Steve Prentice

Following on from my post about my top picks from 2008, I promised to look forward to 2009. And since I am also resolving to blog more regularly …..

Firstly, I think 2009 is going to be the year of 3-D. I’ve been watching this space all of last year and it is a natural progression from the gestural computing that I observed progressing so much in 2008. I’m not talking about the fifties-style 3-D glasses, but something a little more sophisticated. We will see 3-D in computer gaming, in entertainment, on the desktop in dozens of different ways. The world may have been flat up to now, but things are going to get more interesting from here on out.

Secondly (and I have commented on this before) I think the combination of technology advancement, increasing user acceptance and the pressures arising from the current economic woes, will result in a big increase in the use (however unwillingly) of virtualised collaboration environments – everything from web conferencing through virtual worlds.  I suspect we will also see some progress towards virtual seminars/conferences – 2008 saw some experiments but 2009 will see a lot more I suspect.

Third I think 2009 is going to see a lot of smaller, less obtrusive computing environments. Some of these will be embedded into other systems (home entertainment for example) but also more netbooks (I was browsing down at the local office supplies store (how sad!) and almost ended up buying one recently – it was so cute and ridiculously inexpensive!). Do I need another notebook? Not really, but at that price it barely matters! The continuing fall in the price of solid state memory helps to fuel this trend (more SSD drives even for larger notebooks I expect) and it is going to be difficult to resist the coming generation of smartphones. At what point does a smartphone do the same job as a netbook? The other important element in this mix is the arrival of an application delivery mechanism like App Store and the wealth of applications that it makes available and accessible to non-technical users. This is an explosive cocktail of trends that will combine together very effectively.

Well, there we are (three is enough for now!). I’ll try to come back in 12 months and see how well I did!