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....