This year, they look at things like mind-reading, spam, and sustainable energy. Let’s take a look into the future, according to IBM.

1. People will power their houses with energy that they create themselves.  True renewable energy will become the norm, allowing people to power their homes and work places with simple movement – like the turning of the spokes on a bicycle or the running of water through pipes.
2. No more passwords.  Biometric tools like retina scanners and voice recognition will totally replace traditional passwords, and you’ll be able to use these login devices at places like the ATM machine.
3. Your devices will read your mind.  In the next 5 years, scientists will have discovered a way to link your mind to you devices so that you can just think about calling someone and it will happen.  Further down the road, people might just be able to simply think about what they want to say and have it typed out for them on their computers.
4. Mobile Technology will help close the digital divide.  They predict that within 5 years, 80% of the global population will own a mobile device.  communities all over the world will be able to use this technology to access mobile commerce programs and virtual health care.
5. Spam will become personal.  “Junk mail will become priority mail. In five years, unsolicited advertisements may feel so personalized and relevant it may seem spam is dead.”

Not all of the past IBM predictions have come to pass. For instance, we don’t quite have mind reading mobile phones yet (predicted back in 2006) and we haven’t been able to eradicate the “forgetting” part of aging (predicted in 2008). But some of the predictions have definitely come true.

Two of the first year’s predictions, for instance, have pretty much come true:

We will be able to access healthcare remotely from just about anywhere in the world. Today, through telemedicine, patients can connect with physicians or specialists from just about anywhere via inexpensive computers and broadband networks. Doctors can view x-rays and other diagnostic imagery from thousands of miles away.

Technologies the size of a few atoms will address areas of environmental importance. Nanotechnology is now used in countless fields and industries, including agriculture, biotechnology and sensor networks, enabling us to understand and interact with the natural environment like never before.

Plus, they predicted that users would soon talk to the web, and the web would talk back. Sounds a little bit like Siri and other voice assistants, no?

Which of IBM’s 2011 predictions do you see coming true in the next 5 years? Which ones seem just a little too ambitious? Let us know in the comments.

Looking back at 2011

The turmoil that Clay was referring to was largely because of Google’s Panda update. As WebProNews previously reported, Google rolled out its Panda update in an effort to target low quality sites across the Web. The impact of it, however, was extremely significant. Many people, such as Dani Horowitz of DaniWeb, saw their site drop dramatically and had no idea why.

“We’ve determined, or at least convinced ourselves, that linking, the quality of your inbound link networking, is also part of the quality of your site certainly at a trust level,” said Clay. “Trust scores and components associated with the quality of how your site connects to everybody is part of the factor to determine whether or not you are a site worthy of ranking.”

He went on to say that Panda was “disruptive” but that he thought, in the end, that it had helped Google’s search results.

“Overall, I think that the results have improved,” he said.

Google also released a “Freshness” update not long ago that was intended to index fresher content more quickly. From Clay’s perspective, this update really only impacts news content. Fortunately, most people seem to be hopeful about it.

Another move, however, that Google made that did and will continue to have an impact on the search industry was Google’s move to encrypt search. If you remember, Google said it would begin encrypting logged-in searches that users do by default when they are logged into Google.com. For SEOs, this means that they will not receive referral data from the websites consumers click on from Google search results.

Although Google claimed the move was done to protect user privacy, most SEOs – Clay included – aren’t buying into this theory, mostly because the move did not impact advertisers.

“I really think that the intent there was more to allow Google to see what we are searching for themselves because they are now in the stream,” said Clay. “It’s sort of not a universal privacy issue [because] people don’t know, many times, that it’s an ad.”

While Google announcements have primarily dominated the 2011 recap thus far, the yearly events do go beyond the search giant. For starters, social media is bleeding over much more into search. Clay told us that social media, and especially Twitter, has changed how people find sites.

In other words, social media is becoming a replacement for the browser. Searchers look to their social networks for recommendations and reviews before they visit the brand sites. Clay said that this shift in behavior is still resulting in conversions even though the traffic is down.

Speaking of social and search, Google’s release of its own social network Google+ was another significant move during the year. Clay told us that it doesn’t have a big impact on search at this point, but he suspects it will.

In terms of the other search engines, Clay said that Bing has held its own during the year. Microsoft and Yahoo collectively appear to be growing in search share, but Clay said he thinks the reason is because Ask and AOL have lost some.

