I was in the departure terminal at Heathrow airport when I received a call to do this feature. The first thing I did was to trudge with my hand baggage and laptop to a Wifi hotspot to initiate research on the Net. You must be thinking how this is relevant. You’ll understand when I tell you that this was not possible five years back. Technology has made life so easy that we don’t bother anymore. It’s with this simple truth that I write about the new technologies in store for us in 2007. I will give you a sense of some trends and changes, and how they will affect our lives. I will also give you a few predictions. Just don’t clobber me at the end of the year if I am wrong. That’s the nature of technology—it does not send e-mail alerts before changing path and form. It does it while we are sleeping.
The hot new space, Personal Technology, will see a lot of action in the form of cool gadgets and gizmos. Mobile phone firms will be the torchbearers in this arena, coming out with handsets which have more and more features—like integrated hard drives, multi-megapixel cameras, MP3 players, video recorders and health monitors. Mobiles will become the ultimate convergence medium with voice, data, audio and video all coming together in a pocket-sized device. The future seems unbelievable.
Take, for example, Nokia’s 888 concept phone. It may not hit the shelves this year but you have to see it to believe it. The bracelet-like 888 will use a liquid battery, feature speech recognition, a flexible touchscreen and a touch-sensitive body which will change physical structure as per your moods. The potential features include an alarm clock, PDA, GPS, phone, push e-mail receiver, digital wallet and, of course, jewellery. Digital cameras are next in line. Kodak’s V610 has a 10x optical zoom with no lens sticking in and out—that’s dual-lens technology for you. More and more cameras will use this innovation and we will see thinner and more powerful cameras this year. Engineers at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) have built a powerful yet ultra-thin digital camera by folding up the telephoto lens. This technology may yield lightweight, ultra-thin, high-resolution miniature cameras for unmanned surveillance aircraft, cellphones and infrared night vision applications.
Is the 16GB Flash-based full-video iPod the app to die for in ’07?
Portable music players will become smaller and sleeker this year. Every manufacturer worth its salt will try to come up with the next iPod killer, but Apple will continue to woo us with a new generation of iPods each time. Rumour has it that there are three new babies due this year. One of them could be the 16GB Flash-based full-video iPod.
On the PC front, hardware will continue to get more powerful and less expensive. We’ll see more laptops sold as they become cheaper every day. Experts think that laptops will sell as many as desktops in volume terms this year. Storage and processing power will increase inversely proportional to physical size. Did someone mention Moore’s Law? And we may see laser-based storage this year with Inphase Technologies announcing the first Holographic Versatile Disc (HVD) that can store 300 GB of data and is 10 times faster than a DVD.
The entertainment industry will also have much to shout about. With new and improved peer-to-peer, streaming and podcast technology, upcoming bands and artistes won’t have to spend to make themselves heard. The Net will provide them the medium. We will see a shift to legal downloads with announcements like Warner Brothers distributing movies through BitTorrent or Apple iTunes Movie Store. TV will be the last to join the online bandwagon with IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) on its way. If you didn’t know, BSNL is conducting an IPTV pilot in Pune, MTNL in New Delhi and Airtel in Gurgaon, and commercial services will commence by the end of the year. Digital content distribution will reach new heights with streaming music, movies on download, TV on demand and of course the Net, thus achieving ultimate convergence.
The Internet itself will evolve and help in further changing social dynamics. Social networking will continue to shape the way we interact with our fellow human beings with the likes of YouTube, Myspace and Orkut. Social scientists will form a core part of the workforce of these companies as they come up with new and interesting albeit controversial features like the Orkut Crush-Alert. It allows you to send someone a message that you have a crush on that person. Only if that person feels the same way and sends you a similar message will both come to know of it. No longer do young people have to wait to muster the courage to say those words out aloud.
"Actualisation of Personalisation will be the new business area for web companies," says Kathy Johnson of Consort Partners, a Silicon Valley-based firm that advises start-ups targeting the so-called Web 2.0 space. What this means is that web firms will find new ways to mine and make money out of the information generated by these online communities. So don’t be surprised if you receive discounts on your new car even before you reach the showroom. You may have scrapped about it on Orkut to your friend and this information will be available in the public domain.
The other big area on the Net will be Virtualisation. Concepts like the moka5 LivePC will decide how users use software in the future. LivePCs are virtual PCs that you can create and share. A LivePC encompasses an operating system and a complete set of software determined by the publisher of the LivePC. moka5 is designed to be installed on a PC or USB Flash Drive. It is intended to run programs without installation. All you need is access to the Internet. No licence costs, which will bring down software piracy.
