Attention is being paid to such things as green-technology, alternative energy, mobile technology, and RFID. As we approach the start of 2008, what other technology areas should we watch, develop, and/or invest?

Wow. This is an interesting and really tough question. I can think of 100 different things, but if I had to boil it down, we have been talking about convergence of different technologies year over year for many years, but 2008 really is setup to be prime time for vendors to actually rationalize many of their technology plays and reduce the chaos into technology that makes sense. Take a look at Amazon's Kindle for example, all made possible due to simultaneous confluences of storage, telecommunications and other technologies.

The “culmination” of a number of different technology advancements is the production of a new and useful technology to read digital books. Similar examples can be found in the ASUS EeePC, and many of the latest gadgets and gizmos from iPhones, the LG Venus and other devices that “bring together” a number of different technologies into “one device” that is “easy” to use.

In a broader sense, 2008 should give us acceleration in the hop, skip and a jump philosophy. At each layer in the technological landscape we need to see advancements, then each tier above the foundation has to figure out how to take advantage of the improvement, and take it to market.

If we go back a decade to the first RIM devices, original Blackberry’s did not contain many technological advancement for their time-as a matter a-fact they used the same packet switch network that our good old fashion pagers that we have for the previous decade - but underlying improvements in server reliability at lower price points in the corporate space, mail platform delivery systems from major manufacturers, and some fine ergonomic design created a new era in mobile computing from “component” pieces that have been around but needed to converge and come together.

What we’ll see in 2008 should be much of the same but much more accelerated because many major "underlying" technologies are under going rapid improvements. So there should be a shortening of the “cycle” between improvements in the most fundamental underlying technologies, which are the longest-major improvements to a protocol for example–these are the most widely deployed and the slowest to evolve–and the convergence of component pieces.

When you look at such drastic reduction in price points for storage, increased density, smaller form factors, better power consumption, higher bandwidth and easier delivery on the telecom side, greater reliability, faster cheaper application development, more software component re-use across platforms, easier porting across platforms and genres of devices, build once run anywhere-including any breed of telephone, etc.

All of this should culminate into hopefully, more useful technologies other than "gadgets". RFID is another major player that you mentioned, that will evolve past supply chain management and inventory control and start saving lives!

The corporate market front is challenged simply with data overload.

Common sense hasn’t prevailed and won’t for sometime, and the phenomenon is simple. My builder added a hundred square feet to my closet space, I have a bigger closet, so I fill it up with more clothes.

The price of 1-storage goes down, 2-cheaper to deploy, 3-easier to manage, etc.-Those 3 are different technologies coming together to make the whole better. So common sense dictates that I go from terabytes to petabytes. The trend to "keep more" started in the eCom era, with transactional data, but as I now carry 10gb on a few thumb-drives in my brief-case–its definitely one of these areas where a confluence and rationalization will have to appear in the horizon in order to get some sanity around the accumulation of "unstructured" data–its definitely green-field territory for technology innovations around Search (ie. Google and others), applications and storage.

We should also see more Cloud type technologies (ie. Amazon yet again) develop into real purposeful applications.

Ok, what was the question again?

Good Luck,
Peter
November 2007

* http://eeepc.asus.com/en/
* http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000FI73MA/ref=pd_sl_aw_manual-1_kin...
* http://www.csi1000.com