Happy New Year!

January the 1st is a time for celebration, recovery, resolutions – and predictions.

Making predictions in the tech business is always a hair-raising game. There are many infamous quotes from people getting it utterly wrong. But, still. It’s a fun thing to do at the beginning of the year, isn’t it?

I asked some of the key people involved in running NEXT to give a single prediction for the year to come (and, to be fair, I’ll give you my own predictions tomorrow). Some of them were brave enough to do so…

Here are the five brave NEXT folk who stepped forwards:

Martin Recke, Head of NEXT:

2014 will be the year of the Internet of Things. Finally.

Peter Bihr, Programme Curator:

All things get connected!

Benjamin Nickel, Head of Corporate Communications, SinnerSchrader:

For 2014 I expect mobile payment solutions that are ready for mass-market. And somebody (Apple?) will solve the problem of photo management in the mobile age, which is still appallingly broken.

Marina Lenz, Conference Management:

2014 will be the year, in which all those new types of interfaces (especially wearables) will finally become value-adding assets instead of only being funny gimmicks.

Ina Feistritzer, Head of Communications, NEXT Berlin:

We will see services emerge based on anticipatory computing that will give us information we want before we even now we want it by analyzing our language, location or calendar events.

Agree? Disagree? Have any predictions of your own?