Mal Fletcher reports on the technologies you & your organisation can't afford to ignore.

Education will shift too, with rapid growth in the field of nanodegrees. The massive open online course (MOOC) is now giving way to the massive open mobile course (MOMC).

Students will soon be able to take full course, largely free of charge, from top universities, in small units driven by mobile apps.

Social media will also help to change the measure of success within the business community. Return on investment (ROI) will be forced to share top billing with return on community (ROC), was companies take on a social enterprise aspect in place of their old CSR arrangements.

In part because of the ubiquity of social media, which places all the world's needs constantly in our eye-line, customers want to know that their buck is helping to support something beyond the corporate front door.

At the same time, as privatisation of government services grows to accommodate cost-cutting, private companies will have to sign up to payment-for-success models. A percentage of funding will increasingly be linked to proven benefits to community welfare.

Social media will also play a part in the growth of acceptance for cashless payment options such as crypto-currencies. The overall benefits of this are questionable.

The best known of these currencies is Bitcoin, though it is one of many. Whilst the US Senate recognises Bitcoin as a currency, it is like all cyber-currencies unregulated. It is not tied to any external value standard such as the value of gold. It is worth whatever its users decide at any given time, so that its value is subject to wild fluctuations.

However, with the growth of social shopping and digital shopping generally, more retailers, service-providers and universities will allow for them as payment options. As a result, digital-only currencies will gain traction.

Perhaps not this year, but in time, governments will be forced to act, either nationally or trans-nationally, to regulate these currencies. Doing so will bring them further into the mainstream and grant them legitimacy within the mainstream economy.

This will in turn raise hugely important ethical questions about digital debt, which will rise as we increasingly divorce spending from the substantiality of paper money and separate spending from forethought.

Related to cyber-currencies in the push for cashless payments - which are financially supported by banks, for whom cash is a time-consuming and costly option - are subcutaneous payment chips.

No longer strictly the purview of science fiction, these are now being used, albeit on a small scale, within industrial parks in countries like Sweden.

They may seem a convenient option, but their use raises the issue of whether we want our bodies to become, for the first time, fully hackable and trackable devices. They will also increase the rates of violent theft.

After all, I might steal your wave-and-pay card without physically hurting you, but I can't remove an imbedded RFID or chip without violence.

Whatever the longer-term benefits and losses, social media is set for another big year in 2016. There will be fewer newer players in the game, but those who avoid the cannibalising attempts of the big fish will offer boutique services and merge technologies like holography with social media.

Of course, technologies cannot be graded on their technical capacities alone. They must be weighed against the cognitive and social impacts they produce. As a social futurist, that is an area of great interest to me and it represents a core part of what I do.

In the end, technology is not destiny. We are a product not of the technologies we devise, but of how we choose to use them.