It’s hard to believe that 2010 was almost 10 years ago. As we near to close the decade, we look back to the most defining trends that have helped shape the tech and startup world to become what it is today.
The rise of ride-hailing apps
gojek was a relatively unknown company back then in 2010 when it was first launched by the now Indonesia’s Minister of Education Nadiem Makarim with his co-founders Michaelangelo Moran and Kevin Aluwi.
Started off as the same-day delivery service for fashion e-commerce Zalora, slowly the app gained traction as it directly tackled the traffic jam issue of the country by combining convenience of using smartphone -something that the nation has also started to experience before reaching the boom in 2014- and branched out to other on-demand services such as food delivery and e-payment.
On the other hand, Grab was founded by Anthony Tan in 2012 in Malaysia as MyTeksi, an app specialised in taxi-hailing, before moving its headquarter to Singapore.
Realising early on that the two startups are targeting the same markets, and that both have vast potentials when it comes to the regional expansion, they have taken off in their own rights and have reached the decacorn status as of today.
Both the presence of Grab and gojek have defined the everyday lives of the people in the region. At first, it might be only the people in their home market, now it has entered other significant markets in the region as well, with gojek taking the expansion race a little later than Grab.
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Today, as both have on-demand solutions for practically anything we can think of (with gojek leading the market providing from massage therapist to home cleaning service), it’s almost impossible to think to cruise through everyday lives without them. Nikkei Asian Review also reminded us that the two are practically startup investors themselves now, considering how big both have gotten.
The decades of new media
Did you know that Instagram was launched in 2010? And that one year later, Snapchat followed by releasing its app to the public in July?
Since then, we have come a long way when it comes to social media. We’ve seen multiple releases by Instagram that includes “stealing” the filter features from Snapchat, to the release of IGTV, its own small YouTube-like features.
We’ve seen what it did to the way brands did their marketing, as influencer marketing becomes a real job and a real word packed a real punch for businesses. According to Influencer Marketing Hub, businesses today are making US$5.20 for every US$1 spent on influencer marketing.
But towards the end of 2019, we’ve seen that the world seems ready to welcome another disruptive platform designed with the wave of the new generation in mind: TikTok. Combining fun and giving control to users as creators, Instagram scrambled along to also give the platform the creators’ steering wheel to keep up.
Watch out 2020, TikTok is going to find its way to become the next marketing medium as Generation Zs are taking the front seat.
The decade of listening to content
Podcast first emerged in 2004, but it’s not until the 2010s that podcasts really sank in as an information medium, which is ironic since it’s basically on-demand radio.
In Asia, Click2View Asia stated that the downloading figures of podcasts grew by 29 per cent in 2017, up from 18 per cent increase in 2016. Overall, podcasts attracted about 73 million people tuning in monthly by 2018 in the US alone.
The recent popularity of podcasts could be attributed to the decade Millennials dominated, made the market primed with younger and more educated generations seeking quality content. With more streaming choices available, podcasts started to become a go-to content, although it’s yet to become the go-to choice for paid content.
However, the outlook may differ in the next decade, as IAB and PwC have estimated podcast advertising revenue will grow to an impressive US$650 million by 2020. It is interesting to see how the podcasters will navigate more effective ways to reach out to listeners with ads and sponsored content without so much as interrupting the flow of the content.
Remote working as the new norm
Remote working has become a somewhat cultural phenomenon in the last decade. Going from what can only be described as underpaid Do-It-Yourself hours, remote working has become a more popular choice thanks to Millennials and Generation Z campaigning for introversion.
The reason remote working becomes popular is that it’s the look of the ideal and modern workplace, promoting flexibility and mental health above all. Global Workplace Analytics Costs & Benefits survey shows that teleworkers in a number of large companies are actually between 35-40 per cent more productive than their office counterparts.
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It only made sense for the remote working becoming almost a mandatory working lifestyle, especially with the numbers of co-working spaces popping out all over Southeast Asia.
Recent research by JLL shows that flexible workspaces in Southeast Asia have shown a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of around 40 per cent the last three years and now makeup two per cent of total office stock, from less than one per cent in 2015.
Working in co-working space became somewhat trendy for the past decade, and the trend doesn’t show any sign of stopping soon.
e-sports soared high
According to a piece by Nikkei Asian Review, e-sports started to garner attention in 2013, especially the professional competitions.
The trend was proven with the competitive video gaming entering the sports sector, marked this year when esports were included in an IOC-sanctioned event, the 2019 Southeast Asian Games in the Philippines.
Southeast Asia alone is the breeding ground for e-sports as PC Online and mobile gaming revenue hit over US$2.2 billion in 2017 with expectations that it will reach over US$4 billion by 2021. The number of PC online and mobile gamers in Southeast Asia is projected to reach 300 million by the end of 2017, rising to more than 400 million by 2021.
In this article by our contributor former FBI Analyst Jared Polites, it’s stated that Southeast Asia is one of the most attractive markets for online gaming in line with the online and mobile payments that are still on a steady rise, with online transactions expected to grow by 25 per cent in the following years.
