3foldComm

The end of the year and beginning of the next brings the onslaught of retrospective posts and posts taking a glimpse into the future. Overall social media and the digital world advances at a rapid-fire pace, taking giant strides year-to-year in both function and application. It’s fascinating to imagine what the future might hold, so a few 3folder’s had some fun and took a crack at making some bold predictions at what the future of the social and digital space might have in store for us (even if that means years from now!).

Digital Retail Tours
Based on your shopping habits or preferences your phone can guide you from store to store and product to product, on a journey to discover and explore items that are based off your budget and taste. (Clay Nutting)

Ready-and-Waiting App
Program your order into an app, once you enter a zone close to the retail environment, your order will be ready and paid for, all you have to do is pick it up! (Clay Nutting)

Enhanced Brand Experiences with QR
QR codes have been a buzz word for the last year or two, but brands are finally figuring them out. Forget snapping them and being sent to a website, the next phase of QR will involve snapping a QR at a museum and hearing the artist talk about the work you are looking at, or snapping one on a street sign for reporting potholes, accidents or even crimes to the local authorities. (Angela Criser)

Textbook Gamification
Learning has never been so fun! You achieve an epic win for completing a difficult chapter, points for improving your test scores from month-to-month, and recognition for top scores – pitting you against the brightest minds in the class, state, country or even the world! It is a virtual competition against yourself and fellow students with incentives provided by some of the top educational foundations. (Clay Nutting)

Facebook Teen Tracker
Facebook will release an enhanced timeline feature for parents interested in better monitoring their growing kids’ activities. A special feature will notify parents when their children mention activities that cost money, automatically calculate the value of that activity and provide a running total at the top of each parents profile.  Parents will then have a better understanding of whether their kids really need money for more books in college, or whether “book fees” are just supplementing a pizza party or “gotta-have-that-new-top-at-Abercrombie” run. Warning – May be thwarted with “Damn It, My Mom Is On Facebook” app unless advanced controls are activated — for an additional fee of course! (Gordon Fowler)

The Year of Pinterest
Social bookmarking upstart Pinterest will get bigger and better as a social bookmarking tool in 2012. Besides being fun and refreshing, it’s a great space for inspiration and bookmarking the things you love. (Alicia Allen)

Social TV
This one is starting to become a reality, from social networks like GetGlue to the just-announced MySpaceTV to custom TV show apps – TV is getting social. Only problem is, these apps still won’t solve tape delaying shows and events. (Brian Blank)

Mining the Mobile Stream
While paid apps, freemium services and social advertising can generate revenue through mobile devices, it will be the companies that create interesting ways to mine the endless data stream mobile device users generate that will create the real value (and hopefully revenue). Scary Big Brother issues aside, the basic bits of data (location, travel, age, gender, etc.) our phones provide could be useful in other areas beyond augmented reality and location based services. (Brian Blank)

What are your thoughts? Do you see any of these coming through in the next year? Even better yet, what are your predictions?

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“Magical and revolutionary.” Perhaps a bit overstated and a wee bit premature, but give Steve Jobs credit, the man knows how to launch a product.

In case you forgot to exist on Wednesday, you’ve probably heard that Apple has announced the launch of the – unfortunately named, in my humble opinion – iPad. A sleek 9.7”, 1.5 lb tablet, this little beauty holds the hopes and dreams of many an Apple investor in 2010. But, is it really worth all the fuss?

Yes.

It’s the Jan of Apple’s bunch, and say what you will, middle children do have their place. When you want more speed, power and size than an iPhone can provide, but don’t necessarily want to tote your heavy 15” Macbook Pro from meeting to meeting, the iPad is your man (well, gadget).

No.

Spoiler alert! It’s not perfect. The infinitely long list of wishes by Apple’s many fanboys and fangirls find many left unchecked. No multitasking, no Flash, too many adapter cables required, no camera. The first-generation iPad is incomplete for sure.

A bit of the good:

• It runs iPhone apps. This is, of course, more interesting to iPhone owners who, for example, have 11 screens worth of apps on their 3GS and don’t want to pay for them again. It also has the potential to inspire a whole new development industry for iPad-designed apps.
• $10 iWork apps. Pages, Numbers and Keynote (the Word, Excel and PowerPoint equivalents for Mac) can run right from iPad, very inexpensively. You can take notes, build a spreadsheet and run a presentation without lugging in your heavier laptop, and look darn good doing it.
• It’s fast. Word is the Apple A4 chip is smoking speedy, bidding farewell to the lag of traditional (including the iPhone) smart phone devices.
• Prices start at $499 (16gb with WiFi). This is half of the rumored $1000 price tag we all thought it’d be. Depending on storage and whether you want 3G capabilities, the price steps up accordingly, topping out at $829 for 64gb with WiFi and 3G.
• Opportunities. For organizations, businesses, publishers, and designers, the iPad takes the potential strated by the iPhone app to a bigger scale – literally. The possibilities for creating communications tools in app form are exciting and endless.

And some of the not-so-good:

• Multitasking: Seriously, Apple? You want to take on and destroy the army of netbooks, you have to include multitasking. For those who may not be familiar with the annoying one-app-only capabilities of the iPhone operating system, this means no listening to iTunes or Pandora while surfing the web. One thing at a time, such a quaint, and inexplicable, concept.
• Still no Flash. Again, you can’t take on netbooks without offering the most basic features users expect. Without Flash, you’ve removed important functionality from countless websites and denied users the ability to stream videos and television programming. Not cool.
• 3G unlimited plans will cost you $30 per month…at AT&T. Only at AT&T (US). Even the lack of a contract requirement and an unlocked product doesn’t make Apple’s decision to keep AT&T as the sole service provider easier to swallow.
• No camera. Not in the front, not in the back, no video, no still photography. Nada. All my dreams of having face-to-face staff meetings over Skype while sipping a latte at a Starbucks while the rest of the team looks on enviously from the office have been dashed.
• Too much pressure. The publishing and news industries are already looking to the iPad as their potential savior. Mac lovers had dreams of magical technology fairies dancing in their heads before the gadget was even announced. I’m sure there were even some that hoped the iPad would end the recession, create millions of new jobs, stop world hunger, and fix the environment. Alas, it will not be able to do any of these things…yet.

Having personally experienced every single generation of the iPhone, I’m more than familiar with the room-for-improvement release of a new Apple product and the subsequent decision-making confusion – buy now, wait for the next generation, find an alternative, or stick with what you have. But let’s be honest, where’s the fun in waiting to see if something better comes along? Life is short and technology will change; so just keep reminding yourself, there is always hope in the next software update.

For better or worse, we at 3fold are looking forward to the iPad’s release (which you know if you followed us on Twitter on Apple event day). While it may not be all we hoped and dreamed for, you can be sure we’re still going to be clamoring to play with it…er, use it for important business things.

Want to know a bit more: Check out Mashable’s Apple iPad: A Comprehensive Guide.

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