Lykle de Vries

A dent in ownership

Netflix and Redbox have almost destroyed the concept of owning DVD disks. Pandora has lowered the need to buy music.  Zipcar has made not owning a car possible for a lot of urbanites. The real estate crisis has made owning your own place seem less cool.

All and all, it seems the trend is moving, to a large extent, away from physical ownership of goods and towards either sharing models or outright rentals. We will see this trend continue to grow over the coming year. Some of the things to watch out for are the rise of the cord-cutters, where people replace their cable TV offering with an online only offering because of the a-la-carte pricing nature of online efforts. Another trend to look at is e-book lending with the initial efforts or the Nook and Kindle readers offering sharing capabilities on select titles.

The mobile revolution continues

The introduction of the iPhone 3 years ago shifted the whole online landscape to mobile devices. Yet, for all the discussion of mobile, it still has been a phenomenon sitting on the edge, as smart-phones were on the more expensive side of the price spectrum. Except all this to change this year, with many Android-based phones being available for free or almost free, putting any feature phone at a substantial disadvantage.

At the same time, get ready for the shoot-and-learn revolution as QR-codes, tagged objects, and smart tools like Google Goggles gain more mainstream acceptance. People will increasingly scan or shoot to learn more about or compare a physical good to information available online.

Internet Backlash

The internet industry has benefited from a great amount of support over the last 2–3 years. Companies like Facebook, GroupOn, Zynga, and Google have been able to move along with high levels of consumer acceptance. I suspect that this year, we may start seeing more people rethinking some of their web 2.0 choices, disclosing a little less information on Facebook, or becoming more wary of the power of Google. We will also see the rise of digital-free zones, where people agree that the use of mobile devices or computers is not allowed. Read more at feeds.tristanlouis.com