Here are five #BigIdeas2015 that will influence business for the remainder of the decade in “the era of the startup economy”…
- Content Creation Tools for Mobile – We know that people consume content on the social web and have been doing so for the last eight years. The issue is none of the social networks provide tools to help create that content. In an area still untapped by those network business models, there will be more companies moving into this space to help people and businesses create. What I always admired about Tumblr and David Karp’s vision for that platform was he helped not only provide distribution of content but helped with creation tools. The companies that can help do more of this for users on mobile devices with tools and apps like Videolicious and Sway will be moving into an area where countless solutions still don’t exist.
- Podcast Promotional Services – In the era of radio, small teams of people were required to push songs to the top of the charts. Now in a new on-demand era, this same model will help people discover podcasts which will undoubtedly continue to explode in popularity as a result of the success of “Serial.” Algorithms can only do so much in a cluttered digital world of content and where people trust other people for referrals. I see small firms and agencies cropping up offering this new capability in helping podcasts become discovered using a variety of growth hacking techniques much like how old promotion firms helped radio station programmers discover new music and artists.
- Information Jamming – This was mentioned as a big area by me in 2014 but I feel it will only grow in popularity in 2015. We live in an attention deficit economy. Time is a resource. Data to help target particular users is as valuable as oil. How will companies construct creative marketing plans that focus capturing attention to users that they value the most? Humans pay attention to particular emotional drivers. Information jamming is a combination of growth hacking and culture jamming that may be tapped more and more in that feat to capture 15 milliseconds of our attention before we focus on something else.
- Video P2P Goes Mainstream in the Enterprise – In 2012 I told IBM to start using video P2P to replace the dreadful conference call. That is now possible and even more manageable across various devices as a result of the cloud. Even Skype has broken down translation barriers to make it effective for global teams or sales calls where the customer may speak a different language. In any case, if business wants to get more done in 2015, simply speaking into a phone is not the way to do it. Video will ultimately be everywhere and enterprise teams will be able to refer to a video recording as much as they referred to the conference call recording.
- Public Address System Mobile Applications – It was once said that the “pen is mightier than the sword.” This could be the year we see your mobile phone becoming more powerful than a gun. With all the upheaval around the world that we’ve seen as of late, a startup will create an application this year that turns the mobile phone into both a microphone and a public address loudspeaker system. For years, getting such equipment was costly and this technology will be a disruptive innovation to that market. The mobility will allow those who want to practice their civil rights to speak above the fray in mass crowd situations. This is simply my futurist speculation, but more and more what existed in the analog realm will continue to translate into a mobile digital environment.
