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Ask HN: Your predictions for 2012?

39 points by csomar ↗ HN
This year we saw interesting things in technology and considerable improvement in the Web related tech.

What are your predictions for 2012? Not limited only to the startup world, but any prediction worth mentioning.

28 comments

[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 85.2 ms ] thread
chmielewski
Oakland's continuing trend as an up-and-coming alternative to the SF start-up scene will gain some recognition and tractable returns, exponentially fueling its viability.

Start-ups ending in .ly will reach critical mass and those further hoping to capitalize on this will be viewed as "old-hat" (if even only in name/branding). This will be revisited in late 2012 by a smashing.ly successful start-up that uses it for "ironic" purposes (if even only in name/branding).

Some sort of hybrid between Bitcoin and MMORPG will emerge. If you think people are jumping ship on Bitcoin in droves and that it will soon be "dead", consider that people still play Project Entropia (and even begin playing as new players) to this day, and then consider why.

20 to 30 new programming languages will be released, giving birth to the meta-polyglot, or a language whose purpose is to form a polyglot translation bridge.

Hundreds of articles will be written with titles like "n ways to foo your bars in 2012".

Thousands like me will make public their predictions for 2012 based on the biases and misinformation that have been brewing in their vacuous heads for more than just the past year.

da02
* More solar energy startups go bankrupt or shutdown: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100125720/...

* Bubble in American farmland continues growing: http://blog.mises.org/19970/farmland-is-bubbleland/

* More civil unrest in China as economic landing is closer to a crash: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iWObIptHU...

* Ancestral/Paleo/Primal Lifestyle more popular, but still not mainstream.

* Gold at $2,500/oz.

* New season of Doctor Who is repetitive, derivative, but still just as popular and exciting.

* csomar builds a website to keep track of predictions, but his homepage will still say, "coming soon".

anonymoushn
* Gold at $2,500/oz.

Are you taking bets on this one?

lucaspiller
The world won't end on Dec. 21, 2012.
OpenStartup
Only the beginning of the end of Closed Institutions.

For the last 5000 years the closed institution has ruled humanity. 12.12.12 that will change. And a new collaborative framework will marginalize the 1% and their money.

It all started with the the closed family of the strongest tribal leader... future generations became chiefs by enslaving and killing rivals. Fearful of others killing them they sought mystics to aid them and in turn these anointed them into Kings with divine right of rule; and the "closed" religion casts were born. And these leaders become great and powerful tyrants. Innovation brought about a new class "the merchants" and these eventually usurped the tyrants in great rebellions Magna Carta and the French Revolution and over time more innovation made these expand into global territories and giving them eventually more power and control than the leaders. Such power in fact they decided and controlled all matters -- spinning everything out of control: Climate, Fishery's, Forests, etc... Until that day that the bearer of the gift arrived and that gift was the Open !ncubator Framework (O!F) makes a good story :) http://mtrout.com

willvarfar
Native Client (NaCL) will power the next wave of social games.

Adobe Creative Suite will support an NaCL target and Flash will be superceded whilst Adobe get a new boost of adoption on the tools front

charliesome
I hope NaCl doesn't gain any traction. It really is a step backwards.
chriseidhof
I hope so, this would be a huge leap forward for the web. For low-level performance, Javascript doesn't quite cut it. Although it will of course become faster and faster, I don't think you can approach a low-level language.

NaCl will also enable other languages for client-side programming.

However... I doubt that Apple will include it in iOS, which might be a big hurdle for adoption...

math
Our latest project will give you lots of financial predictions, many for 2012 (though you can't filter by that explicitly yet): http://backrecord.com Early days, but if you're into this sort of thing worth checking out..
OpenStartup
I am a disgruntled entrepreneur who for nearly 2 years have been developing an enterprise 2.0 solution for the "closed" startup. I predict this will be the year of the Open Startup and it's foundup®. We running a closed alpha development trial and launching public beta on 12.12.12. What's so great about the open startup? It doesn't need the 1% to succeed and they launch as Open Corp and new selfless framework in which 20-80% of net profits are invested into lannching more open corps. My prediction is this...

