1. Artificial Currencies Multiply, and Go Nowhere. When will geeks learn that currencies are more than hard math problems, and require the good faith, economic strength and military power of a nation in order to warrant the trust of others? Not next year.
   
    
   10 pts.
    
   
2. Net Neutrality Survives the Onslaught of US Lobbyists, but carriers are thrown a bone of some kind by old friend Tom Wheeler.
   
    
   10 pts.
    
   
3. Pattern Recognition Becomes the Real Goal of Predictive Analytics and Big Data Collection, and PRP (Pattern Recognition Processors) Chips, and a whole new ecology of tools and languages begins to arrive in developers’ hands, setting the stage for a revolution in computing.
   
    
   10 pts.
    
   
4. Security Takes Its Rightful Place in the CEO Agenda, and corporate spending on security reverses its current downward trend. The cost of building an insecure Internet is paying for security, and this is the year when all of the tickets come due at once. (Russia gains more fear and respect as a cyber warrior, and China gains more global scorn as a cyber thief of commercial IP, and the press will do a good job of confusing the two.)
   
    
   10 pts.
    
   
5. VR Remains Exactly That – Virtual – everywhere except in gaming and fringe entertainment. Just because Zuck has a good lunch date with Oculus doesn’t mean the rest of the world has not already taken a pass on this technology for decades.
   
    
   10 pts.
    
   
6. Amazon Stumbles, as Jeff’s appetite finally exceeds his reach, and customers are turned off by his megalomaniacal drive: the fire phone debacle, off-book rocket adventures, hapless drone delivery scenarios, Hachette punishments, all lead to a loss of customer, and investor, confidence.
   
    
   5 Pts.: Bezos becomes publicly ranked by the Harvard Business Review as one of the worst CEOs in the world, and the New York Times writes a crucifixion story about the company which directly impacts its recruitment levels – even as the stock climbs.
    
   
7. Home Networks Finally Get Off the Launchpad, and it turns out that all people want is low energy bills, TVs everywhere, and a single remote. What they don’t want: talking refrigerators, things that don’t work, complexity replacing reliability, more nested menus instead of real buttons, dumb things talking to other dumb things, or, worst of all, hackable home networks. Samsung and Apple lead the pack in this race.
   
    
   10 pts.
    
   
8. Apple Pay Succeeds, establishing its leadership in the new MALT category. With Mapping improved and Micro-mapping driven by Beacon, Advertising dollars following Beacon merchandising edge, Location provided by phones and Beacons, and the final Transactions step now well in hand with Apple Pay, Apple achieves the technical and market steps necessary for domination of retail and physical space services.
   
    
   10 Pts.: Apple has achieved the technical position and market positioning, but beacons have yet to be widely deployed.
    
   
9. Encryption Continues Its Exponential Expansion: Everywhere, deeper and end-to-end, a continuing major trend. Thank you, again, Edward, for protecting us from China and Russia, as well as ourselves.
   
    
   10 pts.
    
   
10. Personal Health, Fitness, and Lifestyle Devices Merge. The doctor / patient relationship begins an inevitable and irreversible shift in power and cooperation. We’ll see a flood of new watches, bands, and jewelry, but intelligent clothing stays fashion-niched because of price and inconsistency. New goals for the device genre: non-invasive measurement of blood pressure and glucose levels, and for the fanciful, creative visual displays of body state, such as heart rate and galvanic skin response, perhaps even a lover’s proxy touch. New creative energies in science and design rush in.
    
     
    10 pts.
     
    

 

Total: 95 Pts.