Gaming will be the second largest electronic industry after core software development. This year, expect a newer, meaner and more realistic gaming experience on the PC, console and mobile phone. The release of DirectX10 along with Vista should also prompt some of the more dedicated gamers to finally get out and grab a new video card that can take advantage of the platform. That might not happen until the next generation of cards since most games taking advantage of DX10 aren’t due out till later in the year, but it will happen. The console wars will leave you panting with the PS3, Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii all vying for your attention.
High-definition TVs will become cheaper and better
The Wii remote, also called ‘Wiimote’, introduces the new motion- sensing capability which allows the user to interact with and manipulate items on screen via movement and pointing, as well as its expandability through the use of attachments. Also expected are 3D games on the mobile phone as the devices pack in more hardware to support gaming. Besides Nokia’s next generation N-Gage, there’s been a lot of talk within the mobile games industry about ‘native’ gaming—games which use the raw power of your mobile’s innards rather than running on top of the Java platform. If you’ve got a Symbian or Windows Mobile handset, for example, there’ll be more and better games coming out in glorious 3D for it.
Two names that will shine bigger and brighter in 2007 are Google and Linux. Both are household names already and thus we take them for granted. But Linux and the open source movement are gathering momentum faster than we thought. Last year, Microsoft, which had shunned the concept, announced a partnership with Novell (the second largest Linux player) to promote Linux. It just shows that the software giant has realised its mistake and is getting ready to sail.
The future is open source. And one company you need to watch closely is Red Hat, the current numero uno. With driver support for all available desktop hardware, Red Hat Linux is just a download away from removing Mr Gates’ legacy from your home PCs. Pick up any computer magazine on the stands in any given month and you will find one Linux distribution on the free CD or DVD. And it’s not only hardware support. Linux distributions like Red Hat come bundled with every possible alternative to Windows-based software that you will ever need. Thus the average Joe can sleep a lot easier at night as he is no longer involved in software piracy. This is great news for fund-strapped schools in India as computer literacy can be cheaper and fun with Linux. More and more institutions will move towards Linux and open source in 2007, thus adding fuel to the movement.
Kodak’s V610 has a 10x optical zoom, but with no lens sticking out. Thinner is better in ’07.
If I were to make a prediction here, one of the software biggies will put in a bid to acquire Red Hat this year. I won’t be surprised if it’s Google, which brings us to the other big name of 2007. Google had ceased to be only an online search company a long time ago. It’s nothing less than a phenomenon today. For the uninitiated, just click on the little ‘More>’ button over the search text box on the Google homepage and you will know what I am talking about. Loads and loads of new features are creeping up in the background without any announcements.
2007 will probably see the release of Google’s GDrive service. GDrive will provide anyone (who trusts Google with their data) a universally accessible network share that spans across computers, operating systems and even devices. It would become a network drive in your My Computer. Bear in mind that this will just be an extension of Gmail—get the first GB free, pay for the rest. Then there is GoogleTV (Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt has mentioned his interest in TV several times). Google is reportedly in talks with Apple for partnering with their new iTV product that should be out this year. Google will probably also release its Medical Scrapbook this year, revolutionising the way the medical world uses personal health records.
And then there’s Google Checkout which will probably become the Paypal killer app this year. India will play a significant part in Google’s plans. Visit the official Google Blog and you will see several Indian developers in the forefront of innovation. Though it may not happen this year, I assure you that a GooglePC is in the works. That’s where its bid for Red Hat will figure. Rumour is ripe in Googleland about ‘Fensi’—which could easily be Google’s OS. Linux will definitely be the platform of choice on this one.
This is what Google is telling us. What it is not telling us is its ultimate plan to take over the world. Oh, and Mars and Moon too. Google has entered into an agreement with NASA for advancing its Google Maps platform to include these two heavenly bodies. Be prepared to see real-time temperature and climate information for any point on these two soon.
All said and done, 2007 promises to be another year that technology changes your life. For better or for worse, you decide. I hope you enjoy reading the rest of the package as much as we enjoyed putting it together. Before I sign off, I must mention that my friends from the EDGE send their wishes and assure you with caution that technology will rule your life a little more this year, and the next and next. The geek shall inherit the Earth (and Mars, if Google has its way). May the source be with you!
(Raunak Roy works with a major software development company in Pune and dabbles in freelance technology writing)
