2015 has already arrived.

In the last few days of 2014, Penguin Intelligence (企鹅智酷) launched an annual report over a hundred pages long, analyzing entrepreneurial opportunities and challenges in 11 tech market segments for the new year. (For the full report, follow Penguin Intelligence's WeChat public account "biznext" and reply "2014" to request it.)

But there were also comments from another group of readers who raised new needs. They were not frontline entrepreneurs, but rather analysis and decision-making teams more involved with their companies, institutions, and organizations. Beyond specific, detailed cases, they wanted to see more macro-level and forward-looking insights.

Making predictions is always a difficult and dangerous thing. Standing at the beginning of 2015, let's look at what interesting things might happen in the future:

1. Smartphones, not much fun anymore

In 2014, Samsung turned in a miserable performance in the smartphone market, and Apple's new iPhone was no longer stunning. The smartphone revolution, ignited by multi-touch technology and the APP model, has seen its "innovation aftershocks" near their end. In the next 1-2 years, smartphones will find it difficult to produce another innovation breakthrough that can reinvigorate the entire industry, and may even fall silent, evolving into a stable-state competition based on the current ecosystem landscape.

Products and markets will continue to exist in an orderly fashion in the long term, but surprises will be hard to come by.

Don't expect slightly curved screens to save the smartphone industry from its innovation predicament. Within the palm of a hand, the interaction between hand and phone may have already reached its limit. This is also why manufacturers like Apple and Samsung are venturing into wearable devices despite the risks of an immature market: new breakthroughs may need to be sought from a blank slate.

2. Internet of Everything, the door to the future opens

At the latest CES, Samsung did not unveil the new S6 phone, but instead launched multiple smart home products such as TVs, washing machines, and induction cookers. The concept of the Internet of Things has been tossed around for many years, but has always remained far from real user life scenarios—however, this problem may be resolved within an upcoming cycle of time.

In the long term, expanding intelligence from phones to other areas of human life is an inevitability. In the short term, several tech giants with R&D and ecosystem capabilities, including Samsung, Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc., are also in urgent need of finding new profit growth points beyond traditional digital and IT devices, expanding their ecosystem spheres of influence. The current pie has been largely divided up; a new, bigger pie must be found.

We cannot imagine how large the ultimate market size of the Internet of Everything will be—considering just smart home, one corner of it, the imaginative space already far exceeds the thousands-of-yuan phone market. When we truly seek long-term future opportunities, the places with the most room for fantasy are often where hope lies. Televisions, airplanes, and smartphones—before these products appeared, their forms existed only in the minds of the most romantic humans.

3. O2O transforms traditional industries; cold water is coming, but it won't extinguish the flames

In areas such as dining and community services, the O2O concept has rapidly heated up. Many restaurants and laundromats have been swept into the 2.0 era without even clearly understanding how O2O should actually operate.

However, due to a lack of mature industry templates and simple, user-friendly intermediary platforms, entrepreneurs who invested in the first wave of O2O will soon face difficult challenges. This round of reshuffling is not a matter of resource integration or shifts in industry power structures, but rather the inevitable price of crossing the river by feeling the stones in an emerging market.

But the possible positive expectation is that this splash of cold water will not extinguish the general trend of service-oriented industries evolving toward the internet and mobile internet. More accumulated lessons and experience will further mature the industry in the future.

4. Agriculture embraces the internet, further polarization

Traditional agriculture shows a trend of polarization in embracing the internet, and this trend will further intensify in the future. Although rural internet penetration rates continue to rise, the internet's impact on the front end of the traditional agricultural production process remains extremely limited. Those stories of obtaining market demand through the internet and then planting custom products according to orders are nice, but they are difficult to promote to the broader countryside in the short term.

On the agricultural product processing and sales end, however, the momentum and effects of internet involvement are very obvious. Deep processing of agricultural products and global allocation, supplemented by advances in logistics and distribution, will further enhance profit margins in the processing and branding of agricultural products in the future.

For the white-collar class, the main force driving agricultural product consumption, the high-end consumer market will further expand in today's era of frequent food safety crises. Moreover, the brand credibility of internet and technology companies is not weaker than that of traditional agricultural brands—indeed, given the shifting balance between transparency of confidence and marketing capability, the former is more easily accepted by high-end consumer groups.

5. Industry 4.0 is not a technology problem, but a population problem

The large-scale replacement of manufacturing workers with robots is emerging in the West, raising concerns about the shaking of China's manufacturing global position. But in reality, no matter how good the numbers look on paper, robots still lag behind human labor in manufacturing flexibility and adaptability. Historically, the idea of replacing workers with technology was proposed during the first round of industrialization, but it has never become a reality.

