Which is the hottest technology area around? This is the
time of the year, when such a question is bound to be asked-and the answers
could be many. In fact there are a number of areas where rapid strides can be
expected.
The first one that comes to mind is digital video. The last
few years were the years of audio and still graphics. The coming years will be
that of video, particularly video captured or delivered over handheld devices
like a cellphone or the Internet. High-quality video is already getting
integrated into Web pages and mobile devices are improving their video
capabilities day by day.
Talking of the Web, AJAX has taken the online development
world by storm, and we have only started exploring the immense possibilities
that it offers. This year could well turn out to be that of AJAX. PHP could
finally be coming of age in the enterprise application space and Ruby on Rails
is also being touted by many as a revolutionary new development.
But I would like to reserve my judgment, as it is still very early days
there.
On wireless, while there will be a lot of buzz around WiMax,
my feel is that it will be at least one more year before that technology goes
mainstream. Meanwhile, WiFi will continue to grow in momentum. But the killer
wireless technologies of the year could well be GPRS and packet technologies
over CDMA, with cellphones being used in large numbers to access the Internet
and even enterprise networks.
Community-content technologies are going to be another hot
area, with blogs, wikis and sites like digg and del.icio.us continuing the churn
in this space. Businesses will continue to be hard pressed on both ends, to
assimilate them into their business plans, and to control, challenge or even
limit their negative potential.
On the hardware front, the event to be most keenly watched
is not a new technology debut, but the launch of the MacOS on an Intel platform.
That one has intriguing possibilities on how the battle for the desktop might be
rejoined again.
Biometrics held out much promise on the security front, but
is yet to deliver the goods in large scale. There is no way of predicting
whether it will do so this year or not. My guess is that betting on the negative
is safer. Otherwise, social engineering and human errors will continue to be the
largest security threats.
Enterprises, large and small, would continue to struggle
with integrating the multiple systems that they have to run and with attempting
to get a single and true view of the data in their systems.
Another area of turbulence is going to be digital rights
management. Many more mis-steps, like the major one that Sony made this year,
should be par for the course as consumers and content providers engage in a
battle of wits to decide how much of content rights should be 'managed'.
Tech aside, while much ado has been made about
Nanotechnology, that area is still waiting for a major breakthrough, the first
production quality result and Biotechnology is making serious progress. But the
one where rapid progress is taking place is robotics. The last year saw robotics
starting to deliver on its promise and even as I write this piece, the news is
out that now we have robots that can differentiate between its own mirror image
and another robot like itself!
Krishna Kumar, Editor