The Brand Knew philosophy of simplicity reigning supreme, even for ideologically complex development or design initiatives, finds its roots somewhat in the methods of the late/great Steve Jobs. His recent passing, coupled with the release of his authorized biography, has spawned a significant volume of quotes, videos and other materials that have become played out because of how quickly they’ve infiltrated second and third tier admirers. Within the first 24 hours of his death, Facebook status updates referenced Steve Jobs once every 1.6 seconds. While his brand and ideologies may be overexposed in the immediate, it shouldn’t diminish the importance of his permeating theses. At the risk of falling into uniform line with the rest of the technology world, the impact of Jobs’ genius on the creation and operation of Brand Knew is substantial.

As if creating the Lisa computer wasn’t enough, he built NEXT into a shiny acquisition piece for Apple, ensuring his return to the company he’d been ousted from. As if his triumphant return wasn’t enough, he invented the Macintosh. As if reinventing the personal computer wasn’t enough, he simultaneously rejuvenated the general public’s relationship with cartoons in his development of Pixar. As if dominating a new wave of personal computing while becoming the largest shareholder in Disney wasn’t enough, he redefined cellular telephonics and demoted carriers to second rate citizenship. As if redefining our mobile experiences wasn’t enough, he revolutionized software developer technology and created an entirely new device category in the iPad. As if convincing us to purchase $600 items we didn’t even know we needed wasn’t enough, along the path of launching innovation after innovation, he set an entirely new standard for retail shopping both online and off. In the end, he created the most valuable company in the world, both literally and figuratively.

Arguably, no man has positively influenced more lives on a global level in the past hundred years. There are some whose relationship to Apple is a religious one- there are the tablets of Moses and the tablets of Steve. For us… three apples changed the world. The one that Eve ate. The one that dropped on Isaac Newton’s head. The one that Steve built. Brand Knew would not exist if not for Steve Jobs’ contributions to personal computing because I absolutely loathed the user experience on my Gateway desktop in high school and my Dell laptop in college. Not until my first MacBook Pro towards the end of college did I take a serious interest in social media, the technology sector and computers.

Many wonder what Jobs’ legacy will be. $AAPL will likely continue to perform well for many years. I believe that $AAPL will potentially be a $600 stock by the end of 2012. It’s rumored that Steve Jobs was intimately involved with several products in the pipeline days before his death.

Here are my predictions in 2011 of what is to come in the next five years. The implications of the launch of Siri and iCloud could not be more understated or underestimated.

Textbook Industry/Education Sector
A new iPad will be released with an upgraded iOS and functional non-beta Siri. This will pave the way for deals with textbook companies similar to the deals Apple has forged with music labels and movie studios. In ten years time, students using notepads or paperback textbooks will be looked at as dinosaurs. Notes will be taken on iPads and course curriculums will be downloaded onto the devices along with digital textbooks. Publishers will have to rise to the occasion and develop more interactive learning experiences that bring lessons to life in ways that were unimaginable just half a decade before. Students will wirelessly share notes and it will be incomprehensible to them how lessons were once taught as “boring” words on a page.

Television/Cable/Gaming
Cable companies are dinosaurs trapped on a sinking peninsula. Consumers pay upwards of $200/month for four hundred channels they’ve never even watched. The same model that was applied to music in allowing users to pick and choose which songs they want to purchase from an album will be applied to the cable television world as consumers pay for individual channels or channel bundles. The way consumers currently pay for cable service would be the equivalent to my ordering a cheeseburger with everything on it, eating the sliced pickle, and throwing the rest of the burger into the trash. It makes zero sense and is not a sustainable business model for cable providers. Apple is going to represent consumer advocacy as they broker deals with television networks to allow consumers to curate their own cable packages… through AppleTV.

AppleTV will be connected to iCloud and will access our photos, our videos, our music, our curated cable package, our apps, our internet browser/bookmarks and the evolution of the gaming center currently available on iOS. With the new AppleTV hardware, the SDK concept will expand to an HDK concept, allowing manufacturers to customize hardware (gaming controllers) that will link to the gaming experience on the main entertainment console (AppleTV). iCloud will also allow give continuity to any experience – viewing pictures, watching a movie, listening to music, playing a game, surfing the web – meaning that you can pause on one device and continue on another, either in another room or on mobile. There will be a gold rush for developers to produce the most compelling games on this new AppleTV, as major players in the space like EA and Zynga valiantly battle the volumes of “nobodies” who stimulate an entirely new ecosystem.

Automotive
One of the most obvious destinations for an iOS device is the car. As the iPad technology decreases in price, all new vehicles will have some form of implemented open operating system. Google’s Android will likely also vie for this piece of the technological pie, but they will accrue an inferior market share to Apple’s first mover advantage. There will be a suite of amazingly utilitarian applications in the car that integrate touchscreen technology and Siri with cellular devices, eliminating the need for Garmin or other navigation systems all together.With Apple’s recent acquisition of C3 Technologies, the powerhouse has issued a very deliberate war cry against Google, whose mapping technology is likely to be phased out in iOS6. When your car pulls up to a parking meter, you’ll designate time and payment within seconds… before you’ve even left your vehicle. These automotive applications will increase safety, socialization amongst cars and will eventually be the catalyst for sensor-maneuever driving, something that Google is openly testing in the wild to prevent drunk driving, falling asleep at the wheel and road rage.

Everyday problems like finding and paying for the right tutor, paying $200 for cable each month and having to deal with car accidents will be fossil prints of a society that seemed so technologically advanced, yet had no concept of the exponential improvements they would soon realize. Steve Jobs’ final “one more thing” will be to revolutionize just a few more aspects of our lives before we hit an accelerated trajectory of technology we can’t yet even fathom… and that’s quite the legacy…