/Big Question/ Forward thinking
07/01/2009 | Filed under Discover > Big Question
What will be the main issues affecting the net in 2009?
Activist
Oxblood Ruffin
Hactivismo
I suspect 2009 will be a Mary J Blige year, as in who is real and who isn’t? For those bullshit businesses that choose to pump more bumf into the infosphere, well, sorry. See you around. And for those who take this as an opportunity to produce valuable and ‘pay as you please’ content, then they’ll do okay, that’s my two rupees anyway.
Oxblood Ruffin is the founder of Hacktivismo
Internet playboy
Drew Curtis
Fark
I think the biggest issue will be a lack of bullshit. All of the crappy-ass dotcom 2.0 companies spent all their money and will be revealed for the scams they really are in wave after wave of bankruptcy. We’re going to have to find more bullshit somewhere to take up the slack.
Drew is the owner of Fark.com
Applications guru
Roger Greene
Ipswitch
Given the economy, the emphasis will be on value. E-commerce purchases will be based less on convenience and more on low price. Hard goods vendors with the most efficient back office will win out. I think there will also start to be more consolidation of web brands. E-commerce and the web are no longer novel concepts. Too much choice overwhelms and unless there’s strong differentiation, consolidation will follow. A recession is a natural time for this winnowing to occur. Less popular sites will disappear or be bought. There will be fewer portals and news sites and those that remain will have clearer differentiation. Again because of the economy, video on the net will continue to grow, but at a slower pace, because telcos won’t make the needed infrastructure improvements to improve bandwidth capacity.
Roger Greene is founder and CEO of Ipswitch
Hosting specialist
Neil Barton
Hostway, UK
Unfortunately, I think that one of the main issues affecting the net in 2009 will be the economic downturn. However, whilst high street brands are suffering and turning to discount vouchers to draw in punters, online brands have a far greater arsenal of tools at their disposal. Over the last 18 months, companies have been questioning whether social networking and web 2.0 tools are anything more than a time-waster. However, in 2009 many of these companies will turn to Facebook, MySpace, podcasts, forums and blogs to promote themselves, improve customer feedback and distribute special offers to attract new customers. Fundamentally, the downturn will encourage many companies to forge these peripheral online services into economic tools. The second issue affecting the net in 2009 will be the ICANN ‘.anything’ announcement. It will be interesting to see how the web and the dynamics of web usage change when we have .shop, .retail and .charity as well as .com, .co.uk and .biz. Overall, 2009 should see a broadening and deepening of web usage and it may potentially be the most interesting
and influential year for the internet to date.
Neil is the director of Hostway UK
Ecommerce expert
Ben Dyer
Actinic
The first thing that springs to mind is Net neutrality. President-elect Obama has promised to uphold this neutrality and there’s already a relevant bill hanging around in the US Congress. However, getting any airtime given the mutual economic mess is likely to prove difficult.
Secondly, money is now tight, so there’s much less grace for ‘beta’ stage online businesses. Quite rightly innovation has been allowed to run riot for a few years, but now investors are desperate for a return. This coupled with a slowdown in advertising spending will push companies to explore alternative revenue sources and they’ll have to become more creative. Even so, I fear that many much-loved e-businesses will prove a light snack for the big beasts, or vanish altogether.
Ben Dyer is director of product development at Actinic
Legal expert
Struan Robertson
Pinsent Masons
One of the big issues for 2009 should be accessibility. We expect to see the next version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines - WCAG 2.0 - by the start of the year; and the first British Standard on web accessibility has just come out in draft, with a final version due in the summer. These developments should help to raise awareness of the need to make websites that work for everyone, including users with disabilities. Lots of people know that that’s important - they just don’t do anything about it. Hopefully in 2009 we’ll see more organisations taking accessibility seriously.
Struan is senior associate at Pinsent Masons
Web filtering specialist
Eamonn Doyle
Bloxx
With this year’s ICANN proposal to extend the range of top level domains (TLDs), 2009 should see a land grab and a huge increase in the number of registered domains.
Eamonn Doyle is managing director of Bloxx
Software expert
Ian Moulster
Microsoft
Pessimists everywhere delight in pointing out how terrible things will be and there is no shortage of issues with the net if you go looking. Privacy will become a bigger issue as people start being more aware of how much of their lives they’re exposing when using the net. The browser is reaching the limits of its usefulness and we need to find ways to move beyond it. Bandwidth demands will continue to stretch ISPs. And the economy of course is going to be very painful in 2009.