On the mobile side, Southeast Asia has always been an attractive market for Chinese gaming firms, especially given the ease of entry compared to other markets. Coupled with the fact that Southeast Asia is the fastest-growing regional gaming market, we should expect to see more and more companies from western markets, China, and Southeast Asia drive innovation in space.
Hyper-personalisation startups were calling the shots
Last year, we saw Singapore-based personalised skincare startup Yours raised US$3.5 million in seed funding. Back in 2014, there was even Wityu.fm, a Thailand-based curated and personalised radio experience that learns and plays music according to each individual’s preferences.
Personalisation talks about customer engagement as customers have been the driver for information circulated online. According to this article on e27, customers are more aware and have the power to spread positive or negative word of mouth about a brand in no time.
“This trend has led companies to rethink their marketing strategies and give more weight to customer engagement as a means to build a better connection with their customers,” the article states.
Customers want much more from a brand than to simply buy a product in order to feel connected with it. Brands need to provide personalised experiences to the customers and keep in touch with them through consistent and relevant information, and the last decade has been the years to prepare for the personalised services.
A decade of AI disruption
If the tech industry were a high school, AI would most likely be voted “most progressive” given how it was futuristic stuff back at the start of the decade.
Google figured out in 2012 how a computer can be used to identify what a cat looks like after learning from thousands of cat videos, indicating the eerie yet untapped potential of deep learning in an advanced computer.
Now, AI has been a part of the daily lives in a form of facial recognition to unlock our smartphone, to voice recognition to search for something on the net.
It is important to note that with advanced AI, come to the realisation of data significance. This CNN article pointed out that AI, in itself, continues to require a lot of work on making machine learning systems better at generalising and learning from fewer examples, something that thoroughly depends on data work.
Now that data is the new sexy, AI in social networks, smartphones, and virtual assistants are touching new subjects such as healthcare and even art. It’s safe to say that AI will likely still progress in the next decade.
Fintech ranked on top
In the past decade, the financial industries witnessed the shift into inclusivity, backed by technology such as AI and blockchain taking over the financial sector by storm.
Big, traditional bank practices have seen what it’s like to be stubborn and gradually warmed up to the idea of moving transactions online. E-payment in many forms emerged, with Indonesia and Vietnam becoming the leading countries for fintech innovations in the region for the last decade.
Fortunly noted in its article that partnerships and mergers between established companies and fintech startups were becoming more and more frequent. It was not rare for a fintech business with a business-to-consumer model to transfer completely to a business-to-business approach, to be able to offer its technology to larger companies and access massive client pools.
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Furthermore, Fortunly showed the number in lending space also peaked in the last decade, with global loan origination in digital lending was US$41.1 billion in 2017, showing 30.1 per cent year-on-year growth according to fintech statistics.
In Asia, fintech market size reportedly challenged for top spot globally in 2018, with a record amount of funds raised: $22.65 billion from 516 deals, according to CB Insights.
Blockchain’s boom
Still from the Fortunly’s piece, 24 per cent of businesses say they are very or extremely familiar with blockchain technology.
In 2017, blockchain companies reached a record high of US$450 million in funding, a 79 per cent year-on-year increase compared to 2016, according to fintech statistics.
In 2018, the cryptocurrency that was Bitcoin was on the high. 9 out of 10 banks in Europe and North America were exploring blockchain trends at that time and its market capitalisation has since expanded from nearly US$1.02 billion in Q1 of 2013 to approximately US$72.37 billion in Q1 of 2019, Leftronic shared.
According to Bitcoin wallet stats shared further in Leftronic’s article, in February 2011, the value only reached US$1. In July of the same year, one Bitcoin was standing at US$31 and then fell to US$2 by the end of the same year.
At the end of 2012, the Bitcoin price reached Us$13, while during the next year it was in the US$650–US$800 scope. In 2014, the value of Bitcoin reached US$745 but then fell sharply to US$317 by the end of the year.
A year later, the price of Bitcoin was US$760, while in November of 2017, it grew to US$19,498, an all-time high as of August 2019. At the end of 2018, Bitcoin dropped to US$3,832, and by mid-June, it regained strength by breaking the US$13,000 mark.
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Blockchain, despite being dominated by Bitcoin and crypto exchange, are ripe for other facets of industries, especially healthcare. The decentralised concept works well in storing patients data, helps open up a plethora of new possibilities for further blockchain growth. At least this will be the future.
Sharing economy
According to Forbes, the sharing economy is an economic system in which assets or services are shared between peers or businesses for free or for a fee. The article states that the concept is to enhance the usability of assets, making their lifespan more worthwhile.
In the age where “Marie Kondo”-ing your life is the new cool and sustainability is more urgent than ever, sharing economy made perfect sense. Instead of buying a car, hailing a ride with the choices of gojek or Grab. Rent your clothes via Style Theory, instead of shopping for a new one.
In fact, owning stuff can now be a source of new income as almost everything can be rented out online. After all, that was the basic concept of sharing economy, and the trend’s beginning is likely to carry through.
From these trends of the decade, we’ve learned that it has longevity to it as they need the next decade to really boom and reach the next level of innovation. Bring it on, 2020.
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Image Credit: Farzad Nazifi on Unsplash
The post What a decade it has been: 10 trends that emerged to the top in the 2010s appeared first on e27.
