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In my Crystal Ball

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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