GRAND RAPIDS ? For the 15th year, serial entrepreneur Keith Brophy has looked into his crystal ball to predict tech trends short and long-term. On Wednesday he updated his list to include a stampede to social media advertising, virtual reality headsets for gaming and entertainment, and the Apple Watch leading the sale of 100 million Smartwatches within five years.

Brophy made his predictions in front of a packed house at a hotel in downtown Grand Rapids at an event sponsored by aimWest, a technology networking group. His 10 technology trend predictions come from a wide variety of sources, including various reports, blogs, and conversations. A drum roll please:

Trend Prediction 1. Social Media Stampede

Organizations scramble to better leverage social media as its expanding power becomes undeniable. Current industry forecasts of social media advertising growth ($8 billion in 2014 up to $15 billion in 2018) turn out to be vastly understated.

Trend Prediction 2. Hyperloop revolutionizes segments of high speed mass transit and logistics supply chain transport.

The Hyperloop race is on, fueled by the brilliant strategy of providing an open source spec for the technology vision. The technology has many challenges to work out and takes longer than anticipated, but results in a revolutionary new form of transport.

Trend Prediction 3. Surface Hub gains quick, strong traction as a key platform and opens up new forms of group collaboration.

Windows 10 apps lays the basis for leveraging the Surface Hub technology. The product includes mature and innovative new ways of productive collaboration such as multi-person multi-touch. This value-add grounding results in strong adoption at the enterprise and then mainstream level.

Trend Prediction 4. ?A Headtop on every noggin!? Virtual reality headsets – propelled by Microsoft?s HoloLens success – become the basic platform for computing tasks beyond gaming and entertainment.

Microsoft?s HoloLens gains substantial revenue and drives strong app creation. This inspires Facebook?s Occulus Rift, Magic Leap (with Google investment) and other global competitors. The enhanced experience has such a clear value proposition that the VR headset is a leading platform for computing, and the old ?computer on every desk and in every house? goal becomes in a sense ?a headtop on every noggin.?

Trend Prediction 5. The metrics-based classroom is replaced by teacher-led, engagement-based small groups. The teacher leverages shared and solo holographic headset delivery experiences.

Teachers lead learning scenarios with systems that help assess personalized learning goals and engage and inspire students. Performance emphasis shifts to value student engagement, self-motivation and innovation as highest order metrics.

Trend Prediction 6. Our choices are increasingly based on population analytics from expanding pools of data (big data). Our personal data is overlaid with these pools to further predict unique impact of our choices on our own lives.

We live in an age with rapidly expanding capability to collect data, meld it with streams of past data, and carry out analysis to project impact of behaviors. As the stream of legacy and new data continues to expand, the tempo of these insights will increase. We will become a society of constant research alignment to optimize our unique lifestyles.

Trend Prediction 7. ?Apple Watch? Validates Smartwatch as Platform and Smartwatch Adoption Exceeds 100 Million within 5 Years

It is not the first smartwatch but it is the one that redefines the category. The range of capabilities plus a good dose of marketing and distribution allows this watch to be perceived as one of the most effective forms of connectivity. The rapid user acceptance of the Apple Watch platform inspires many other competitors to provide innovative and more affordable alternatives, and smartwatch use rapidly explodes across the world.

Trend Prediction 8. By 2025 ?The Internet of Dings? (drones & things) imposes powerful automatic monitoring and control over many aspects of human life in several nations, as capabilities of automated drones and ?The Internet of Things? blend.

Several nations deploy drones that process feedback from sensor grids to provide monitoring and control over humans ? systems that are automatic with no human intervention. This control spans activities such as policing, traffic monitoring, crowd control, safety monitoring, traffic control, and logistics.

Trend Prediction 9. Remote controlled ?proxy-bots? for corporate video conferencing pave the way for widespread use of remotely driven service robots in the U.S. by 2025.

Early mobile video presence platforms converge with tactile feedback systems to provide a new form of interacting remotely where you can high five fellow meeting participants from afar or fetch the a cup of coffee. Eventually this technology evolves so that a vast range of human activities from plumbing to electrical wiring to painting to walking the dog are carried out remotely.

Trend Prediction 10. Mars One fails to land humans on the planet by the 2025 target. However it inspires another nation?s arrival by 2030 and results in creation of many spin-off technologies.

The ambitious goal fails within its stated time range due to insufficient funding, but raises awareness that this bold goal can be achieved. A national space program (non-USA) makes it happen. The self-supporting contained living environment created for the mission generates a vast array of technology improvements from holographic immersive life to the next level 3D printer production facilities.

Keith Brophy last week was named the new executive director of the Michigan Small Business Development Center. To read that story, Click on MITechNews.Com