1) webtorrent [1] will be used to build the next generation of The Pirate Bay. Media companies will have to realize that suing teens for infringing copyright is not an option, since participating in file sharing is no longer a deliberate act when WebRTC is enabled by default.

2) io.js [2] will heavily influence the future of Node.

3) Angular 2.0 will probably be released at the end of the year [reference?]. People might start establishing an Angular fork (similar to what happened in the Node world).

4) Full stack Google: Angular, Dart and Go.

5) We'll find out if there is a tech bubble [3].

6) One of the following will happen: 1) Developers might tend to use bigger and bigger frameworks, or 2) substack-like extreme modularization (current situation in the npm-world).

7) People will move away from native app development. [4]

8) More frameworks will evolve to "reinvent" the DOM. DOM updates will still be expensive as hell. React was just the beginning.

9) Everything will be a SPA. Now that Google executes JavaScript [5], there is no more reason to render websites on the server. (Unless you're using HN, where 50% of the users are using Lynx).

[1] https://github.com/feross/webtorrent [2] https://github.com/iojs/io.js [3] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/17/technology... [4] Disclaimer: I work for famo.us. These are my own thoughts and might not express the thoughts of the company I'm working for. [5] http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.nl/2014/05/understand...

I don't really see this happening. At least not in 2015! IMHO nothing gives better performance than native apis. Nothing at all.

- At least one profitable, company-launching app will come out on Firefox OS first. It likely won't be initially available in English.

- The "freedom and democracy are incompatible" thing will get at least one mention in the mainstream press that won't consist of outright mockery or dismissal.

- Police body cameras will become ubiquitous.

Edit:

- Apple will release the Swift compiler as open source software.

- Something someone at Y Combinator says will be presented as outrageous by the online media. The story will be prominent enough to briefly reach the top of HN's front page and will receive an official response.

But I can't tell how sarcastic you are being from your text alone.

Do you have a reference for that?

The second iteration will blow it out of the water though.

* Netflix will win in the same sense YouTube won

* Amazon will launch an OS

* Jason Statham will make between three and five Jason Statham movies.

Motion picture timelines are pretty long, so I imagine you are correct. Of particularly high likelihood (according to imdb) are: Furious 7, Wildcard, and Spy (2015, 2015, and 2015 respectively). I'm curious to know how often new movies come out quickly or secretly -- in particular, if I made the more precise prediction "Jason Statham will be featured in exactly 3 movies released in 2015", how likely is it that I'll be wrong?

What will happen? Imaging and video will continue to get better faster than ISPs and content publishers are ready to handle. Trust in US service and technology providers will continue to erode, along with their overseas sales. This raises the possibility of secure, verifiable, consumer friendly storage and/or communications products emerging, but I'm not going to predict that will happen in the US. The government in the US wants their nose in everything.

[1]: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oRXJUIttqQxuxmjj2tgYjj09...

[1]: https://sslmate.com

-More global economic shock towards years end.

-North Korea in the news more than last few years. Possible increase in US troop deployed on the Korean peninsula.

-The media decides for us that ISIS isn't really *that bad. Less radical acts coming from the group. The west starts making some concessions.

-4 new JavaScript frameworks arise as the "best way to do things". They get lots of users and press time, and will be largely abandoned by the years end.

-Something completely unexpected happens.

(I have to note the predictions for 2014 on HN were really really bad. Mine probably aren't much better. So don't put much stock. Except in the last prediction. That one is pretty much a guarantee.)

- US, China and World economy will fizzle and maybe tank.

- More players and net-positive news from the Electric Car/Vehicle side.

- Agencies will experiment with "rapid response" quad copter and other drones. (emergency, police, news, security, etc.) There will be talk of drafting "drone traffic" laws.

- Blockbuster finally goes bust.

- People will really get fed up with facebook en masse and competitors will be scrambling to be "the" next social network.

- Microsoft will debut a BASIC geared for Windows 10 (targeted toward mobile) and tie it into coding for education efforts.

- Businesses needing to upgrade overdue long-term tools will seriously look at Linux and other OSS platforms as commercial OSs have gone toward subscription based walled gardens.

2. More hacking scandals come to light and they are used as cover to restrict privacy and empower the intelligence community.

3. The world will continue to do close to nothing about the environment.

4. More steps are taken to protect children online from piracy, porn and controversial opinions.

5. A major critical vulnerability will be exposed in Tor.

6. Magic Leap will turn out to be a massive.. leap forward in technology.

7. Consumer VR will take the world by storm.

8. All the new encrypted email alternatives will fail.

9. eSports will continue to grow and the League of Legends Worlds final will have over 20 million concurrent viewers.

10. An application of AI will blow everyone away.

* Privacy still will be a target to crush for governments, and so any activity/communication media/etc that could affect that main objective.

* More hacking incidents used as excuse for more rights limitations, or for punishing countries

* Cheap health/activity tracking devices will become more popular (xiaomi mi band price/capabilities range could be a baseline)

* Inequality will keep growing. The singularity in that direction should not happen this year anyway.

* More climate related big incidents, but still no worldwide meaningful actions regarding it.

* Internet Explorer starts using an open-source rendering engine (like WebKit)

* Google Code shuts down

* Apple will NOT open up iPhone 6 NFC APIs

* Google self driving cars start a war in Washington

* Apple Watch gives life to "intimate" social networks

* Uber launches a package courier service

Some of these sound far fetched, but there's a slight method to the madness.

Rationale here: https://medium.com/@joewalnes/some-2015-tech-predictions-1e7...

