Last week Bite sponsored the PRSA “Media Predicts: 2010″ event at the Computer History Museum and a few of us Biters were joined by our clients for cocktails and dinner.
Duffy Jennings, famous for covering the Zodiac killer and the Moscone-Milk murders while at the San Francisco Chronicle, MC’d the event. We were enlightened and entertained by a panel of some of the most well known and well respected journalists in the industry from Brad Stone at The New York Times, Byron Acohido at USA Today, Connie Guglielmo at Bloomberg, Matt Marshall of VentureBeat, Om Malik of GigaOM and Steven Levey at Wired. Jim Goldman of CNBC took the role as the moderator, both encouraging opinions and keeping the peace as debate fired up over what’s hot and what’s not in technology in 2010.
As the night kicked off it only became more intense, more interesting and more rowdy. Here are a few takeaways of top ten things the media predicted to be big in 2010 (please note, these are in order of discussion, not importance):
- Apple innovation – Apple’s going to continue to be the #1 story next year with the arrival of tablets. Apple remains the media darling because while Microsoft is dominating the desktop of today, Apple is really dictating the technology and specifically the devices of tomorrow. Even without Steve Jobs, Apple is going to thrive thanks to leading innovation.
- Facebook vs Twitter – the battle for survival. Will Twitter find a business model? Will Facebook go public? How will Facebook figure out the email problem?
- Mobile computing and smartphones - Android vs iPhone. Heated disagreement over whether Droid poses a real risk. Will poor AT&T service hold the iPhone back and drive consumers to switch carriers.
- Green/ smart energy management/ smart grid – this is the backbone of all the devices in our homes as well as datacenters.
- Aggressive M&A movement – the biggest tech companies will continue to get bigger in 2010.
- Increased government scrutiny, and debate whether agencies like the FTC are acting in consumers’ best interests.
- China as major source of innovation, especially with the rise of the telecom giants Huawei and ZTE (Disclosure: Bite Client).
- Explosion of cyberthreats – Consumers are facing incredible risks especially when they bank online, but consumers fail to recognize the risks.
- Amazon – Kindle vs Barnes and Noble. First step needs to be agreement on standards.
- End of free online news.
We look forward to more fun next year!