Looking ahead to 2012

Going forward into 2012, Clay has several predictions. For starters, he believes that Google Panda will continue. In fact, he said that the image should be changed to a polar bear instead of a panda because it would get meaner and more aggressive.

“Google is in the business of making money,” he said. “Everybody needs to recognize that Google is a money generator.”

For this reason, he believes that Google will also integrate Google+ into search in 2012. A few years ago, Google went from a “one size fits all” approach with search to personalized search results. In order to make these results geared more toward individuals instead of groups of people, Clay explained that Google+ would give the search giant this ability.

“The best way to get your history is to just watch you and, I think, Google+ is that tool,” he said.

“It is entirely within reason for Google, every time you login to Google+, for them to know where you are,” he added.

As far as the other search engines go, Clay told us that Bing has good technology and that it would grow, especially in light of its partnerships with both Facebook and Mozilla.

While some have already written Yahoo out of the search market, Clay said that Yahoo would remain a leader in the space. According to him, it’s out of the spidering business but not the search or algorithm business.

“It’s kind of hard to criticize a company that only did a billion dollars in business,” he pointed out.

In addition, Clay said that local search would continue to grow in 2012. Due to this growth, he thinks the search engines will begin to monetize it through a concept called local paid inclusion. He said it would be similar to Yahoo’s Search Submit Pro and that the companies would pay to get included in the top of the search results.

Clay thinks the premium listing will have a call tracking system associated with it that would work like PPC ads work. For instance, if the number is clicked, the company pays the search engine. Based on past trends, he believes that Bing and Yahoo will offer this service before Google. He said that Google typically watches services from other companies and then develops their own version of it.

Clay said we could expect this element as soon as January and believes so strongly in the concept that Bruce Clay Inc. is already preparing to offer services in this area.

According to Clay’s predictions for 2012, the year looks to be just as interesting as 2011. Do you agree?

What do you think the search industry will hold for 2012? Will it be as “disruptive” as 2011? Please comment.

Although its IPO is reportedly back on track, a sense of uncertainty is starting to grow in regards to daily deals.

Is the phenomenon of daily deals going away? What do you think?

While there are people who would argue both sides of the future of daily deals’ dispute, the truth is, it’s really hard to say at this point. There have, however, been people who have made predictions about them including Mary Song, the CEO of travel discount site Yuupon.

Just a few months ago, she shared these predictions:

1. Facebook Deals will not be a major contender as is.

2. The daily deals space will mature and the flexibility that merchants may see today will disappear or become commoditized. Why? Daily deals / flash deals are still in infancy and a lot of trial and error/learning is still taking place. As the space matures a lot of this will be figured out and will become much more cookie cutter. This works, this doesn’t, want to run a deal? Here are the parameters The early adopters will get to play a role in shaping how flash deals operate.

3. Major shift to mobile delivery and fulfillment – where we’ll no longer need to use paper vouchers. Why? Let’s face it, printing a paper voucher and bringing it with you seems so 1990, the larger sites already offer some mobile delivery and fulfillment – expect to see major developments on the mobile front. Instant and Now are two examples.

4. More partnerships between players – Ebay is already in the daily deal space, and with their acquisition of Where, they made a strong move into the mobile hyperlocal space; however they are going to make a major move into the local deals space with their acquisition of Magento ecommerce software. We may see some additional acquisitions from Ebay.

5. Groupon Getaways/Expedia is not a slam dunk but does validate the travel voucher model. Existing issues between OTAs, bait and switch with deal pricing, etc may stand in the way of being the dominant player in the travel deal vertical.

6. Multiple players will exist and thrive in flash travel deal vertical – possibly as many as ten.

If you’re at all familiar with the space, you know that some of these have already come true. For example, Facebook, just 4 months after it entered the daily deal space, announced that it would be discontinuing its deals’ product. Song told us that she believed this would happen because Facebook did not effectively position its product. It was located in a place that most users would not visit regularly, and therefore, could not get very much traction.

She also told us that Facebook did not have a marketplace for deals. As she explained, most people don’t get on Facebook to make purchases, and those that do, aren’t typically repeat buyers. She thinks that both of these reasons played a big role in Facebook shuttering its product.

Facebook did say that it would be keeping its check-in deals, and Song believes they have potential. She said that merchants could use them to build loyalty programs and to drive revenue.

Another one of her predictions that we’re already seeing is the shift to mobile vouchers. Song said this was “bound to happen” with the increased use and convenience of smartphones.

