Contributed article by Mani Zarrehparvar, president of Visage Mobile

2014: Telcos Come to Roost and Data (Finally) Makes Sense

Having spent the better part of my career in mobile, it pains me to say that 2014 will be a relatively status quo year for mobile. It's been a while since we've seen anything really transformative come out of mobile. On the consumer side, developers continue to fight the feature/function battle. On the enterprise side, the industries that typically have the might to push mobility forward-such as healthcare and financial services-well, let's just say they will have bigger fish to fry in 2014.

That doesn't mean 2014 will be boring. In the coming year, I see the technology industry beginning a major transformation as major telecommunications companies extend their reach and developers make real inroads in turning the growing zettabytes of data into something more meaningful on both a a business and personal level. Here's what I see on the horizon.

The Empire Strikes Back

Large telcos are sitting on tremendous piles of cash and are hungry for growth. Their traditional way of spending-acquiring smaller players in the market or expanding to other markets-has been stymied by government regulation.

In 2014, I predict that telcos will expand in new markets, disrupting the technology industry in the process. Cloud-based infrastructure, hosting and storage, application development, field force enablement, and managed services companies will all feel the impact.

Social Data: Giving Social a Much Needed Filter

The ubiquitous use of mobile technologies and vastly improved mobile social apps have given us all the ability to push content to our social network, without constraint. However, our patience for how much information we want to consume is decreasing; mobile devices just don't work for long reading or browsing. And our social networks are only getting bigger. The result: The content we truly care about is diminishing by the day.

In 2014, we'll see someone introduce a filter that sits on top of all of our social networks that will automatically sort out the stuff we simply don't care about. Just as Google was able to make sense of the exploding Internet content in the 1990s to help us find the information we wanted, this filter will do the same for our social feeds. However, because social networks have inherently different interests and are more focused on acquiring and keeping customers and increasing revenues, this change will likely come from the outside.

Mobile Data: Sensor Technology and the Next Mobile Revolution

Mobile technologies and infrastructure have advanced to the point where we have sufficient hardware and network bandwidth to handle just about any amount of data. Vendors have also figured out how to package and display content in ways that have profoundly impacted the way we work and interact with one another. So, once the industry figures out how to develop small, reliable and cost-effective sensor technologies, they will take mobile to the next level by allowing us to connect things and places- not just people.

In 2014, developers will begin introducing better hardware sensors that can more reliably capture data in a multitude of use cases. In the next couple of years, these sensors will include software that will enable sensors to interpret and translate raw data into something meaningful-without human intervention.

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