2014 was the year the world came to terms with Edward Snowden’s revelations from 18 months ago, then 2015 will be the year where we see a pivotal shift in consumers’ behaviour. As ever, provider trust will be key and it will be interesting to see how telecom companies and social media platforms change to retain and gain the trust the confidence of their customers.
Communications provider market to become more consolidated
BT’s proposed £12.5bn acquisition of EE in the UK evidence of a telecoms industry in a state of evolution. The ability for operators to offer ‘Quadplay’ is the new Holy Grail from the comms industry to grow its customer base.
Driving this consolidation is the desire to combat churn. Incorporating Quadplay is all well and good, but bundle services aren’t enough to keep customers loyal, real engagement is needed. If telecom companies learn to give more added value to the services that they are already providing, they stand a better chance of holding onto those customers – improving your additional services is a less costly tactic than providing completely new ones. The same goes for cloud services – vendors will aim to make their services more robust from both an application and infrastructure perspective. As such, quality of service and security will improve and services will be designed with openness in mind.
Legal challenge to the Internet giants
The EU is considering a motion to force Google to unbundle its search engine from its other products. Google currently dominate 90% of the share market in Europe, if the EU are successful in this motion could this have a serious impact on other technology companies?
For some time now, many of the social networks have been acting irresponsibly with their users’ data; Facebook’s much publicised ‘Emotional contagion’ experiment from last year is case in point. This year could well see a landmark legal challenge from an individual, or group of individuals, for continued improper use of their data – it could send ripples even greater than the “Right to be Forgotten” ruling of 2014
Move towards more private services
The recent Sony breach demonstrated the danger of not encrypting sensitive messages, and 2015 will a wave of new encryption tools and increased encryption options in existing apps. We’ve already seen this with the growth of Threema, an encrypted messaging service popular in German speaking countries. Expect it to be more widely adopted as people become more conscious of data privacy with products like Blackphone becoming viable alternatives as the market matures.