As a freelance developer I don’t have a significant amount of money to invest in new technologies and/or startups. But I do have and ample amount of time to invest. I have to decide which of my own projects are most relevant to industry trends and thus potential for earning money. I also need to know which client projects have the most promising future which translates into long term clients who can pay their invoices on time. Therefore a good bit of my research is similar to what an investment research analyst might do for their clients much like research analyst by Fisher Investments.
While most of my research includes sites that pertain to industry trends – mashable.com, wired.com – what they offer is typically only the superficial information and trends. In addition sites like that tend to get more caught up in industry hoopla and marketing buzz. But we all know that what people are thinking about and what people are spending their money on are two different things.
Take for instance the recent Adobe Flash verses iOS/Apple and HTML5 hype. There was no end of sites weighing in on the inevitable demise of Flash, and consequently Adobe as a whole. However, at the same time investment analysts saw through the hoopla being spewed and could see that Adobe, and Flash, were even better positioned to gain market share in the near and long term due to the explosion of mobile phones. It’s as simple as looking at the vast increase of both devices that can display complex multimedia and the time that users will be spending on these devices. No longer is multimedia limited to your desktop. Now you can view and share it with friends at the restaurant. This vastly increases the amount of time users will be digesting multimedia. And while not all of that will be Flash content a large percentage will be. Without question the reach of Flash has increased.
If I had only listened to the surface level buzz I would have been tempted to switch my skill set from Flash to other technologies like HTML5. And while there is certainly a market for HTML5 skills it isn’t nearly as in demand as the buzz would lead one to believe.
For that reason I’ve begun relying on sources like Fisher Investments and twitter feeds like @fisherinvest_mm to help me see through the hype into where the markets, and thus my time, is going.
