Media Predicts 2012: A ...

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Our humble corner now enters unchartered waters with two guest posts in a row (now one guest post away from “Bingo”).

Teresa Pham captures the highlights from PRSA’s annual Media Predicts event on Wednesday evening.

My two cents —

Reed Hastings and Netflix will be the comeback story of the year in 2012. It’s easy to keep piling on Netflix, but this company is too good and too savvy to not rise to the challenge.


By Teresa Pham
The Hoffman Agency (Silicon Valley)
 

Our Hoffman team attended the annual PRSA Silicon Valley Media Predicts 2012 event on November 30. This is one of our favorite events of the year because it brings together PR professionals and tech journalists in one place for a discussion on technology trends.

With storytelling as such an important part of PR, it’s important to see what the journalists we are following think are the big tech stories to tell this year.

prsa media predicts

The panelists discussed, sparred and gave communications professionals an idea of what they think will be the biggest stories in technology in 2011:

Greg Kimparak of TechCrunch predicted that the WiiU would be the biggest flop of 2012 for the lack of a “killer feature” that distinguishes it from other gaming consoles.

Audrey Watters of O’Reilly Radar said with confidence that the coming year would be the end of Chrome OS.

John Gallant of IDG Enterprise predicted, half in jest, that Oracle would buy HP in 2012. The year will certainly be a big year for the consolidation of IT. In addition, he foresaw the rise of desktop virtualization and a focus on security solutions.

Harry McCracken of Technologizer and CNET gave one of our favorite predictions of the night. He compared the loss of Steve Jobs at Apple to the loss of Walt Disney at Disney. Perhaps staying true to Steve Jobs’s legacy will mean innovating in ways that Jobs wouldn’t have necessarily done.

Emily Chang added that Jobs said to Tim Cook, “Don’t ask would I do it. Just do what’s right.”

James Temple of the San Francisco Chronicle said that he sees 2012 as the year of the convergence of natural user interface, where we’ll begin to see more technology featuring swiping, voice, gesture, etc.

Nick Bilton of The New York Times predicted an Internet reset in 2012, where there will finally be a surge in online privacy legislation. He also discussed the overvaluation of companies like Zynga, which will be reevaluated at their true worth.

Emily Chang of Bloomberg West predicted that Groupon and other social buying sites this year will struggle, as their stock drops off and they compete in an oversaturated market.

Finally, returning moderator Jon Fortt of CNBC had a quick, but exciting prediction: 2012 will be the year we see the Amazon phone.

We know we’ll be keeping an eye out for whether or not those predictions come true in the upcoming year!


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