After looking through the list of technological predictions for 2011, I believe the disappearance of the DVD and Yahoo are most likely to occur.
For years, VHS was the way to go. But slowly, DVD players and DVD's began coming to the stores and replacing movies on the rental shelf. Then it seemed that out of nowhere, movies were no where to be found and DVD's were the way to go. VHS's disappeared completely and VCR's were no longer being made. It forced people to buy into more technology and spend more money. If ever the time came where they wanted to rent a new movie on a Friday night, they had no choice but to buy a DVD player. Now slowly we see the BlueRay coming to shelves and the players replacing the DVD players. I would bet anything that out of nowhere, DVD players will disappear and no longer be produced and that it will yet again, force people into getting rid of the old and buying into the new. Its all about money making. There are not many people who will go out every weekend and spend $10 per person to watch all the new videos in the movie theatre. Most people will wait until they come to the shelves and if they plan on watching them, then they will have to buy a Blueray player.
I also believe that Facebook is very rapidly replacing Yahoo; but not only Yahoo, replacing all sources of email including Hotmail and Sympatico. Why would you go through the effort of checking your email when you can easily long onto facebook and check your in boxes, and check several other things such as pictures and status updates at the same time? Facebook even makes it easy to create a group of contacts, ex. Jessica's surprise birthday party, and inbox a message to the entire group of people all at once. It serves all the same purposes as email servers, plus more. It makes that much more sense to get Facebook rather than open an email account. Literally the only person I know today that still uses their Yahoo account regularly is my mother. I used to check my Hotmail daily, now I check it once a week for my work schedule and that is only because it is against guidelines to post it to Facebook, other than that I never check my Hotmail, Facebook has all that already waiting for me.
Two technological predictions I believe will be less likely to occur is Apple dominating the cell phone market and the electronic wallet.
Although Apple is a huge company and growing larger and larger every day, there are a lot of things to consider when comparing it alone to all other cellular devices. Apple may dominate when it comes to music players, considering MP3's and CD players are basically unheard of anymore. Why bother buying CD after CD and having to change each one once it has played through when you can just download music off of the Internet for free and buy an iPod dock and listen to days on end of music? That part is understandable. But there are tons of other cellular phone companies who all make different models of phones. From a personal point of view, I would never buy an iPhone simply because I hate touch screen phones. They become dirty quickly and break even easier. A close friend of mine had an iPhone and he simply pulled it out of his car trunk one day and found the screen shattered. Even if people do like touch screen phones, there are lots of other models of touch screen phones such as the Blackberry Torch which also comes with just as many applications as the Apple iPhone. From another personal point of view, I find the Apple iPhone way too large. I like a small phone which is easy to stick in your pocket and not uncomfortable to have on you.
And as far as the electronic wallet goes, it may become big one day, but I definitely cannot see it dominating in this year mainly because I have never heard of it until day, so there are probably a lot of other people who are yet to hear of it. Also, although it may be useful in the fact that you can store everything in one, but what happens if it breaks? Or what if you lose it? Losing your debit card is much simpler, you just go and get another one from the bank at a low cost. But buying electronic wallet after electronic wallet will quickly build up in costs and people just don't have the money for that these days with the state our economy is in.
Although I do not fully understand even a fraction of the media predictions, I am going to try my best and respond to them.
The main media prediction I can see happening in this year, 2011, is Social vs. Search. I for one nearly never watch the news, and I know nearly no one I go to school does either. Everything we need to find is posted on the Internet, ex. Facebook. If people find it important or interesting, it gets posted on there. Even though I never watch the news, I know I am still not behind in what is going on in the world today. I still know what people are talking to when they bring up the latest pandemic. Therefore it just goes to prove that anything you need to know about, will eventually find its way to Facebook. If you are not a Facebook, I'm sure the same thing goes for Twitter. If it gets posted on there, or talked about on there, people have complete access to it.
TV's, but I believe the television will still be here for a long time. They are much cheaper than the interactive TV and households are going to want to have more than one screen. I believe most households will probably have one of the interactive TV's and one of the regular televisions.
One news prediction I make for 2011 is that the newspapers are going to disappear. Why would you go out and buy a news paper when everything you'll ever need to know about the news can be found on the Internet? Or ever more, on the Internet on your cell phone? It's a waste of money to go the extra mile and buy a newspaper. The Internet makes everything easier, instead of flipping through page after page trying to find what you are looking for, why not just Google it? It just doesn't make sense to me.
One media prediction I make for 2011 is that 3D is going to take over all theater and home theater systems. From personal experience, working in a theater, I see how fast these changes come into play. This time last year I had never heard anything about getting a 3D movie player in our theater, and last July, two got installed. It happened that fast. And now whenever we don't have a movie in 3D, people are becoming very upset. There is such a high demand for it. We live in such a small city which most of the rest of the world has never and will never heard of. What about the big cities like New York or Tokyo? They have probably been using 3D for years and we are just the last to hear about it.