Although the others have not come true yet, she did offer some further insight into the overall space. She told us that even though Groupon is the leader, she could see LivingSocial overtaking it. According to her, LivingSocial could actually be fine with its 2nd place position.

“Groupon is sort of paving the way, making mistakes, and LivingSocial is following behind learning from those mistakes and not making the same ones,” she said.

Song went on to say that she thinks that Google will be successful in the market because of its already broad reach.

“My prediction is that they won’t be as successful as LivingSocial or Groupon,” she pointed out.

Specifically, she believes that Google will be 1 of the top 3 daily deal providers but said that it wouldn’t hold positions 1 or 2.

In terms of the sustainability of daily deal services, Song told us that the market would continue to grow but that the number of providers would be greatly reduced.

“The market will sustain itself,” she said. “I don’t think the number of players that are considered daily deals’ sites will continue to exist.”

At this point, there well over 500 deals’ services, but she said that they are growing as individual services very slowly. As a result, she believes that these sites will be greatly reduced by 2012. Some sites will be merged or acquired, and others will simply have to shut down.

“It’s really easy to get into the daily deals’ market… but it’s not easy to run a daily deals’ site,” she added.

What’s your prediction for the overall daily deal industry and also the individual deal providers?

Mobile Phones and Tablets

First off, we asked what implications all of the new mobile devices and tablets coming out have on security in the coming year. "Three trends emerge," Wood tells us. "Increased mobile device processing power will mean more opportunity for malware to run on these devices. As their numbers and use increase, they become a viable target for attackers. Many brands of mobile devices will share the same chipsets and threats targeting vulnerabilities in some chipsets will emerge in 2011."

"Increased convergence from a technology perspective means that more people than before are using mobile devices to access their email and social networking circles," he continues. "From a corporate perspective, business users will be accessing business data and services whilst on the move – often outside the boundaries of the physical corporate network – so applying the same rules to enforce acceptable usage policies, for example – will become more important."

"Security protection will be required to work seamlessly across many platforms as users switch between devices and laptops used to store and transmit information online," he adds. "Businesses will look to the cloud to secure their information longer-term, irrespective of how the data is accessed. There will also be a drive for stronger cloud-based authentication and for the cloud to remove malicious threats before they reach the network or device."

Social Media Threats

When asked whether social networks like Facebook and Twitter will start becoming bigger security problems or less of an issue in the next year, Wood says, "Social networking will continue to be a persuasive force and will continue to be exploited as a means of running confidence tricks – social engineering attacks – and for distributing malware. The level of risk will remain unchanged from this year, but the level of sophistication involved may increase. This may manifest as phishing attacks to compromise legitimate accounts and third-party apps may be likely to continue to be a source of malware and attacks against privacy. We expect to see more fraud targeting virtual online currencies."

Location-Based Services

As you’re probably aware, location sharing is becoming more common thanks to capabilities in mobile phones as well as the market saturation of check-in apps. We asked Wood if threats based on the sharing of location are going to become a bigger problem. "Probably not, it’s difficult to see how to monetize attacks over the internet using location sharing," he says. "One attack that may be predicted is for malware faking location information in order to boost ranking or prominence of the spoofed location. This type of information will be of value in the reconnaissance stage prior to a targeted attack, or perhaps prior to burgling someone’s house – the robber can know the owner is elsewhere." 

You may recall a site/Twitter account called PleaseRobMe, dedicated to illustrating that very point. 

Email Spam 

As far as changes over the next year with regards to email spam, Wood says, "It’s going to remain in excess of 90% of all email for most of 2011. Botnets will continue to be a major threat and a major source of spam – currently 90% of spam is sent from botnets."

"Spam will increasingly use URL shortening links as these are legitimate domains – we may even find a legitimate shortening domain being compromised or spammers establishing their own such services, using disposable domain names and chaining them together," he predicts. "Spam will increasingly make use of the news and current affairs by consuming RSS feeds from major news aggregators and using these headlines as subjects in the messages. More spam will be sent from new economic areas, particularly East Africa as increased broadband capacity is deployed in the region."

The One Thing Businesses Should Do

Finally, we asked Wood if he could name one thing as the single most important step businesses should take to protect their data, what would it be?

"Know what it is that you’re trying to protect," he answers. "Too many businesses look for magic bullets that will make security go away. The reality is that security is achieved by knowing what it is that you are trying to protect – know your assets, who has access to these assets and under what circumstances, and what are the attacks directed against the assets. By considering these issues, businesses can build coherent defences that protect their systems yet also allow employees to get on with their work."

