Welcome 2015!

When we go from one year to the next, we love to analyze what went well last year and what will be better during the next year… the progress is something that makes us summarize the past and dream about the future.

I spent an amazing 2014 in Silicon Valley working at BootstrapLabs and talked with some great leaders about innovation and technology. Gathering from research and hands-on-experience in Silicon Valley, below are my best predictions of trends in technology in 2015.

BIG DATA and Machine Learning. 

This year we will see exponential growth of data-driven successful companies. Big Data scientists and SQLs business intelligence systems are now must-have components for companies to succeed in the modern tech space.

Marketing and advertising will be focusing in personalization and automatization. Big data will help companies to build personal offers to their customer base. More often than not, we will see a one-to-one ad targeting strategy, with CRM`s emphasizing personalized interactions with customers.

In-store experience will be improved by beacon utilization, making offline shopping more competitive and integrated with online shopping. Many impressive integrated solutions like PayPal are already available. Online payments and digital wallets are now an additional layer to improve ads and marketing strategies. Expect mobile payments to increase exponentially in 2015. Apple Pay will gain more traction and companies like Samsung and other credit card companies will enter the space in a big way.

Wearables are growing trending more than ever as the smart watch market is booming!

Take a look at this chart:

TapSense just launched the industry’s First Programmatic Ad Platform for Apple Watch at CES 2015.

The wearables market is bringing to our “must have” list trackers and fitness bracelets, like Fitbit and Jawbone. The most interesting trend here is the exponential growth of healthcare mobile applications. Dedicate healthcare VC funds and investments are growing faster than ever.

Apple, Samsung and Google, just to mention someone, are already competing in this space. Apple with the IOS 8 release launched “The new Health app”:

An entirely new way to use your health and fitness information.

Google last summer announced the Google Fit health data platform. Samsung around the same period last year announced: “Samsung wants ‘SAMI’ and ‘Simband’ to be the start of a new biohealth ecosystem”. Many others new startups are already there with their great products in the market.

It`s also going to be the year of fashion tech – look at Misfit and Swarovski.

According to experts data… Drones, will sell 500.000 units in 2015. That means drone revenue in the 2015 is expected to be around $130 million. There is huge potential to use drone to track, control and gather more data. For example, I saw some great illustrations in the Agricultural Drones and Mapping Services. Also there are already different “Drone Pilote Program” both in USA and Europe…  (what a nice job would be to drive drones around…)

Mobile, mobile and mobile… Mobile first is not an option anymore,  it`s now the solution… Instagram (with more than 300 Million users) is now bigger than Twitter and during the last Christmas holidays more than 60% of Amazon traffic comes from mobile. Emerging countries went from no-PC to +50% smartphones penetration overnight in the last few years and even developed countries in Europe (Ie Italy) are way more attractive for mobile applications.

3D printing, the interest level has grown the number of applications in this space tremendously. I would expect another great year for this segment.  Especially look for few main global trends, like: personalized offer or micro-customization, on-demand production and productions re-localization.

I don`t think the 2015 will be the year of the Virtual Reality revolution, although a lot is happening in this space as well. I support the thesis that says: VR will be a fast growing market when it will be in business applications and not just in gaming apps. Some cool things will soon arrive to the market no doubt. Sony and Samsung are working hard to bring VR to the game space forward as soon as possible. Marriott is testing the new formula “travel without travel” with its great futuristic project, “Travel Brilliantly” .

If you haven`t tried yet VR, you should begin with Cardboard. 

What excites me about 2015?

On-Demand Economy and sharing economy are now mandatory concepts to study for every students… Uber is not just a company anymore. Uber is the on-demand revolution and the “uberization” of everything that will soon occur. This is a global logistic optimization game; Uber is already making moves in the delivery space and it will happen way faster than we thought. They are now building the infrastructure and collecting data. With these elements in place, it will be easier to ship products in almost real time in every major city around the world.

There are also a lot of other exiting things happening that we have to track in 2015, such as: connected-home (home automation), which will be bigger and bigger thanks to devices like Nest. Another curiosity: Nest hired the Apple iPod VP to build the best product in design and simplicity.

I am sure this year will be amazing and I am sooooo curious to see which one will be the next billionaire acquisition in the tech space… stay tuned and remember if you are going to build a new company this year, look into large market and never fall in love with your idea!

This is the Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, from the 2014                  

Have thoughts to share?

Hope you enjoyed this article…

Special thanks to my great friend Mike!