As we trudge through the final days of what has been anything but an uneventful year and start to look ahead in anticipation of an uplifting 2010, I want to reflect a bit on bits and pieces happening in the world of technology.
What we've had till now!
We are starting to have quite an interesting time since a lot of things we grew up with are fast becoming outdated and getting past there "best by" dates. My friends at The Huffington Post list voice phone calling, newspaper classified ads, dial-up internet, encyclopedias, compact discs (CDs), land-line phones, film (and film cameras), yellow pages & address books, catalogs, fax machines, wires (as in cabling etc) and hand written letters as things that became
obsolete this decade due to the rapid adoption (mostly in the developed world I might say) of innovations from text messaging and email to wikipedia, mobile phones, music downloads and of course digital cameras.
The guys at Mashable reckon that the real-time web matured in 2009 and will only get bigger and more essential in 2010. Twitter’s domination of the space has meant that a lot of the new real-time services out there are not as visible even though some of them are serving millions of people already. To help give some idea of what to expect in 2010, they give a roundup of what they consider thefive most exciting general applications of the concept in 2009, and give examples of each:
- Real-Time Results from Google
- Aggregating News As It Happens from PubSubHubbub
- Real-Time Social from Facebook + FriendFeed
- Real-Time on the Go from Cuil and BNO News
- Collaboration Without Delay from Google Wave
A YouTube video suggesting that face recognition cameras installed in HP laptops cannot detect black faces has had over one million views and caused HP to take the matter of their so called Racist computers serious enough to investigate with their partners.
The rising fortunes of Cloud Computing over the past few years has Gartner predicting that "The market for cloud products and services to increase from $46.4 billion to $150.1 billion in 2013". Even though many of us have heard of it, but only a few actually understand what it is and, fewer still how it can benefit them, Mark Anderson of BusinessWeek predicts a big remote-computing service disaster (read Cloud) for 2010
What's coming in 2010?
Last year I talked about my three favorite expectations for 2009. Next year the three I quite like that seem to be on the cards are:
- Pedestrian Detection for Cars - Volvo has actually devised a system to prevent pedestrian accidents from taking place and it will be available in a matter of months
- Slimline OLPC or the Apple Tablet? - either way expect to see slimline touchscreen tablet PCs starting to creep into corporate and education technology use.
- V-Phone - Verizon will be selling a two-way video-conferencing phone called the VPhone by Saygus which CNet say may outshine its brother, the Droid, and its rival, the iPhone.
What we really want?
In case you think we have it all or you've seen it all, there so much more to come its unbelievable. Fortunately for you and I, we have
Mary Bellis tracking Future Technology while a Layperson's View of Future Technology and Society is revealed in The Art of the Possible.Here's wishing you a fulfilling 2010!