Symantec’s Kevin Haley has some more interesting predictions for 2011 in a new report here.

A representative for Cross MediaWorks sent us some predictions for media, advertising and content trends in 2010 from that firm as well, that are worth sharing. These come from CEO Marc Krigsman (formerly EVP of Primedia Digital Video) and COO Larry Rubin (formerly SVP, Business Development, USA Networks and Vice President, Associate General Counsel – Transactions, Viacom).

1. An improvement in ad spending in 2010, especially by the automotive, financial, and healthcare industries. However, spending will not return to pre-downturn levels. Overall, they think it will be a conservative year with conservative growth as companies concentrate on fine tuning their messages.

2. There will [be] more emphasis on measurement of performance in 2010 with data being incorporated from other areas such as shopping carts, social media, and credit-card data.

3. Advertising on both broadcast and cable television will remain the most cost-effective option for advertisers; viewership for both will continue to increase in 2010.

4.  Spending on online and mobile will not get ahead of television for at least eight to ten years.

5.  Smartphones like the iPhone will continue to pave the way for content platforms to emerge that will drive more users to mobile sites; however, what is considered a valuable mobile ad will remain undefined until that happens.

6.  In the coming year, there will be a greater emphasis on "active eyeballs" as opposed to "passive eyeballs" with regards to online advertising and online ads will get more visual, [and] include multimedia.

7. Video content available online will have to move to a subscription model or one with more advertising as media comes at a cost.  In television’s early days, for example, entire programs were paid for by an advertiser like "Texaco Star Theater."

8. The Web can’t yet deliver a video product comparable to HD and the top-trafficked Web sites are informational; consumers continue to go to the Internet to look for information about their bank, their phones, etc.

While we’re no the subject of predictions about trends for 2010, let’s not overlook a recent survey by Silverpop, which found that 40% of email marketers plan on increasing their budgets for the channel in 2010 and 47% said their budgets would stay the same.

Related Articles:

> Nielsen Shares Predictions for Advertising Trends in 2010

> Email Marketing Budgets Set For Increase In 2010

> Online Video Viewing Continues To Boom

When Google itself comes out with predictions for where search is headed, things get even more interesting. This is obviously because Google is such a huge and critical part of the search landscape. Google’s Matt Cutts discussed some of his own predictions for search in a recent upload to Google’s Webmaster Central YouTube channel.

One thing Matt stressed is that Google is always looking for new types of data to search. He gave examples of searching email with Gmail, books with Google Book Search, and patents with Google Patent search. He predicts Google will continue this trend and find more data sources to provide search functionality for.

Another prediction he gave was that Google will continue to improve search over harder problems. Specifically, he noted things like determining what is really going on with the words in documents and in queries – semantic search if you will.

"A lot of people think that if you type in ‘A B C,’ all Google does is crawl the web and return pages that match ‘A,’ ‘B,’ and ‘C’. And that’s not it," says Cutts. "We do a lot of sophisticated stuff. Think about synonyms, morphology…all sorts of ways where we can kind of find out, ‘oh, this is really related to them conceptually.’ Whether you want to call it semantic stuff or statistical processing, we do a lot of stuff to try and return relevant documents."

As part of this prediction, Cutts says Google will continue trying to find new ways to extract "good data" from the web. He mentions Google Squared (which is still in an experimental stage)  as an example of doing so. Google Squared, in Google’s words, takes a category and creates a starter ‘square’ of information, automatically fetching and organizing facts from across the web.

Cutts also predicts that people will get more comfortable with storing their data in the cloud. He expects more people will migrate their data from their hard drives to different cloud services, and that this will make it easier and better for search, and contribute to the delivery of more relevant results.

He also mentions real-time and mobile as playing significant roles in the future or search. No surprise there.

"It’s going to be a lot of fun. Search is nowhere near done, and every time we make search better, people ask us harder and harder questions, " he says. "So the nice thing is knowing that we’ll pretty much always have more to do to make search better."

Cutts recently discussed the possibility that page speed could play a role in search engine rankings. He made no mention of this in this set of predictions, but that is another thing to consider as we get ready to move into 2010.

What predictions do you have for search? Any that Matt didn’t go into? Discuss here.

Related Articles:

> Google Testing a Revamp of the Search Results Page

> Google Puts Its Own Dictionary in the Spotlight

> Critical Local Search Factors To Pay Attention To

1. Optimizing media convergence is a top priority.
2. New models emerge to take advantage of smartphones.
3. More cross-media ad campaigns surface.
4. Commercialization of social networking hubs increase.
5. More interesting and interactive online ads appear.

