In the near future, social networks for particular verticals will become a very hot technology. There will be mini social networks, which will be tied by Facebook so that discovery of friends and social graph is easy to achieve. For instance, a social network focused on fashion or a social network for vegan lifestyle and more will come. Another major change will be brought forth by mobile, it will continue changing the way we live and carry out mundane activities. For example, we have launched a platform, by which upscale restaurants can replace paper menu card or wine list with an iPad. This is much more interactive and informative as it provides users with pictures, calorie count and the popular dishes in the restaurant. Another trend is that sales teams of many companies are now using iPads to showcase products, instead of carrying bulky brochures.
There is a lot of information in the form of location, pictures, and videos, being generated by these mobile devices. Sharing and processing of such information in an insightful way is bringing a paradigm shift in the industry. Smart phones like iPhones are so feature rich that I feel like I am carrying my office with me all the time. I have access to all my files (thanks to DropBox), I can directly print, scan, and even sign documents. Information is moving to the cloud, which will encourage formation of more software as a service like Dropbox, Evernote, and online Quickbooks.
Launching a startup is comparatively easy and inexpensive these days, and so we are seeing a wild proliferation of startups. It is becoming much harder for entrepreneurs to understand whether they are launching a feature or they are actually launching a product which solves a big problem. Moreover, some entrepreneurs struggle transforming themselves from entrepreneurs to managers to scale the company. I felt the same for myself in my first year of running Y Media Labs. Entrepreneurs are by nature very passionate and driven, however, they need to scale that passion and channelize the energy into process, management, metrics, and goal setting to take the company to the next level.
The author is CEO, Y Media Labs