The year this will be (2005)... from a tech perspective

I have some predictions for 2005 (half of these are not predictions. They are facts, but you know, it feels great to play the foresighted, once in a while..)

• We would see a start in the movement of core PDA functionality, centered on personal information management, to other devices such as cell phones. Mobility solutions would start encompassing cell phone based solutions as well in addition to handhelds and tablets.
• Increased use of voice interfaces to personal information management applications hosted on PDAs and cell phones. With improved voice recognition engines (Latest version of Dragon Naturally speaking claims 99% accuracy) and technologies like VXML, this is only a matter of time.
• Computer chips continue to fail in following the ‘doubling power in 18 months’ kind of growth (Moore’s law). The interesting connotation here for solution developers is that we need to mend our ways and start optimizing our code and addressing concurrent processing. There is an interesting article a friend had sent me, which every one of us should read. Try http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm )
• EJB 3.0 could improve EJB’s lost ground in software market All you java brethren, get hold of EJB 3.0 specs and start trying out various appserver implementations of the same.
• Release of Visual Studio 2005 could revolutionize the way we develop software solutions Beta is already available. If you are a Dot Net engineer and you haven’t tried it out by now, God help you!!
• VOIP will capture a large chunk of the Telephony Market
• Wireless broadband to continue growth…more cities to get fully Wi-fi enabled. Hopefully security concerns get addressed this year. Wi-Fi or otherwise, application developers need to get our knowledge and understanding of security of the ground; what with 21 CFR Part 11 etc.!!!

This list is in no way exhaustive. But it shows us that technology is changing by the minute and we probably have some insight into what is cooking. The question here is, what we are doing about it?

The year that was (2004)...from a tech perspective

The year 2004 was quite significant from the Information Technology front. Some of the achievements/trends (small and large) we saw last year are:

• Internet 2 reaching a speed of 6.63 GBPS between CERN in Europe and Caltech in USA transferring 859 GB in less than 17 minutes
  You know what that means? Some time into the future we need to think about applications, which make use of such speeds. Otherwise, our solutions would look like a black and white 2D movies running in color 3D theatres!
• Intel funded ISR (internet Suspend/Resume) project achieved some milestones.
  Internet Suspend/Resume (ISR) is a new approach to mobile computing in which a user's computing environment follows the user through the Internet as he or she travels. Today, when a laptop computer is closed/hibernated, the user's execution state is suspended to disk. When the user moves the laptop to a new physical location, the user may re-open the laptop, and resume working in the same environment that was active at the time of suspend. The goal of the ISR project is to achieve the same effect without requiring the user to transport physical hardware. (Intel)
• RFID technology gained significant ground
  Infact newer and newer uses of this technology are being thought out every day. The success in the RFID area seems to be in identifying niche areas and providing solutions. Infact Gartner thinks RFID is one of the ten technologies to watch in 2005. Frankly I do not seeraction this year despite efforts especially by leading retailers
• XQuery got final touches at W3C and is likely to replace SQL for XML databases
  This is one technology area none of us can claim to be oblivious of. If you do not know more about this already, use Google today itself.
• Search became personal with Google Desktop
  Be aware of the security issues before using it. I do not think it is enterprise class yet. Mind you, Microsoft is catching up fast on this.
• Digital Music became cool with iPOD
  A great lesson on identifying the right business model. MP3 and music downloads were actually bad news for the music industry with Napster clones around. But iPOD business model has changed some of these technologies to a boon.

I have some predictions for 2005 but let that be in the next post....

The Big Bang

No that is not true...This is not meant to be a big bang. This is to be expected to be a painful process of building brick by brick...creating my own blog. I have named it 'Dr. Ashok on Technology'. That is not really true if you are a purist in defining the term 'technology'. Because I intend to put my ideas and thoughts on anything under the sun here. So pardon me if you fell for the 'Technology' part. Let me tell you, most of it will be anyway relating to technology.

Then the question arise..'What do I know of Technology?'. To tell the truth, I do not know much. But I have an open mind and I can appreciate it. In other words, if I see somebody standing on the road shouting 'Beam me up', I will not consider him bonkers.

That is pretty much it...let me start blogging

Ashok