I think this is more likely to come true through Microsoft open-sourcing Trident.

- Text chat and interactive systems will become more significant in a way I can't put my finger on yet. But expect to see more Slack-style activity creeping out to other types of app. Instead of "form filling", many types of app will begin to request data in a more conversational way on a "need to know" basis.

2. real time fmri will prove it's worth in the first clinical trial (for treating traumatic brain injury). This will cause an in rush of investment in the sector - both for applications in mental health , and applications in "peak performance" .

3. A long range wireless for the IOT will start deployment around most of the us - and will become a very common target for IOT stuff.

4. Deep learning will become usable by standard , non expert developers.

* Big data will get even bigger

* Companies will continue to become more comfortable with their data not being on-premise and cloud will grow larger as a result

- Facebook will lobby for a national voting system that requires a Facebook account.

- ISPs will either merge with or be bought up by some of the world's largest media companies.

- Instead of phones getting thinner or having bigger screens, they'll start having multiple screens.

- The next big thing in the mobile software world will probably come out of Africa or India.

- Cooking and food related devices will become popular in the hacking community.

- Clojure and Rust will gain a great amount of new adopters.

- Apple wont sell much of iwatch and wont grow as much as they did in 2014.

- 3d printing, bitcoin, virtual reality, IOT will be slower this year although they still have a bigger future in 10+ years time.

- Oil will drop a little further and then gain back to near 90 by end of 2015.

- Number of commercial flights disasters will reduce in 2015.

- US is going to do better in 2015.

- Inequality to keep growing

- World will be more peaceful in 2015!

http://controlvr.com http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_U3BmDlmtc

...or Magic Leap?

http://www.magicleap.com/#/company

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/technicalillusions/cast...

For a start, I think they'll hire few more high profile people from prominent SV company to build the brand in Western hemisphere.

Also, I predict this year, there will be much more interesting stuff coming from the East in general.

- One of the next top AAA startups (like AirBnB or Uber) built almost entirely with Clojure/ClojureScript;

- SublimeText 4;

- Accepted Pull Requests to github.com/Microsoft/Browser;

- You have to be highly motivated by serious reasons to stay in Russia rather than relocate to more startup-friendly country.

- China political turmoil becomes frightening to the rest of the world

- US advisers directly engage ISIS in combat

- Four YC companies graduate to the $ 1 Billion valuation club

- Two YC companies graduate to the $ 10 Billion valuation Club

* hoverboards * flying cars * pizza hydrators * size-adjusting-and-auto-drying jackets

1. Apple Watch will be successful, although Wall Street will not perceive it as such, and sell over 20 million units. It will not sell in iPhone numbers and as a result will be initially dismissed as a failure by major news companies. It will be the catalyst required to launch the wearable market and sales of wearables by other companies will increase considerably.

2. As a result of a burgeoning wearables market, low to medium end mechanical Swiss watch companies and many lower-end quartz watch companies will see a small drop in sales. None will be in trouble yet. High end Swiss watch companies will have nothing to worry about and will likely continue to see increases in sales.

3. A number of Swiss watch companies will release their own wearables (Montblanc recently did this actually[1] but we'll see a lot more in 2015) - they will mostly be ignored due to lack of features, poor craftmanship, buggy software and high prices.

4. Android Wear will continue to develop rapidly however there will be fewer quality apps on the platform. Many Android Wear devices will not see daily use. Tim Cook will mention this on stage at WWDC later this year.

5. Fitness companies, such as Fitbit, will see a decline in sales but will not be in any significant trouble this year.

6. Apple will improve iCloud reliability significantly, restoring some developer trust but not all. Problems with app review will re-emerge as Apple struggles to define the boundaries for the use of new features in iOS 8 (and 9) and on the new Watch platform.

7. Companies will still continue to mainly launch on iOS first although there will be an increased need to be on both platforms (if not at launch but soon after). This is how it has been this year, I don't see any indication that the trend of iOS-first is going away.

8. Over the year, Google will increasingly control Android and the Play Store. It won't become as strict as the App Store next year however long term users of Android will express concern.

9. Profitability of mobile devices will continue to fall. Samsung's profits will decline in the face of competition from companies such as Xiaomi. Apple's global marketshare will either stay fairly level or increase slightly however their cut of the phone industry profits will continue to increase with them making considerably more money than all other players.

[1] http://www.hodinkee.com/blog/introducing-the-montblanc-timew...

* reproducable build for docker images

* generate randomized test cases for web flows

I suspect that many organizations will start to migrate apps to containers, see that they require a fundamentally different set of tools and processes, and migrate back. The reason VMs work as well as they do is that they look just like regular servers.

That does not mean that containers will never succeed, just that it will take a long time for the tooling and processes and knowledge about containers to be common and commodity enough for many organizations to take advantage of them.

[1] https://www.openshift.com/products

It's not the OS support, it's all the surrounding tools. How do you monitor running Docker containers? How do you handle placement (i.e. let's make sure that the two sides of my MySQL replicated database aren't on the same physical host)? How do you handle hardware maintenance? What happens when someone has an app that requires local runtime configuration parameters? Do you even try to do configuration management on docker images?

And so on and so on.

Spark will gain more traction in the data mining world. Companies running on linux will opt to have their codebase in C#. we will likely see a dip in the economy which will affect all includijg tech workers. Julia will start to appear alongside Python and R for data analyst/mining positions.

I don't get it. Is this sarcasm? He's pretty much completely wrong on all counts