Business Insider’s Julie Bort writes about nine trends that market research firm IDC predicts “will unfold next year – and generate billions of dollars.” Here they are:
- People and companies will spend $2.1 trillion on technology – “Worldwide IT spending will grow 5% next year to $2.1 million.” They will buy smartphones, tablets, and new data center hardware, but not PCs.
- Countries outside the U.S. and Europe will buy tech like crazy – “The four hottest emerging markets, Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC), will up their spending by 13%.”
- Business will put money into the cloud – “IDC predicts that the cloud will drive $100 billion worth of spending in 2014, up 25% over 2013.”
- Amazon and Google will start a war for the cloudÂ
- Mobile devices will go nuts – endangering Microsoft – “Worldwide tablet sales will grow by 18% and smartphones will grow by 12% next year.”
- Big Data gets bigger -“Spending on big data technologies and services will grow by a hefty 30% in 2014, surpassing $14 billion.”
- Social networking software gets absorbed – “By mid-2015, virtually all enterprise software will have some sort of social feature built in.”
- The rise of crowdsourced innovations – 2014 will see the rise of “communities of innovators.”
- The Internet of Things becomes an actual thing – “By 2020, 30 billion inanimate objects will be made ‘smart,’ and added to the Internet, controlled by apps.”