Making my technology predictions during the Chinese New Year celebration seems like it will be a lot easier than joining the crowd at the Western calendar's equivalent. Not only is there less competition, but I have the benefit of reading everybody else's before I do mine.
I find, though, that I have a distinctly different point of view (POV) than most prognosticators. There are two varieties that seem to predominate.
The first POV is that of the enterprise prognosticator, of whom some of the best I've seen are from the EDS Fellows' Blog, which made eight predictions for 2007 back in December, and in additional posts this year predicted that utility computing and the tablet PC
would come into their own. (I'm not sure if/how utility computing is
different from server virtualization, which was one of the original
eight, but let's not quibble.)
The other POV is gadget-oriented, of which my favorites (I did not say "best") are in the comments on Engadget's RFP (Request For Predictions) post. Let's call these folks the gadget geeks. There are some pearls to be found among the (as of today) 129 comments, but the consensus vision was that Apple would release a phone and a video iPod, of which the latter would suck (seriously), and on a more humorous note, these two:
*AT&T will screw over it's customers some how. [sic]
*An ISP will be caught not honoring net neutrality.
My POV is distorted by the education in human-computer interaction I've been getting in the Master's program at the University of Michigan School of Information and by my position as a kind of technology guru in clinical research informatics at the U-M Med School. I'll personally throw these three predictions into the fray.
- Serious Games, especially 3D Virtual Worlds, will start being taken seriously by mainstream academic health researchers. Check out the just-released Initial Batch of Presentations from Games for Health on the Games for Health blogsite, for more information.
- Haptic (tactile) interfaces: Related to the above, but with much wider implications, these interfaces will become mainstream, starting with the Nintendo Wii. The Wii mainly does haptic input, providing only vibrations as haptic output, but having now seen the Wii in action, I can see that it has great potential for serious games development. I won't say how in more detail, because I'd rather get funded first to work on the ideas I have before I announce them to the world.
- Social networking will become totally mainstream in academia, but will disappoint in some major ways. Maintaining a blog and participating in a wiki will become (in fact, already is becoming) a course requirement. This will lead to the discovery that writer's block and banality are two of the more common human ailments. I should know, I suffer from both on occasion.
The disappointments will go beyond quantity and quality of written works, though. An amazing discovery will come to light: blogs and wikis are actually Websites, and are prone as a consequence to suffer from the same information architecture woes as everyone else on the Web. It's as hard to design a usable blog or wiki as it is to design a usable e-commerce site.
That's all I can write for now, but I'm out of predictions in any case. We'll see how I did when the Second Annuals come around.
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