In the future, Industry 4.0 will exert strong advantages in large-scale simple manufacturing, but it cannot fully replace human labor. The real driving force behind the adoption of robots by China and global manufacturing bases is not technological progress—rather, as the natural population growth rate declines and the demographic dividend fades, labor shortages will become a long-term problem.

That is the real opportunity for robots.

6. Vehicle electrification will ignite more innovation

Electric vehicles have gained nearly unanimous approval, from government agencies and business investors to serious environmentalists. Global emission reduction pressures will drive the passage of more electric-vehicle-friendly policies around the world, and policy is usually the golden key to driving an industry's rapid development.

In the past 2014, although Tesla ignited the industry and more traditional automakers began joining in, the electric vehicle ecosystem still had many issues to be resolved—but this is not a bad thing.

The enormous potential demand of the household electric vehicle consumer market and national policy incentives will stimulate the industry to ignite many great innovations in the future. Battery technology, wireless charging technology, solar energy technology, and other fields will all benefit from the development of electric vehicles, and in turn benefit other industries.

For technology innovation companies, this is an excellent opportunity to enter a huge traditional market. In areas such as battery development, intelligent platforms, and core central control, there is potential for cooperation with traditional automobile companies. Even developing an entire vehicle from scratch is not an impossible fantasy.

In contrast to the bright future of electric vehicles is the long and difficult road for autonomous vehicles. Compared with the former, self-driving cars will face severe legal, regulatory, and social ethical challenges. It will be difficult to achieve widespread acceptance and adoption in the short term.

7. 3D printing, the awkward fate of a panacea

In recent years, almost every tech industry outlook has mentioned 3D printing. From children's toys to aircraft manufacturing, it seems omnipresent and omnipotent.

But the technology's true impact on manufacturing and other industries may not be as great as it appears. Model making based on 3D printing is currently a relatively mature application scenario, used to replace the lengthy cycles and expensive costs of trial product processing in industrial R&D. Additionally, in some creative industries, 3D printing also has a relatively higher exposure rate.

In the long term, unless major breakthroughs are achieved in modeling barriers, sample libraries, and material adaptability, 3D printing will continue to serve as a "process substitute" in the manufacturing industry, leveraging its strengths in flexible, rapid prototyping—but it will be difficult to form a true, large-scale industrial ecosystem.

In the consumer field, 3D printing will also demonstrate a kind of "strange universality"—it can quickly enter many niche markets, but simply cannot become mainstream.

8. Wearable devices, stripping away "smartphone thinking"

Don't be misled by the setbacks of Google Glass; wearable devices actually have a bright future.

Besides the difficulties brought by the market incubation period, the difficulties wearable devices encountered in the past had another main cause—many products sought to transplant as many smartphone functions as possible onto the devices—but users actually had no need for these at all.

In the future, breakthroughs in this field will occur on the demand side where phones truly cannot satisfy—such as sports tracking, medical diagnostics, natural interaction in mobile scenarios, and dynamic collection of human ecological data. In design and usage, future products will place greater emphasis on portability and "zero-operation"—that is, operating on their own without human interaction.

If necessary, screens will gradually disappear from this product line.

9. The cultural industry will further benefit from the internet

Fields such as film and television, book publishing, and music will gain more benefits from integration with the internet. The broad-spectrum and flattened nature of online promotion will give many niche literary and artistic works more exposure and online release opportunities, and for vertically-niche cultures, the internet will help them find more companions.

With the further maturation of the copyright adaptation market, traditional cultural companies will gain even greater incremental returns from the pan-entertainment network ecosystem.

Of course, internet companies will not completely yield this market. In the future, they will accelerate their layout in the cultural field, infiltrating backward from the distribution end into content production and cultural creativity.

Some "army group" giants will be born in the cultural industry.

Conclusion: The real future is the things that look completely impossible today

Only prophets can see the future completely. The 9 predictions above may not all come to pass in our time and space.

But as a serious business analysis platform, Penguin Intelligence hopes to use scientific analytical models and precise data research and analysis to discover more real business opportunities and pitfalls hidden in the fog of the future. So in 2015, Zhiku will output more exclusive user behavior surveys and in-depth business research reports for global "intellectuals" focused on business and technology. Let us look forward to it together.

Penguin Intelligence, the future is right here.

(Analyst for this issue: Wang Guan)

Source: http://tech.qq.com/a/20150107/007212.htm