1) Closed incubators such as this one and other clones will be displaced by a highly scaleable open free solution that offers a solution where 1% are not needed. 2) Closed crowdfunding funding platforms like profounder, KS, IGG, etc will be disrupted by our free version that offers TWO new ways to raise funds, 1) has raised over $1.6bn for npo strategic initiatives and another is my creation that I call passive crowdfunding. 3) Developers will be marginalized to becoming construction workers. As I have invented a new way to validate ideas.

There is a lot more but I will leave some things to be suprises :) Here are my talks... http://j.mp/OSiplaylist. If you want to see the solution that lies outside your paradigm to fully comprehend and you are willing to sign an NDA then I would be happy to show you it. After all I don't want this BS happening to us http://j.mp/modista. Open Startups is really Stupid simple... it combines 10 years of me beta testing experience, throws in fundraising lessons learned and 2 years of picking apart the Valley Startup. Just as Wikipedia disrupted MS Encarta. The Open Startup will change the world. I am here telling you but it should so absurd none of you will take heed... that OK. FOUNDUPS® Vision statement is "Be Good." because let's face it "Don't Be Evil" just doesn't cut it any more. We are a blue ocean strategy just letting now the red ocean we are here and would LOVE you to own some of use to hedge against our disrupting your business model. Jimmy Wales never did that... I think that was wrong. Paul, there you have my prediction... Love to show you our Open Startup !ncubator (OS!)

FOUNDUPS® Michael Trout, CEO Sorry for the edits, like Shakespeare I am highly dislexic

ivank
http://predictionbook.com/ is handy for keeping track of predictions, and getting feedback about your overconfidence/underconfidence. (It generates a graph of your your confidence vs. accuracy - '90% sure' should happen 90% of the time.) Outside of specialist sites, you generally see no confidence values attached to predictions, and vagueness that makes judging them difficult or impossible.

Of possible interest:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/7z9/1001_predictionbook_nights/

http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/8dx/predictionbook_a_sh...

nyellin
Don't forget InTrade.

http://www.intrade.com/v4/home/

gwern
You have to get money into Intrade, the fees are bad for small sums like a hundred bucks or so, you can't do long-term predictions profitably (foregone interest/investment return eats you alive), and you can only bet on the preselected set of markets - assuming they're even liquid enough to bet on.

So for predictions like we're discussing here, PredictionBook is way better. (Sometimes using real-money doesn't make things better.)

unexpected
1) RIM will be bought.

2) Google will fold ChromeOS and roll up everything into variations of Android.

booduh
- The year of the startup.

- Massive government policy changes.

- Revolution in conscious dream and mind (self) control.

- Apple TV sucks.

- Facebook gets lucky.

And of course...

- My startup is the most viral web app of the year!

yurylifshits
10x-100x growth in enrollment into online classes from top universities (like Stanford classes)

Non-TED lecture to get 5M views on Youtube

janus
The year of the linux desktop
ellie42
iPhone 5 I guess. New MacBooks.
teja1990
Android will gain more market and still struggles to make more money than iOS.

I'll start my startup and still continue reading HN :D

buymorechuck
Facebook continues work on their own fork of Android towards releasing a phone and Facebook mobile app platform. Perhaps an IPO to coincide with it.
[deleted]
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kgutteridge
* iPhone 5 will add NFC, which will have advertisers foaming at the mouth as Apple will link to ATV

* RIMM will be brought by a network operator for their operator friendly tech

* Existing iOS and Android publishers will be looking to other markets to get a ROI on their current outlay

* Stephen Elop will jump ship from Nokia

* Nintendo will release something on one of the existing mobile platform (probably more hoping, they should just do a high priced accessory game combo branded for Zelda/Mario for iOS)

* HTML 5 will provide "cross platform apps"

herval
* No economy bubble burst in europe

* G+ doesn't go anywhere, but doesn't shut down just yet

* More failed IPOs will make mass media call it "a different 2k bubble"

* Incubator/accelerator bubble burst (specially outside USA)

* Facebook phone

* Facebook credits for physical stuff will face-off with Paypal

* Obvious Facebook IPO

* Groupon files for bankruptcy

* Nintendo declares yet another year of losses, doesn't die (yet)

* The year of Linux on the Desktop (just kidding)