At the beginning of each year, Deloitte uncovers its TMT Predictions—that is, a forecasting of the top technology, media, and telecommunications trends that will be making a splash in the year to come. Since Deloitte Canada's Director of TMT Research Duncan Stewart debuted the annual predictions in 2001, the company's yearly findings have boasted the kind of accuracy a tech and media nut can't really ignore. So, this year, we paid attention.

Here are the top three Deloitte predictions we came away with:

3D printing will be the driving force behind a new industrial revolution.
The increased accessibility of 3D printing will level the playing field between large and small enterprise by allowing for rapid, affordable prototyping. Those expecting an era of “desktop factories,” however, are likely to be disappointed.

Millennials are hugely influential TMT consumers.
Big surprise: 18-34 year-olds are massively impactful consumers. But before your eyes roll dangerously far back into your ocular sockets from total non-surprise, consider that one of the media markets in which millennials flex top purchasing muscle is books. Yes, books—as in, the kind made of bound paper and ink. Millennials not only overwhelmingly prefer print books over e-books, but are willing to pay for them rather than pirate online or rent from a library. So, purists can rest assured that dead-tree media isn't going anywhere anytime soon. (Take that, Boomers!)

Hello, walletphone.
2015 will mark the “tipping point” for mobile payments, with more and more Canadians using their phones for smaller tap-and-pay purchases. By the end of the year, about five percent of the base of 600 million NFC equipped smartphones around the world will be used to make in-store NFC payments at least once per month. That sliver of the phone-owning population might not seem like a lot, but consider that less than half a percent of NFC equipped phones worldwide were used to make a monthly purchase as of mid-2014. That's a lot of growth in not a lot of time, which suggests that the trend will continue to snowball. Also, nobody likes wallets, anyway.