Seriously Bold Tech Startup Predictions for 2012
About this time of year, folks put together lots of lists about the past year as well as the outlook on the future. While these are nice, thoughtful, and insightful posts, I think people are being way too timid. This is the time to aim high and hit it out of the ballpark.
So without further ado, here is what you can really expect to see in 2012 in technology, tech startups, and the VC world.
- Ryan Gosling gets the last laugh, starts a $2 billion VC fund, and manages in one fell swoop to crush USV, Kleiner, Sequoia, and General Catalyst stealing all their deal flow.
- Enterprise tech gets tired of playing second fiddle to consumer apps and starts gamifying all of their products. Take that to the bank, Zynga.
- Pinterest gets even more red-hot, snags a $119 billion valuation, and buys out Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook overnight.
- New ideas for viral Internet memes run out, shutting down the Internet and causing massive global riots.
- BitCoin gets replaced by AwesomeCoin which in turn replaces the Euro, and thus stabilizes the entire economy of the Eurozone. Greece still defaults however.
- FAKEGRIMLOCK gets exposed as an obese, middle-aged mom of four children living in Dayton, OH. Worse still, she does not even own a single Apple product.
- Congress wises up to the fact that they are hopelessly deadlocked in ideologically induced self-destruction, so they give up and legalize online gaming as the only politically plausible way to balance the budget.
- Apple releases the iPhone 5 and it looks suspiciously like the Microsoft Kin.
- Engineers rail against the design first ethos and form a mass protest by building decidedly ugly web software using Comic Sans, stick figures, and mismatched pantone colors.
- Incubators form to incubate incubators, so you can incubate while you are incubating startups.
- Actual ninjas take legal action against the ninja fraudsters for infringing on their ninja patent and trademarks. As trial starts, ninjas suddenly disappear and the heads of all the defendants are sliced off.
- People continue to bitch about Facebook infringing on privacy, Google being creepy, and Twitter being useless. Meanwhile, they are still using all those services even more than they were previously.
- Several prominent TechStar entrepreneur graduates get caught in a cozy Union Square located NYC restaurant colluding to raise valuations and blacklist investors.
- TechCrunch folds when the entire staff quits en masse. No one appears visibly upset either. AOL finally realizes what happens a week after the announcement and responds that TechCrunch is still going strong.
- RIM finally fights back and produces a Blackberry that…forget it, no one cares anymore.
- HP finally gets the board of directors it deserves and can be proud of, filled with prominent members of the 112th “Do-Nothing” Congress.
- Financial tech continues to be the most uninteresting, non-innovative, least disruptive sector of the technology market which simply means Wall Street will keep winning and America will continue losing.
- Rex Ryan, coach of the NY Jets, talks so much he actually deflates and falls through a sidewalk drainage gate, never to be heard from again (it is off topic, but so be it).
- Yahoo! gets purchased by someone. Buyer’s remorse sets in immediately.
- Starbucks says screw it to free Wi-Fi and starts charging again realizing that it just encouraged loafers that do not actually buy anything in the stores.
- Women tech entrepreneurs fight back against the male-dominated tech startup community by hosting more conferences for women to talk about the problem of females not starting more startups.
- Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley have a winner takes all Nerf dart gun battle to determine who is indeed tops in the technology world. As a side note, Boston was simply forgotten.
- Betabeat continues to write salacious, barely legitimate, and borderline libelous tech startups articles and the haters will continue to hate.
- Startup Kazakhstan becomes a major phenomena igniting a well-spring of innovation in agricultural technology throughout the Central Asian region.
- China becomes notable for having more open and transparent access to the Internet than the US.
- Over 2/3’s of startups fess up and admit that they are, in fact, dipshit Internet companies. VC’s continue to invest in them.
- No one takes up Mark Suster’s challenge of building apps for the automotive industry and he goes apopletic.
- Wikipedia stops with all the annoying banner ads begging for donations after a wealthy benefactor saves the day and funds the organization indefinitely.
- Social media helps to incite protests and topple illegitimate dictatorships worldwide, and Malcolm Gladwell continues to stick his head into the sand.
- Everyone and their mothers decide to build recommendation engines of some sort. They all turn out to be dismal failures because no one likes getting machine generated recommendations.
- Someone finally figures out how to sell web SaaS business applications to small and mid-sized businesses at scale without requiring a massive human sales force.
- Despite the doom and gloom, the daily deals space continues to expand and remains a lucrative business as more niche services sprout up with better targeted offerings and audiences.
- Twitter finally figures out a business model that makes money rather than raises its valuations.
- Tech IPO’s continue to be a trainwreck.
- Someone other than Apple produces a tablet computer worth buying, and it is not produced by Samsung.
- Subcom category dies a quick death as Amazon takes over the entire sector through aggressive buyouts and sheer market saturation.
- Crowdfunding gets overblown and is replaced by narrowfunding, optimizing the outreach for maximum effect through various channels to relevant populations.
- Website API’s experience a Cambrian explosion which begins to overwhelm the technology sector in an ocean of API’s and differing standards. Tech startups that exploit this trend hit it big time.
- The word Cambrian gets listed as the Top 10 overused and annoying words in tech for 2012.
- Bio-chips that integrate live tissue and systems with electric circuits goes mainstream.
- Several US states take a tough stance on mobile use in cars and issue an outright bans on their use by drivers, including hands-free use, sending the auto and mobile industries into a panic.
- I take a vacation where I actually do not look at a computer or smartphone screen for over a week. I call it a Webcation, which eventually enters the Oxford English Dictionary as the term for taking an extended break from computers and the Internet.
The future is indeed bright, so enjoy the ride and may you have an epic and exciting 2012!
33 Notes/ Hide
- kilpatrickk09-blog liked this
- gloria2fg-blog liked this
- fitzpatrickyou834-blog liked this
- heatheryi982-blog liked this
- fergusonicd890-blog liked this
- kathleentag901-blog liked this
- messel-blog reblogged this from marksbirch
- messel-blog liked this
- wecloud-blog liked this
- joeconyers liked this
- shesthefounder liked this
- gautamelon-blog liked this
- sallydoodle liked this
- adsahay liked this
- johnesperanza-blog liked this
- justinalcon-blog liked this
- whitneymcn liked this
- marksbirch posted this