90%  of the online population will regularly watch online video by  2017.”
• Ebook self-publishing market grows (and  is expected to surge in 2013)
• Growing popularity of e-singles (“stories  somewhere between 5,000 and 30,000 words, usually nonfiction, and sold as  inexpensive ebooks”)
• Tablets sales rise, sales growth of dedicated e-readers slows
• Apple maps—big blunder and embarrassment (with iOS 6 Apple dropped Google  Maps)
• Facebook’s botched IPO
• Publisher consolidation
• Web-scale discovery for library collections
• Evolving roles for librarians
• The rise of monograph  e-platforms (Books at JSTOR, University Publishing Online,  University Press Scholarship Online, University Press Content Consortium Book  Collections of Project MUSE )
• Privacy  and security concerns dominate policy discussions
• Government tries to regulate the internet (SOPA and PIPA, ACTA, WCIT)—expect  more battles in 2013
• Progress in Open  Access initiatives

Looking Ahead to 2013

• Apple  versus Google versus Facebook versus Amazon—battling on hardware  and search (“The Lines Between Software and Hardware Continue to Blur”)
• Battle of the mobile devices (Apple iOS, Google’s Android, Microsoft  Windows)
• Intelligent objects—The Internet of Things
• More predictive personalization
• Expansion of peer power
• Growth in open source innovation/problem solving (e.g., more installations  of Solr)
• Expansion of cloud computing and thus a greater need for security and data  center redundancy (outages  are much more a problem than data breaches)
• Work anywhere
• More Big Data (as one search technologies expert  said, “There’s plenty of hype around big data, but underneath there are  compelling applications to be implemented which combine the best of enterprise  search and business insight technologies.”)
• Publishers will use metadata in more sophisticated ways
• Publishers will still grapple with testing  new business models—library pricing, subscription models, DRM-free  sales, etc.
• Companies will increasingly have to deal with Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)  issues
• Looking forward to Microsoft Surface Pro with full version of Windows 8
• Enterprises may choose to bypass Windows 8 (because of interface issues) and  wait for “Windows 9”
• Anticipated launch of “iPad 5” and “iPhone 6”
• Anticipated next Android launch—“Key Lime Pie”
• More sales of near-field-communication (NFC) enabled mobile devices—and  adoption of customizable NFC tags
• Biometric security becoming more prevalent
• T-Mobile targets  AT&T customers
• More publisher consolidation
• Consumers with content stored in the cloud may encounter problems when they  want to move to another provider

Read the full article here ”