2015 is upon us and it's time for our annual predications for the world of technology and the Internet. We'll score last year further down but first this is what we think will be headline worthy in 2015. 
1. My first prediction has to be related to Back to the Future. BTTF2 was partly set in 2015 and gave us a glimpse of what life would be like. Now, 26 years later, we can see if they were right. I don't think we'll have flying De Loreans, but the hoverboard is coming. We'll hopefully see special edition Pepsi bottles and Nike shoes with power laces and I think the Cubs will win the World Series and the food hydrator will get a prototype. Oh and The Power of Love to be number 1. 2. 2015 is election year in the UK. After 5 years of the coalition we get to go to the polls again. I'm not going to predict the winner, instead I'm going to predict that whoever is in charge come June will announce that the next election will be the first in the UK to allow people the option to vote electronically and online. 3. If we can get a hoverboard in 2015 then surely next must be a broom. A Kickstarter project with a prototype broom will launch next year so that we can have a real Quidditch World Cup in 2018. 4. For each of the last 3 years I've predicted Apple will launch a television, so this year I'm going to predict they won't and the only TV product coming from Cupertino will be a slightly revised Apple TV set-top box. 5. The robots are coming. People have predicted that robots will be doing our jobs and saving us time for years, this year we'll start seeing robots all over the place, drones, cars, vacuum cleaners. The most sought after Christmas gifts will all be robots of some kind. 6. We'll spend over £1bn via Mobile payments in 2015. Apply Pay will be the most commonly used but there will be others getting into this field. 7. The price of both petrol and diesel will fall below £1 per litre in the UK. 8. The Force Awakens in December and to go alongside the film will be some of the most technologically advanced toys including actual flying ships. 9. Shops try and grab your attention with window displays, but they are fairly limited with what they can have in them and how often they can change them. That will change with the advent of window TV screens, the whole window is a transparent TV screen which can advertise whatever the shop wants, can do bespoke offers, even tying into the apps we have on our phones but still lets you see through the window inside the store. 10. Smart Dummies, the ultimate wearable, but for babies. The Smart Dummy (I should trademark that) will check your baby's vital statistics and send them to your phone so you can check if they are running a temperature and compare it to previous days. And finally Bob's chipped in with our bonus predictions for this year. He reckons Half Life 3 won't see a release this year but one of the next generations consoles will be on sale at for less than £200 by the end of the year (at the time of writing the PS4 is £325 and Xbox One £299 on Amazon). Now to see how badly I did last year. 1. 2014 will be the year of wearable tech. We saw plenty of smart watches but the wearable tech hasn't really hit mainstream yet. Cat Nav though is real 0.5/1 2. The Internet of Things! People definitely have more devices this year than last year but they're still mainly the common items (tablets, phones, computers, games consoles etc.) 0.5/2 3. Third year lucky, this year will finally be the year for the Apple television and iWatch. Well the Apple Watch is coming next year, I'll take that. 1/3 4. Big changes are ahead at Microsoft next year. Didn't do too well here, Windows 9 never made it, Nokia is going and the Surface is still around. 1/4 5. Brazil will win the most watched World Cup of all times and that increase in viewers will be driven almost entirely by people streaming it. I changed my mind on this one and put my money on Germany before the tournament started. Won't be counting that though and 2006 still looks like it leads the ratings 1/5 6. One of Eastenders, Doctor Who, Top Gear or Masterchef will see episodes aired on iPlayer first before being on BBC1/2. All new episodes of these shows aired first on TV although BBC3 will shifting to be entirely online. 1/6 7. Indecision 2016 may still be over 2 years away but the prospective presidential candidates will start to emerge over the year and one of the key topics will be security and privacy due to the revelations from Edward Snowden. I'm going to take another half point here. What happened to Sony has really kicked off that debate. 1.5/7 8. I think the PS4 will sell the most in 2014 but it won’t be far ahead of the Xbox One. 13.5 million for the PS4 vs 10 million for the Xbox One. Wii U has over 7.3 million. That's got to be worth a full point. 2.5/8 9. If you take the combined power of these apps and then do what Google and others have done for outdoor mapping you can create indoor maps too and use technology like Google Glass to plot you a visible sat-nav style route to the beans. It's starting, Google lets you upload floor plans and Tesco are looking at Augmented Reality. Got to be another half point. 3/9 10. Wireless proximity charging will become commonplace in 2014. The Apple Watch will support inductive charging, I think that's another half point. 3.5/10 What have we missed, please leave a comment or post in our Forums with your predications for the year ahead.
Plusnet Predictions 2015