"A better understanding of media convergence will manifest in order to deliver a better return on investment," the firm says. "The ability to accurately measure activity and link online ads to offline purchasing behavior will be critical."

Nielsen says accurate mobile measurement will be required for advertisers to stay ahead of "snowballing growth" of that media platform and that the massive growth of online games will lead the way for more successful interactive and cross-media advertising campaigns. The firm expects growth in innovation and adoption in this area.

Of course social media will continue to provide new opportunities and Nielsen thinks there will be increased use of more creative advertising and content models online.

John Burbank, CEO of Nielsen Online says the next phase of the Internet will be the "audience-centric web" and will be characterized by the audience being the center of everything, "online" no longer being an island, and richer business opportunities due to richer data being consumed.

"Whether it’s reaching men aged 18 to 24, women with incomes of over $150,000, heavy users of Tide or Hispanic teens, the match of consumer need to marketing message starts with the audience," he says. "In the audience-centric Web, that richness of insight will now be available to online marketers, just as it has been offline."

Nielsen also shared its top five cross-media trends for 2010, which include: convergence in demand, second and third screen initiative growth, continued audience fragmentation, new and varied approaches to content, and the formation of multiple distribution opportunities.
 

Related Articles:

> Nielsen Also Puts Bing Up In November

> November Online Video Trends A Mixed Bag

> Online Video Viewing Continues To Boom

Recent research from Nielsen shows that in May, unique visitors, total streams, streams per viewer, and time per viewer were all up compared to the same month in 2008. There was a 49% increase in time per viewer.

According to Nielsen, YouTube was way on top in video streams (with over 6 billion during the month) and unique viewers (95 million). Behind YouTube were Hulu, Yahoo, Fox Interactive Media, and ABC.com.

That was the past. What About the Future?

Cisco recently shared some interesting predictions (via Ben Worthen at the WSJ) of its own looking at the future of online video. Stats from this research include:

- Internet traffic will increase fivefold over the next five years, driven in large part by a jump in the amount of video transmitted

- Over 90% of traffic will come from video (including TV, video on demand, or file sharing)

- Video chat will increase tenfold between 2008 and 2013

- the amount of data flowing to mobile devices will double each year, increasing 66 times by 2013, with video being the fastest growing category.

Another reason why online video will likely continue to grow in a big way is that HTML 5 is continuing its path toward wide acceptance. Ryan Paul at Ars Technica has a fascinating piece on what this will mean for online video and rich media.

"A growing number of prominent companies that deliver content and services on the Web are putting their weight behind HTML 5 and touting it as the way forward for building interactive Web applications and deploying rich media in the browser," he says. "Video is one of the most significant areas where this trend will have a major impact. "

"For content providers like YouTube and DailyMotion, the HTML 5 video element offers numerous advantages," he explains. "It integrates seamlessly with conventional HTML content and can be manipulated with JavaScript and CSS. This enables Web developers to build video player interfaces that are more consistent with the rest of their website. The ability to control playback with JavaScript allows video to be a more native part of the user experience in interactive Web applications."

There’s no doubt that there are big things on the horizon for online video as a medium. Just how quickly it has grown thus far may be a little overstated though. Christophor Rick of video marketing firm ReelSEO talks about a study from Trendstream that calls online video the fastest-growing media platform in the history of media. That might be going a little overboard.

"Now they say that online video has only been around for three years (or maybe Mediapost said that) but I beg to differ," says Rick. "Online video was pioneered by the pornography industry way before YouTube showed up (which was 2005). Sure, many might not want to admit it but honestly, porn drove internet technology innovation for a long time. So that means the numbers seem to be slightly skewed."

"The heart of the matter is this – online video is rapidly expanding," he says. "Since its initial inception maybe a decade or more ago it has obviously become the media du jour online….So is video the wave of the future for online entertainment? Well, isn’t it the current wave we’re all riding already? Will that stop? No, probably not. Will it grow? Yes, without a doubt. Will more people upload, watch, share, create, comment on, Twitter, or otherwise talk about online video? Absolutely."

I think Rick’s conclusion is the main take away from all of this. You can probably fit online video into your budget whether you realize it or not. You can use video to improve your ranking and conversions, and as long as YouTube is top dog in the industry (not to mention the 2nd largest search engine), there are plenty of ways to use it to help your online business.