Now I accept that these are ‘real’ problems that we’ll need to find a way to address, but that’s what the net’s always been good at - enabling innovation. So maybe the right focus here’s on how the net’s going to allow the creation of innovative solutions rather than looking for problems. I feel really positive that there’s still plenty of opportunity out there and plenty of smart people who are going to go after it. It’s going to be an exciting year and let’s hope that the tough times will bring out the best in British talent. For me that’s the real story for 2009
Ian is senior product manager for Microsoft
Security expert
John Lyons
SecureTrading
The sale of restricted goods and services online to children will become an increasingly emotive issue during 2009. At present, just about every online business sector outside of financial services and gambling is paying lip service to the legal requirements that prohibit the sale of certain goods and services to under-age persons.
Right now thousands of online merchants and shops seem to believe that it is sufficient simply to require a customer to verify that they are over 18 by ticking a box on a webpage. It’s also possible for retailers to legitimately suggest that reliance on the person holding a valid credit card was proof enough that they’re over 18, but with recent launches by various financial services companies of pre-paid credit and debit cards to underage teens this is no longer the case.
Legislators are already starting to look at ways to address the problem, so the industry will need to get its act together and put in steps on a voluntary basis if they wish a statutory regime to be avoided.
John Lyons is SecureTrading’s chief security officer
Interactive expert
Darrell Wilkins
Specialmoves
Data and the way it’s used will be a hot topic next year. Expect the phrases behavioural targeting and context sensitivity to be banded about with reckless abandon. Advertisers and e-commerce sites will use increasing sophistication to analyse visitor actions and deliver up personalised content and recommendations. Brilliant if they get it right. Horrid if they don’t.
Darrell Wilkins is the co-founder of Specialmoves
Pitching specialist
James Tomaszewski
Fortune Cookie
My economics teacher had a sign above his desk that read: “We have no problems, only opportunities.” I think that sums up my expectation of 2009.
Although I’m no expert on the UK’s present financial crisis, it’s clear that 2009 is going to be challenging. But when there are problems and challenges there are also opportunities and this is definitely the case for digital agencies.
Here are just a few of the things that excite me when I think about 2009: true convergence on mobile, RIA, our clients embracing technology even more than they have in the past.
When money is tight, innovation blossoms. Businesses that rely on the web for their survival should develop a more tactical approach to digital if they want to sail through the credit crunch safely. As our clients' digital partners, we should keep our heads up and our eyes open, ever alert to spot bigger and longer-term strategic opportunities in digital that will take our clients beyond this recession.
James Tomaszewski is solutions director at leading web design agency Fortune Cookie
Business guru
Elliot Reuben
Conchango
It’s going to be interesting to see who gets social media right and who gets it wrong in 2009. Social media destinations are used by the vast majority of brands' target demographic consumers. They’re engaging, sticky and a fantastic vehicle for a brand - if they get it right. Get it wrong, however and they risk causing themselves untold misery. And what’s more, the internet is forever - mess up and it’s going to be up there for a long time. There are plenty of blogs and sites dedicated to poking fun at brands who’ve completely misunderstood what a ‘viral’ is, or who have made some less than successful attempts at MySpace pages and Facebook groups.
The opportunity is so huge that brands can’t afford to turn it down. But they need to make sure they engage specialists, not those who just have a bolt-on ‘digital’ department.
Elliot Reuben is senior business consultant at Conchango
PART TWO
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Comments
Jane Moch / 10/01/2009 / 13:54 / http://www.frowey.com
2009 - Death by social media. But hey, this is the web, so somebody will come up with a surprise. I've got an idea of my own but can't do anything with it other than cogitate over it - probably pants. It'll be interesting to see what Obama's team come up with - so who is the new CTO? There's a sort of fluency about what they're doing that's interesting although the change website is dissapointingly unappealing. They're a dream ticket for RIM!
Neil Bant / 12/01/2009 / 12:22 / http://www.targ8.com
An online Apps Aggregator will take-off in 2009. I would love this to be www.targ8.com
In 1985 we had seperate PC based apps i.e. word perfect, lotus1-2-3, Harvard Graphics, SmartCom, dbase2. Then along came Microsoft and provided a suite of apps with a common user interface called windows. This included Word, excel, powerpoint, Access in one place.
Now with online apps like searching the web, social networks and online tools, we need one interface to access all these sites from, to speed up our online experience. Many of us will not only be using PC based applications, but online ones too. Like search google, yahoo and MSN as well as networking on LinkedIn, Facebook, bebo, myspace, friester etc, and online tools like Twitter, Youtube, flickr, digg and del.icio.us.
Now wouldn't it be great if in 2009 we could access and search all these sites from one place. That'll be www.targ8.com then.
