6) Employed millennials
WHY: Yes, the numbers have been grim of late. But data show the slack is slowly draining out of the 25-34 cohort not in the labor force. As Matt Busigin points out in his Most Important Charts In The World selection, the data suggest "there is a long uptrend in 25-34 employment coming."
7) Robots
WHY: In their new book '' THE SECOND MACHINE AGE", MIT professors and some other argue increasing automation of the labor force will be a permanent feature of the economy. Thus robot-makers like Kiva Systems, which built Amazon's warehouse bots, stand to see receipts climb. Stocks: What are stocks?” Investments : Investing Tools And Resources- Banking & Finance - Accounting.’
8) Personal drones
WHY: A sub-trend of the above. Drones largely remain legal for personal use, and the market is now large enough that products which makes drones for camera, is among the most successful.
9) App stores
WHY: Chris Dixon
argues that people have basically stopped using the mobile Web and now exclusively use apps. This means that the owners of app stores — that is to say, for now, the mobile phone developers — wield tremendous power. " What if AOL or some other central gatekeeper had controlled the Web, and developers had to ask permission to create Google, YouTube, eBay, PayPal, Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, etc.? Sadly, this is where we’re headed on mobile."
10) Personalized genetic testing
WHY: Shares in gene-testing companies like Myriad have seen some of the best performance of 2014. 23&me had seen strong consumer interest before the FDA temporarily halted sales of its testing kit. The company
says it's working with the agency to get its product back on the market.
11) Wearable tech
WHY: It's getting to the point where you probably have a friend, or a friend of a friend, who owns a Nike FitBit, a Jawbone, or some other device tracking their personal health data.
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12) Smart fabrics
13) Uberification
WHY: Here's a list of every company now offering on-demand personal services, via Steve Schlafman at RRS. There are more than 70. "The “uberification” of our economy signals a fundamental shift in the way that local services are discovered and fulfilled," he writes.
14) Politics
WHY: The Supreme Court continues to loosen rules targeted at limiting the amount of money that can be spent on a political campaign. The Koch-brothers-backed group Americans For Prosperity spent $1.4 million on ad buys in Arkansas against Democrat incumbent Senator Mark Pryor, and has spent $30 million nationally,
15) Reinsurance
WHY: The companies that insure the insurers have adjusted well to climate change and the climbing toll of natural disasters. "In 2011, the costliest year ever for loss claims thanks to floods in Thailand and the earthquake that caused the Fukushima disaster, the 40 largest reinsurers made pretax profits of $5.4 billion (U.S.), according to Standard & Poor’s,
16) Rents
WHY: Rents climbed 12% between 2009 and 2013 as the housing bubble pushed former homeowners into apartments. Seattle saw the largest YOY jump last year at 7.1% followed by San Francisco at 5.6%.
17) Online groceries
WHY: Online groceries generated more than $15 billion in sales last year. Amazon's AmazonFresh is about to get expanded into Seattle, Los Angeles and San Francisco, and possibly a bunch more. Wal-Mart To Go as powerful as it can be.
18) Meal kits
WHY: You could have your groceries delivered to you — or you could have the ingredients for specific meals delivered in precise quantities and with detailed recipes. Blue Apron, the leading start-up in this field,. Naturally, there are now at least a half-dozen other start-ups looking to edge their way into the space.
19) Cheap natural gas
20) Blockchain technology
WHY: We recently explained why people keep investing in Bitcoin despite many recent headaches in the Bitcoin ecosystem: Its underlying technology — the Blockchain — is being called the next Internet. The companies incorporating blockchain remain in their infancy.
21) Meteorology
WHY: On Nov. 1, agriculture giant Monsanto
bought a 7-year-old firm called Climate Corporation for about $1 billion. Founded by two former Google employees, Climate Corporation might be described as the expression of the "big data" movement in the farming sector: It takes figures from hundreds of monitoring stations and publishes real-time weather forecasts. We have also seen an increasing number of commodities futures move on weather forecast releases.
22) 3-D printed organs
23) Online luxury
WHY: Online luxury sales are growing twice as fast as the overall market, according to a new report from McKinsey. "Last year, online shopping 'directly generated more than 13% of offline luxury sales and influenced another 28% of sales.' Consumers typically purchase big ticket items in-person, leading many luxury retailers to overlook e-commerce,"
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WHY: Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are paving the way for the first true "space age," "SpaceX estimates that if they are able reach a point where the whole Falcon 9 rocket is recovered and repeatedly reused in such a manner, they may achieve launch costs for around one hundredth of what they currently are. If they successfully meet this ultimate challenge, then we are on the verge of the first true Space Age, with all of the spaceflights that have occurred before amounting to an expensive, decades-long process of baby steps leading to this new capability."
25) Music streaming
WHY: The profitability models are still being worked out, but there is no doubt this is where the future of music lies. The
purchase of music data service The Echo Nest by Spotify for an undisclosed amount signals where this is all going.
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