Media Predicts: What's Hot in 2010?

By Jeannette Bitz

Last week’s PRSA’s annual Media Predicts 2010 event featured some of Silicon Valley’s most influential reporters sharing their predictions on what will be hot in 2010.

Panelist participants included: Brad Stone, New York Times; Byron Acohido, USA Today; Connie Guglielmo, Bloomberg; Om Malik, GigaOm and Steven Levy, Wired. Jim Goldman, CNBC’s Silicon Valley bureau chief, moderated the event. The event kicked off with master of ceremonies, Duffy Jennings, SFGate.com, who provided his commentary on where the industry was headed in 2010.

If the group of panelist are right on their predictions, (and as history indicates, they have a pretty good track record) 2010 promises to be a year with more innovation, M&A activity and the year that online publications and blogs start to charge subscribers for content. Here are just a few of the predictions:

1. Social networking companies will continue to be popular 2010. According to the panelists, Facebook, with a valuation of $9.5 billion will thrive in 2010 and could be in a position to pursue an IPO. On the other hand, Goldman speculated that Twitter would go away in 2010. Several of the panelists disagreed, arguing that Twitter’s investors have invested for the long-haul and will give the company enough of a runway so that they do not have to worry about making money for the next two years.
2. Handset sales will be strong—iPhone will take the lead but Google’s Android will be a viable competitor. Levy felt that it was possible for Android to overtake iPhone sales while Malik argued that “Apple is the only Silicon Valley company playing offense”.
3. “The free online media buffet is over,” said Stone. Stone felt that online newspapers would begin to charge for content next year, especially if they offered subscribers additional information or analysis.
4. “The industry will wake up to the rising cyber-security threats,” said Acohido. He added that the average consumer would finally realize how vulnerable their information is and would want to steer away from doing financial exchanges online.
5. “The FCC will make decisions that show that they are on the side of the Silicon Valley,” said Malik. He argued that the government is opening up the mobile phone market via its decisions on net neutrality.
6. “M&A activity will be on the rise in 2010, which will mean more layoffs,” said Guglielmo. While this could be an opportunity for an entrepreneur to raise capital for a start up, Marshall argued that VC money for new companies would be limited.
7. Five companies will make headlines in 2010: Amazon, Twitter, Comcast, Apple and Facebook.
8. The entertainment industry has been experimenting with paid content but will finally start to figure it out in 2010.
9. Applications in the cloud will continue to grow for enterprises despite the fact that this is in opposition to the Microsoft model.
10. Consumer devices like the Kindle will continue to be hot but Levy felt that there will need to be a better device that has “one format” for all books.