h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Due to the nature of my work (geek) I’ve recently been going through the technology events last year, and the predictions for the year to come, and one thing really stands out amongst these.

Most people doing the reviews and the predictions are seriously detached from reality.

One person forecast that one of big things we’ll see this year is interactive shop displays. I normally respect this persons views on a lot of tech things. They usually seem to have their finger on the pulse. But with this one I can’t help but think that they should have done a five predictions for 2012 rather than sticking stuff like this in. Let’s expand upon that prediction though. For quite a few years now there’s been interactive shop displays. Most often in Estate Agents windows. A monitor inside, and a touch pad in the window that allows passers-by to browse through more properties for sale. So the idea itself isn’t new. However the prediction was forecasting that motion detector hardware would start to emerge here. Think of the film Minority Report where the displays “saw” the person walking by and interacted with them. With devices such as Microsoft’s Kinect this is actually now possible. You can now, or will soon, be able to plug these easily enough into a computer and have it do all this stuff. But there’s a bit of a problem with this idea, there aren’t enough developers out there yet who are actually able to code this stuff. You can get it done, but you’ll have to employ those few developers who can do it, and they’ll charge a lot. So is it worth it? Everybody’s cutting their marketing budgets, so there’s no real competition to do the next big marketing thing. So, while it’s *possible* I personally don’t think it’s likely. The pool of skills isn’t there to make it cheap enough.

A lot of people, in fact pretty much everyone, forecast that this year everyone who wants to actually make money through the web will get their developers to start using open APIs. An API is an Application Programming Interface. It allows lots of different sites and programmes to use the same bits of code or resources. A classic example of this is Google’s Maps. Lots of websites are able to put maps on their pages without having to actually sort out the images or the code that does all the panning and zooming etc. APIs allow for quick development, they mean a site can get up and running quickly. However what seems to have happened with all these predictions is that the quick and cheap development is being seen as a cost saving, but the reliance on a third party for a potentially business critical system is being overlooked for the same of saving a few hundred quid. Here’s an example, OpenDNS is one of the provider the link between website addresses and the actual computers they sit on. Earlier this week they had a problem with the servers hosting Google’s APIs, including the jQuery one. All of a sudden a lot of websites that used these APIs were being flagged up as phishing sites. Not great if you use one of these on your e-commerce site. You’d suddenly be losing a lot of business, and reputation.

Then there’s the aspect of privacy. Last year people started to realise that their idea of privacy on the internet was seriously out of synch with companies idea of privacy. Now, imagine what will happen when all those people who set all their privacy settings in Facebook (amongst others) to not share, not email, not make public, suddenly realise that the new ease of signing in they’ve found on other websites is because they’re actually signing in through a Facebook API, and Facebook are therefore able to not only track their use of that site, but of every site that uses that API. This is actually illegal in Europe but I can guarantee you it’s used.

So what’s my predictions for this year? It’s all well and good saying others are talking rubbish, but it’s a lot harder to do it yourself.
So, here they are:

The general public will start to become comfortable with technology. It’s no longer going to be a fad. People will stop just downloading the next big thing apps and will start being more selective.
The use of smart phones will rise. Older style phones have steadily been declining, but the use of touch screen and smart phones will increase rapidly. The last holdout is Blackberry, which is holding on to a market share through the “kids” using its free instant messenger server, however as more and more phone carriers start offering better data packages, the use of Skype and other applications will allow people to change the sort of phone they use, not being tied down to one manufacturer.

The other thing I see happening this year is lots companies making fools of themselves as they try to jump onto the “next big thing”, I think there’ll be several of these next big things that will all fail, leaving companies out of pocket and looking daft. This itself could also cause another dot com bubble.

I could also go on about how pretty much every website these days is “yet another WordPress site” and how this hars back to the older days of the net when every site was yet another Flash template. Between the constant use of WordPress, jQuery and APIs, there’s a potential for a lack of innovative development on the web. Thankfully though I think there’s enough development happening in the mobile side that we’ll hopefully not loose talent.

Interesting.

I'm looking for the IT sector to recover soon (so I can get a better job), but I can't predict what would cause it. I can't see the industrial economy improving by itself, so it would need to be a technology-led boom. We don't have the Millennium bug to fall back on, so it may just have to be smart applications.

Following Atos's decision to ban internal e-mail, I can see a boom in alternative collaborative technologies (Communicator, Skype, etc)

I think something like 50% of the UK population own a smartphone (I blogged about it, but can't find the article), so the death of dumb phones is probably a very astute prediction...

Well that's it, my predictions are just pointing out what I'm seeing happening, and how I think it'll continue through the next year

BBC News: New technologies unleashed at CES

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16469003