ReadWriteWeb

Oh, the hubris of year-end predictions posts. How did ReadWriteWeb do last year? We nailed a few of our guesses informed forecasts: 2011 saw the arrival of a $200 tablet, a Verizon iPhone, and Spotify in the U.S. We rightly predicted that Kevin Rose would leave Digg, NewsCorp would sell Myspace, and that HTML5 would begin to hit the big time.

I was right that the number of people blogging would continue to fall, but I was wrong that a digital news company was going to acquire a major legacy news organization. We were wrong about a few other things, too: Mobile payments didn't become mainstream, we didn't write a post called "Flickr: In Memoriam," and there was no severe privacy breach at a location-based service.

What's in store for 2012? Here are a few of our predictions (and more of our misses from last year). Let us know your prognostications in the comments.

It's the end of a big week here at ReadWriteWeb. For one, we just got acquired by SAY Media. As I sit here thinking about what happened in 2011 and what's to come in 2012, I keep in mind the simple fact that soon ReadWriteWeb will be operating under a very clean look and feel in this brave new tech world. What does that have to do with 2012 predictions? Not much. Just thought I'd remind you about the state of tech news right here and now.

Which brings me to my 2012 predictions for Facebook, e-commerce, location and social networks, the four areas I've been watching closely since I joined the rad team at ReadWriteWeb this past October. Come along to the next page!

When I sat down on my porch today to consider what 2012 might bring to the intersection of free speech and technology, I drew a complete blank. This is not because there are no precedents to consider. A quick glance at our free speech coverage for 2011 is a typhoon of changes and challenges.

Chief among these changes and challenges, the use of mobile and social technology in two related movements: the Arab Spring and #occupy.

Ketan Karia, CMO and Senior Vice President of Ingres Corporation, provides 11 big data analytics predictions for 2011. I thought we were through with predictions for 2011, but this is worthwhile. Karia focuses on the fact that big data alone doesn't bring big insights: analytics does. He looks at key trends such as in-memory analytics and self-service business intelligence, but what he really emphasizes are the chips.

"In 2011, expect to see more solutions hit the market that enable business software to exploit the tremendous capabilities of modern chips that aren't currently doing so, rather than forcing chip customization or blindly throwing hardware at the problem," he writes.

Editor's note: Every December the ReadWriteWeb team looks into the murky depths of the coming year and tries to predict the future. How did we do last year? Well, Facebook didn't go public, Google Wave didn't make a comeback, and Spotify didn't make it to the U.S. But our forecasts for Google Chrome, cloud computing, Facebook and something we called the "iTablet" were spot on. What's in store for 2011? All this week we'll be posting our predictions. Let us know your prognostications in the comments.

1: There will be major opportunities and innovations around big data - storage, processing, analytics. "Data-driven" will be the new buzzword. "Data scientist" will be the new hot job. So in the spirit of the film The Graduate, I want to say one word to you. Just one word. "Statistics."

Over December we've reviewed the top Web products and developments of 2010. Now it's time to look ahead to 2011. The ReadWriteWeb team is always thinking about what's next, so in our final series of 2010 we attempt to predict the big stories of 2011.

Predictions are of course a tricky business. The braver the predictions, the more risk of them not coming true! Without further ado, here are my predictions for 2011 - 5 serious and 1 not so serious.

Cloud computing blogger Chirag Mehta and Constellation Research Group principal analyst R "Ray" Wang published today a list of their cloud computing predictions for 2011. The pair sees public cloud adoption stalling temporarily, the spread of the app store model in the enterprise, the convergence of Development-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service and an overall simplification of the technology landscape as some of the most important trends in cloud computing in 2011.

With more than 550 million people on Facebook, 65 million tweets posted on Twitter each day, and 2 billion video views each day on YouTube—, social media has become an integral part of our connected lives. But this is just the beginning.

For the past two years, I have been forecasting the evolution social media will undergo. Key trends for 2010 included social media integration across applications and devices, lowered technological barriers, mobile pervasiveness and social media ROI as a focus. It is safe to say that these trends indeed became reality and I expect these to continue and materialize in new solutions, applications and case studies in the year ahead.

Sick of 2011 predictions yet? We've got just a few more. Analyst firm IDC released its 2011 predictions report this week, too late to be included in our earlier analyst firms predictions round-up. "Transformation" is IDC's watchword for next year. According to the firm, transformation driven by the cloud, mobility and analytics. "In addition to creating new markets and opportunities, this restructuring will overthrow nearly every assumption about who the industry's leaders will be and how they establish and maintain leadership," says Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst at IDC.

It's prediction season on the Internet, and today's dose of futurism comes from security firm Imperva. The company just released its Security Trends for 2011 paper. Among other things, Imperva predicts consolidation of the cyber-crime industry, convergence in international privacy and data security laws, and more state-sponsored cyber-attacks targeted at private industry.