Benedict Evans:

The interaction model for the desktop internet was pretty much settled 15 years ago. It turned out that the answer was a web browser. Stand-alone apps such as Pointcast were a mostly blind alley, and while apps persisted for email and IM, and for very specific things like music, the words ‘web’ and ‘internet’ became effectively synonymous to anyone non-technical. Over time we added Ajax and better search and better social, but everything really happened inside the browser.
 
 In mobile this is quite different: nothing is settled. We have the web and apps and of course apps, and then we have many complications – voice, in-app payments, web apps, hybrid apps, widgets, push notifications, social messaging apps, Google Now and Siri. Then there’s the hardware layer – images, barcodes, NFC, bluetooth, location, motion sensors etc. Innovative and disruptive new interaction models can very often find a route to market, far more easily than they could on the desktop internet. Sometimes, they scale to a hundred million users in a year to two. And we have more and more waves of innovation coming, with things like local wireless from Apple and deep linking to within apps from Android, and a very fast-evolving social messaging space, and more things in 2014 and beyond.
 
 So, we can actually have a pretty limited idea of what the dominant interaction models will be in 5 years.

Chris Arnade:

My first year on Wall Street, 1993, I was paid 14 times more than I earned the prior year and three times more than my father’s best year. For that money, I helped my company create financial products that were disguised to look simple, but which required complex math to properly understand. That first year I was roundly applauded by my bosses, who told me I was clever, and to my surprise they gave me $20,000 bonus beyond my salary.
 
 The products were sold to many investors, many who didn’t fully understand what they were buying, most of them what we called “clueless Japanese.” The profits to my company were huge – hundreds of millions of dollars huge. The main product that made my firm great money for close to five years was was called, in typically dense finance jargon, a YIF, or a Yield Indexed Forward.
 
 Eventually, investors got wise, realizing what they had bought was complex, loaded with hidden leverage, and became most dangerous during moments of distress.

IBM Research:

In 2004, MRSA accounted for 94 percent of all healthcare-associated infections per 1,000 patient bed days in the Pittsburgh Veterans Administration Health System. Precautions and education about the disease have lowered incidents significantly, but reports of new outbreaks of this health hazard still appear in the news regularly.
 
 In earlier chip development research, IBM researchers identified specific materials that, when chained together, produced an electrostatic charge that allows microscopic etching on a wafer to be done at a much smaller scale.
 
 This newfound knowledge that characterization of materials could be manipulated at the atomic level to control their movement inspired the team to see what else they could do with these new kinds of polymer structures. They started with MRSA.
 
 The outcome of that experiment was the creation of what are now playfully known as “ninja polymers” – sticky nanostructures that move quickly to target infected cells in the body, destroy the harmful content inside, and then disappear by biodegrading without causing damaging side effects or accumulating in the organs.

David Prest:

Earlier this year Nissan began production in Sunderland of the Leaf, the first electric car to be mass-produced in the UK. But 40 years ago, about 100 electric cars were built on the Isle of Wight to a design which was years ahead of its time.
 
 The Enfield 8000 was a prototype electric vehicle which emerged out of a competition run by the United Kingdom Electricity Council in 1966.
 
 Enfield Automotive beat rival bidders like Ford for the contract and made more than 100 cars at its works on the Isle of Wight.
 
 With a top speed of 48mph (77kph) and a range of up to 56 miles (90km), the car was aimed at low mileage urban users, and was expected to supply a much needed boost to Britain’s export push.