I recently prepared notes for a video interview we did at work and when the actual shoot happened it turned out that none of these notes were relevant to the questions at all, so I decided to publish some of it on here.

Saying anything about the future is always a scary thing, because you can so easily come off as a total idiot six months down the line. I can, however, make a few predictions based on current events and trends in the digital space.

I think the market will shift even more towards mobile. The amount of smart phones on the market is helping a lot. IPhone started this trend, but Android is putting it in the hands of the masses. These devices come with good browsers and processing power, and let’s not forget about the apps. Deploying online applications on a mobile platform is finally becoming a viable option in the South African market.

Location based services is also going to get bigger and better. Beside Foursquare and Gowalla’s commercial promotions, Facebook is also getting in on the action with Facebook Places. I’m not sure how Facebook is planning to monetize this, but I’m sure that it will be well thought out like the rest of the Facebook service. Google is also rumored to be in the planning stages of a social network and I’m sure they will also utilize location data as they already have all the tools in place to make that an easy integration.

The last couple of years there was a large effort to collect data by companies like Google and Facebook, I think that in the future we will start seeing more practical implementations of this data. (e.g. Google bicycle routes and Foursquare restaurant suggestions) I think this will drive people to be even more open with the information they are willing to part with, the Google CEO recently referred to this as the “information explosion” that he predicts is just around the corner.

We might also start seeing online streaming of movies in the local market in the not so distant future, similar to what Netflix is doing in the United States. Vodacom and DSTV is already streaming TV to mobile devices, so streaming high quality movies shouldn’t be much of a stretch.

I also hope to finally start seeing affordable broadband Internet access in South Africa with the WACS and ACE cables being connected in 2011 and 2012.