The official trend whispering season is open as everyone shares their mild, predictable views on 2012. The problem is that when people talk about trends, they’re not trends anymore! They are already happening.
It’s time to challenge these “everybody knows that” kind of predictions.
These are MY OUTRAGEOUS predictions for the Web in 2012.
Ebay crashes after Paypal’s suffers eroding margins due to disruptive (and massive) competition
Payment systems are a broke. But this is a segment driven by a lot of inertia and slow adoption.
Startups are tired of obnoxious behavior by the big guys like Paypal and the slow innovation cycle of the industry will be shaken by new entrants, fragmenting the market heavily by removing complexity and reducing payment fees, effectively growing by cannibalizing the big player’s margins. Dwolla is the emerging name of what’s only the first wave..
Ebay’s dependency on the Paypal’s cash cow will go down, hitting $11 on the stock markets, around the minimums of the 2001 and early 2009.
RIP “Series A crunch”. Long live the Mega A-rounds. Top startups now raising $30M+ at $200M+ valuations
While investors try to put bigger bets on the global winners and mega funds like DST start investing in earlier stages, $200M+ valuations for A-rounds are more of a norm. Who’s to blame? The predictability of the industry leaders…
and the Samwer brothers!
The Samwer’s want to expand their copycatting model to a worldwide reach. This will force successful startups to take internationalization efforts earlier since it starts to make more economic sense to internationalize earlier than to compete or pay $400M in acquisition costs to the Samwer’s down the road. The Mega rounds will become more frequent to support this effort.
Big thinking will prevail and small thinkers squashed along the way.
Being Entrepreneur isn’t plain cool anymore
It was always hard but Hollywood made it look fashionable for a while. Incubators and accelarators everywhere positively removed barriers to start but many would-be entrepreneurs didn’t took the time to digest what being an entrepreneur really means. It’s an darn hard, lonely, life-long journey dudes!
The first generation of entrepreneurs driven by the hype will start tumbling as they hit the 18-32 month barrier, the most challenging time for any startup where lack of profitability and traction drive many to feel the real pain 0f being entrepreneur, after the early days of joy are over. Only the tougher ones will survive (whatever that means). Raising money isn’t the driver to surpass that barrier, I’m sorry.. It’s tough… Loads will realize that, the hard way.
More startups are acquired earlier as a side effect as major players try to snatch talent that is not widely available. This becomes a de facto hiring bonus for the entrepreneurs turned corporate employees in the process.
Social implodes. With a bang!
Social, local and mobile are features. People must realize that sooner or later and 2012 will enforce that. The hard way..
Many people see innovation macro-cycles on the web as 10-12 year cycles: these are substantially reduced due to the recent money poured into concept-stage startups. Social is dead and Mobile is not Web 3.0: it is just a shift where people consume the web dynamically across multiple devices. The real shift will be huge. It will force social, local and mobile to take their place as a feature.
2011 was the “groupon for everything” year and that’s gone. Social apps are following the same path. There’s “500″ apps for everything. No critical scale and/or sustainable revenue equals failing. Big time.
Winners will be more winners. Being the second best doesn’t pay off anymore. Remember Gowalla?
The main problem? People only have 24 hours a day and they can’t overload their life using too many social tools. People only use 1, maybe 2 apps to consume social information. Can the masses use Twitter, G+ and Facebook intensively? No way!!! Most only use one app for photos, not “500″.
Le’ts make an exercise: ask every social app out there how much they need from their users in one given day. Summing them all will turn thousands of hours per day, which doesn’t make any kind of sense.
AirBnB of everything: Dead industries are really dead and they didn’t saw it coming
2012 will be the year of AirBnb (Uber and RedBeacon) for everything.
Big, fat industries sitting on old school monopolies face a huge amount of competition since new startups start allowing consumers to offer services to other consumers at fair value, through a simple and efficient experience.
AirBnb disrupted the hotel industry. Uber and GetAround disrupted the transport and taxi industry. RedBeacon and others are moving further. This will be replicated as copy cats expand on the vision.
Many industries that hold local monopolies will be hit hard as web tools drive sale and local competition.
So, what’s your outrageous prediction for 2012?
PS: What about advertising, you may ask? 2012 will be huge but I won’t share my views on it since I have my own hands dirty 
keep watching..
DISCLAIMER: This outrageous predictions thing isn’t really original. I was inspired by Saxo Bank’s outrageous predictions, which I’ve been following every year since 2006 or 2007.
