Once again, we ask some of the bright folks on the region’s science and tech scene to highlight things to look out for in 2012, and make some wild predictions about what might emerge from the mist. John Hill reports.

PEOPLE shouldn’t be made to predict things. It rarely ends well. It takes a cold, black heart to force people to make solid statements about vague shapes they can barely see through the fog. And you’ve got to be a complete sadist to ask them to do it in a newspaper.

Of course, one good thing about the predictions game is that it’s a bit like releasing balloons into the sky, in that you can pretty much forget about them coming back to haunt you.

That noise you can hear is the sound of my evil cackling, by the way.

Meet Nick Reavill. He’s the co-creator of online store builder Super Simple Shop and insulting to-do list manager Do It Idiot. And he’s looking to create a web app that allows people to check back on what predictions have been made in the media, and how well they turned out.

“I don’t have anything against predicting things, but it’s so easy to make a whole lot of predictions these days because they won’t necessarily get checked out”, he says.

“Often, the only time you’ll hear about them again is when the person is crowing about having got one right.”

At the moment, www.punditspredict. com features a box or two where you can input data on the pundit, link to the prediction, and add a “time horizon” when it’s worth checking back to see if it came true.

At some point in the first few months of 2012 (that’s a prediction, by the way), he will use this information to create a web app which will assign pundits a score based on the importance of their predictions and how accurate they are, and allow people to search by pundit and by events.

“We’ll be looking at a range of areas, from the Oscars to the Olympics”, he says.

“It’s something I wanted to make, for my own interest as much as anything. A lot of predictions can be extremely influential to people, especially in current affairs and politics. If people are making lots of wild predictions and getting them wrong, it will be interesting to have a way to check that.”

Of course, we wouldn’t be so mean as to pass the predictions you’re about to read onto Nick, would we?

For a start, that would be extremely unfair to generous folk such as Plan Digital founder Paul Lancaster, who sent over a wedge of interesting predictions so large that you could squash a car under them.

Lancaster predicts further leaps for political activism and citizen journalism through apps like Bambuser, which allows live video streaming from your mobile.

He also says workers will increasingly become mobile as developments in Cloud storage give them more freedom.

However, co-working spaces will be more in demand as they crave interaction with others. He expects people with strong social networks to be increasingly in demand from companies looking to spread the word, while he’s backing the Windows Phone and Nokia partnership to be “a huge success for both companies”.

Oh, and he’s tipping South Shields singer-songwriter Lulu James to be “the name on everyone’s lips this time next year”, calling her a cross between Grace Jones and Rhianna”.