Category: Technology Trends

Technology in 2010

Combine consumer devices, the cloud and great software and you can expect many interesting innovations in 2010.

(“Birds” from Soffia. Taken in Rijoa Spain – visit soffia.net)

This is the time of year to look back and reflect on the past, and it is also time to look forward. Here are some technology trends that I believe will be important in 2010:

The cloud will continue to grow as it has for some years. More services will be offered and we will see some maturity of these services. What was once only available with installed software becomes available from remote servers. In 2009, it seems that every site was to offering APIs. This will continue but the challenge for 2010 is to make use of these APIs.

The growing market of hosted solutions will also attract more players. I would not be surprised if some of the traditional computer and software companies enter the game and offer some hosting services.

Among the hottest cloud services will be digital content management like for music and TV, with books also picking up. We have seen how the internet is swallowing all markets that produce digital content and this will continue. So far content services have been scattered and limited in functionality. However, the software for arranging digital content is going to be very important, as we have seen what iTunes does for the iPod, so we could expect some interesting innovations in how to use services that offer digital content.

But software is not enough. I would expect to see some really cool hardware for “content experience” or home entertainment boxes, with great software in the box but primarily built to utilize the cloud. And I’m not talking about a low-end, slow and frustrating STB. I’m thinking real computers dressed up as special purpose consumer devices. Granted, there are already many boxes available, but my guess is that we have room for cool innovations in the design of the services these products offer. The real challenge is in the software and the use of the cloud, but also in the way these service get distributed on multiple home devices or screens within the home. I believe there is room for improved services and someone will take that market opportunity in 2010.

Home entertainment is also about games. We have seen innovation in input controls pioneered by the Wii. This spurred a new category of games. Microsoft has done lot of research in both surface technologies and in projects like Natal which allows input with motion detection. Both these technologies will be important in gaming.

Another factor driving the use the cloud is how people access it. Consumer devices like netbooks, e-readers, and smartphones will drive the need for cloud based services. We are also likely to see tablet devices reenter the market. This is supported by the Apple Tablet rumors. Tablets are not new. Microsoft tried to push them few years back but they did not take off. What could make the difference now is how input and display technologies have improved, in particular touch screen, as well as the ubiquitous network access and cloud services. If Apple or other computer manufactures were to release a tablet, something like an oversize iPod Touch, we could see tablets (or computers that are basically the screen) enter the market as an addition to the popular netbook.

Tablets could make the e-reader market interesting. This market started to take off in 2009 and will continue, but the big question is if special or dedicated devices will win. Some believe that people will want a special reading device while others claim that people don’t read and will want a more generic device. Another outcome is that both will prevail, and the special reading device will tailor to a select group that is passionate about reading.

One  of the things that could make tablets a success is the ubiquitous network access. Today we have wireless networks, your WiFi and wireless phone networks. These will merge into the same set of standards. Your phone will use WiFi and your computer will use 3G or 4G, depending on which is available. We will see this start to unfold in 2010 but it might take longer time for seamless experience.

Augmented Reality generated some hype in 2009 but we will see more applications popping up in 2010. Mobile phone applications will be the perfect medium since many of them have web cameras and geo-location capabilities. But I would not be surprised to see totally new types of usages that will fit into this category.

AR is all about building some intelligence into our everyday live. Another field where intelligence is needed is in robotics. whether it’s in 2010 or later, but the robotics revolution will eventually move into the consumer space. We have already seen some interesting toys with robotic capabilities and this will be an interesting market, although it is very price sensitive and with low profit margins.

In other less glamorous fields of technology, battery technology will finally see some significant improvements. This is driven by rise of consumer devices and also by electronic vehicles.

These are some of the issues that I think will be important in 2010. However this develops, I think in 2010 we will see great number of new innovations. It seem that we are at some tipping point in cool consumer technologies. With great devices, software using state of art user experience design, and cloud services we can expect to see some cool products this year.

The Year 2009 in Technology

Cartoon from MIEL Singapore Times (source: Slate Magazine)

Although 2009 will mostly be remembered by economic turmoil and banking crisis, recession and unemployment, it was still an interesting year in technology. I have compiled, in some unspecified order, some of the technological developments that I found interesting over the year.

