Pinterest boards, QR code walls, showrooming, mobile couponing, pop-up shops, mobile apps, Tweet Mirror, Facebook walls, digital circulars, augmented reality, flash sales"”it's a digital jungle out there for retailers today. As consumers embrace new technologies and services, companies find it difficult to stay current"”and harder still to determine where and how to invest their budgets. It's all too tempting simply to jump on the next new thing (and the next and the next), just in hopes of keeping pace.

Megatrends are large, long-term changes coalescing today that will birth shorter-term business and societal trends of tomorrow, says Kas Kasravi, HP fellow with Hewlett-Packard. Kasravi points out a few of these megatrends and posits interesting possibilities for their impact.