Once again, in true UP fashion, we’ll be welcoming the New Year with Bloggers PredICT 2011. A panel of leading Wellington-based bloggers will reveal their insightful, quirky, and occasionally baffling visions for the coming year. A year ago Bloggers PredICT occurred hot on the heels of the iPad release, and accordingly our predicters had plenty to say about it.
Apple aside, reining champion Brenda Wallace predicted Wellington library would start renting eBooks, the open source sector would grow (but for the wrong reasons), open government would lead to cyber-stalking, more labourer-bots would enter the market, and NZ would keep following international trends rather than leading.
“Tweeter” Philip Fierlinger foresaw that the keyboard would reign, with Chrome beating the iPad in the popularity stakes. Facebook – like AOL – would crumble, wireless electricity would break on to the market finally ridding us of those unsightly tangles of cables, and marijuana would be legalised in the US.
Joanna McLeod lamented her prediction that marketers would continue to try selling products to girls by making them pink. On the bright side, Wellingtonians would lead NZ in the adoption of of augmented reality games & cyber pets, the party game industry would continue to grow and government would turn to technology in a bid to save money, adopting among other things – revolutionary SMS messaging technology. She envisioned that people would get tired of sitting at home talking on social networking sites and start using them to meet up face to face, and that touch screens would increase in retail outlets.
Mauricio Freitas shared his glimpse into the mobile market, predicting that Windows mobile and Symbian OS would finally fail in consumer markets, Google’s Android phone would reign supreme in the smartphone market followed closely by the iPhone (although non-geeks would call it a “Google phone”), by default, smartphones would come with built-in GPS, and social networks and location based games would intertwine – with people will forgoing their privacy for the fun of interactive entertainment.
Miraz Jordan predicted that Wellington would become the hub of the 3D printer revolution, direct RSS feed readers would fade away, and that we’d finally get an iPhone app that would tell us when Wellington busses will actually arrive.
So…how accurate have they been, and what visions will we be imparted with for 2011? More will be announced soon, stay tuned!
In the meantime, check out videos of last year’s event here: http://www.viddler.com/explore/uptv/
Contact us if you’re interested in being involved in Bloggers PredICT 2011.
I predict this may not happen