This was the year when Google got some serious competition in search when Microsoft announced Bing. It was the year of operating system releases. Windows 7 and Apple Show Leopard got great reviews, but the lines didn’t make it around the corner.

More interestingly, 2009 was the year of consumer devices: netbooks and e-book readers. Both of these caused some disruptions. The netbook follows the same path as the PC did. In the early days, the PC was low-cost, low-end, not very powerful machine. Compared to the more powerful Minis, it was not very impressive and many people dismissed it as a serious competition. Now the netbooks are causing similar reactions. People dismiss them since they are limited and not very powerful. Yet they have found their market share and have opened up a convenient way to access all the cloud-based services on the Internet.

The year marks the beginning of digital books. With convenient e-book devices like Amazon’s Kindle, the Sony reader and the Nook, more people are discovering the convenience of accessing and reading books in digital format. The accessing part is key. With services like Amazon, the on-line access and convenience of getting the books provides value. This marks the beginning of the book disruption.

The cloud continued to evolve in the year 2009. As more services become available on-line, old business models suffer. Microsoft posted its worst outcome in April. Sale of business and office software dropped. The always-on connectivity of the Internet is changing the game. Indeed Microsoft has put much more emphasis on the cloud.

Related to the cloud is the availability of APIs. It seems that each and every web site is offering third party developers the opportunity to develop apps on top of their services.

Even hard-core video games turned to the cloud. OnLive introduced its service at the GDC in San Francisco in March 2009. Games on Demand. If you can play FPS games over the network, pretty much any digital content can be made available.

Google continued to surprise the world. Two products are noteworthy. Google announced Chrome OS, a new and simpler operating system. Interestingly, I have found that most of the news articles that talk about this, doubt the idea of simpler, just-for-the-web type of OS. I think they miss the point. For many consumers, the important thing is the web and the cloud services. For this you don’t need a complex OS. Chrome OS or similar systems won’t replace Windows or MacOS, they will be an addition to the market.

Google Wave also drew lots of attention but even more skeptics. Crossing e-mail with instant messaging and on-line editing sounds interesting but we still need to see the wave taking off. I find it hard to see Wave replace e-mail or IM, but it might move some collaboration communication and shared editing to a new format. But the idea of disrupting e-mail sounds interesting.

Social media was perhaps the thing that got the most general interest in 2009. We saw more applications of crowdsourcing, a term that become popular in 2009. Another aspect of the web that made headlines was the real-time nature of the web. When Michael Jackson died, people all over the world turned to the Internet. Google even suspected an attack. And again Twitter made the headlines.

2009 was also an interesting year in mobile. I still believe that mobile has yet to take off with some interesting applications. Part of this is the interesting phenomena, the Apple App store. Most other phone vendors rush to get their own app store out. While apps in the Apple App store crossed 100.000, every mobile vendor was introducing their own store. Needless to say, they were all different.

But if anything was different in the mobile world it was Android. Google introduced the open source phone OS and the first phones started to appear. So far, it still remains to be seen if Android takes off.

2009 also marked few birthdays. The Mac turned 25 in January. The Web turned twenty in March. And the Internet turned forty.

Technology Trends: The Future of Magazines

Printed magazines are declining. Earlier this year I put printed newspapers on my Technology Death List. Magazines are suffering the same fate. As ad revenues are declining, partly due to the recessions, and the subscription base is shrinking for some (see A Graphic History of Magazine Income Over the Last Decade). The reasons is simple. The Internet is taking over some roles of the magazines, as people increasingly prefer the net as a medium. But if you take the distribution channel away and look at magazines as content, there is no reason magazines can’t survive in a new digital networked world. If fact magazines might even be reinvented in the new medium.

Now Time magazine has given us a preview of what the future might be (see Demo of Time Inc.’s Manhattan Project). Future, as in next year, that is:

The year 2010 will likely be the year of the netbook tablet, something like an oversize iPod Touch with a 10″ or 13″ screen (see For 2010, IDC Predicts an Apple iPad and Battles in the Cloud). Devices like this will be perfect for reading newspapers and magazines.

I wrote about book disruption in a previous post. One conclusion I came to was that new forms of story telling might show up. Interactive mediums offer much more opportunities than a liner restrictions of a book (or a magazine). Maybe this is the way for newspapers and magazines to reinvent themselves in the new digital channel.