Trust in the future

By Victor Ng | Apr 27, 2010

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Almost certainly, we’ll see two key areas of tremendous growth - globally and in Asia - this year and several more years to come.

How can we be so sure? Before revealing my prediction of what the two fastest-growing fields within information technology are, here are some key trends impacting the global and regional economy today:

• The rise of social media, especially among youths and young adults
• The sophistication and internationalization of an underground economy
• A recovery that holds little promise of eradicating unemployment in many economies
• The persistence of global inflation

These imminent trends provide the backdrop for a ‘perfect techno socio-economic storm’ - characterized by an increasing disdain for dead-end conventional jobs, higher dropout rates in schools and colleges, a worldwide search for unconventional means of making fast bucks, and speedy informal alliances in cyberspace.

Besides new job-seekers facing a less-than-exciting career paths, we can also expect older IT professionals who fell victim to the 2009 downturn to join in the fray - for their families’ or their own survival. Their combined skills and unconventional energy will find their way to new and fast-growing online communities.

Very quickly, in the next few years, the horde of social media sites will discover that the fastest and easiest (perhaps the only) way to profitability is to become part of a growing and increasingly unrestrained underground online economy, trading in information, data, applications, identities, passwords and digital currencies. (At today’s rates, stolen credit card data sell at US$0.10 to $25.00 each, while stolen bank accounts are selling for US$10 to $1,000 each).

Governments and corporations in the region, by themselves, will no longer be able to police piracy of intellectual property, online fraud, identity theft, digital hijacking and blackmail, and - probably to the joy of many - tax evasion.

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