I.B.M. just issued its annual list of five predictions of developments in technology that it thinks will come true in the next five years. Like lots of predictive lists, particularly those that come around New Year’s, this is something of a pseudo-event that serves as an advertisement for the predictor’s own product or service. I.B.M.’s is no different in that regard, but it is worth looking at, both for the pedigree of who is doing the predicting, and what I.B.M.’s choices say about itself.

Here are the predictions:

– Powerful mobile devices, capable of precise language translation, will belong to 80 percent of the world’s population. While this is nearly intuitive, given the ever-lower cost of phones, the real breakthrough will be ubiquitous voice recognition and translation capabilities, which will make the phones highly useful to large populations who are illiterate, or who have languages that aren’t easily written with keypads. Read the other predictions here.

See: BITS

Thanks to @pauledgar1 on Twitter