WeatherPro

An intuitive app offering weather reports for well over two million geographical locations, feeding in everything from cloud formations and atmospheric pressure to wind speed and humidity, all in enough detail to leave Michael Fish clammy-palmed with excitement. It’s also accurate to the point of clairvoyance, so if you’re travelling to Berlin and it predicts rain, pack your best umbrella.
Available on iPhone (£2.49), Android (£1.99) and Windows Phone (£2.29)

FlightTrack

Follow the path of thousands of international flights on slick, zoomable maps, with detailed information on departure gates, delays and (heaven forbid) cancellations. Great for those anticipating the arrival of loved ones, or particularly nerdy train-spotters looking to up their game.
Available on iPhone (£2.99), iPad (£2.99), Android (£2.99) and Windows Phone (£3.99)

Available from most financial institutions, IRAs are customizable financial plans that you can set up to start saving for the future. If you want to end up saving an amount of money that ends with nine zeroes, you need to do this as soon as possible. You’ll accrue interest on your savings and elect to take an amount of risk in investments to make money off the money you have.

The people who are offering the Zen-like answer (“the big thing that can be predicted is not the real big thing, it does not have true buddha-nature”) are being a little too skeptical. Historically, there’s been a fairly good record of people seeing “the next big thing” (NBT) a respectable fraction of the time, so it CAN be done, without 20/20 hindsight. Here are some successful big-thing anticipations that I am cherry-picking to illustrate when, why and how you can predict NBTs.

1. The moon race/Apollo was the NBT of its time and everybody knew it. It trained a generation of technologists and spawned a huge ecosystem of offshoots we use to this day.
2. Distributed computing was the NBT of the 70s, and Xerox invested in it for a decade to make it happen.
3. As the man told Dustin Hoffmann in The Graduate: “Plastics.” Another NBT that plenty of people saw coming.
4. Container shipping. The entire shipping industry saw it as a grand vision that could change everything, and they just had to wait for the people with the right talents. See my review of the history of the revolution: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/0…

What caused the early warning visibility in each case?