Making IT happen in the coming year
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It is time to see what lies ahead for a `connected' world
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INFOBALL: Ambient devices' orb changes colour to reflect changing information trends on the web.
FOR THOSE who can afford to give away New Year gifts at Rs. 7000 ($ 150) a go, one popular idea for 2 years now, has been a white plastic ball made by a Cambridge (Massachusetts, U.S.) company, Ambient Devices.
It's called the Orb — but it's no ordinary spheroid. It can be wirelessly configured to track any trend that the Internet monitors: your portfolio of stocks, the number of emails you are receiving, the weather in your home town, the traffic on your route home — or whatever is meaningful for you.
Programmed to glow
The orb is programmed to glow and change colour in response to the changing trends of the information you are tracking. In its default setting it monitors the Dow Jones Industrial average ...green if the average is up, yellow if the market is stable, red if is a bad day for stocks and shares.
It's called `calm computing', a form of `glanceable' technology that gives a familiar physical form to information from cyberspace — and it is typical of today's challenge to make sense of data mountains — and convert them into meaningful mounds of useful information.
This is the time of the year when analysts, dust another type of orb — a crystal ball — which hopefully predicts upcoming technology trends for both industry, and the rest of lay users of the Internet who currently make up 17 percent of the world's population at around 1 billion.
It is this one billion, whom Time Magazine has honoured as its Person of the Year in its upcoming year-end issue with a cover featuring a piece of mylar, mirroring the face of the reader and saying: "Yes you. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world".
The nameless lay users of the Net are cited for " seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros as their own game".
Web resources like My Tube, My Space and Wikipedia, which have been used by ordinary people to share their thoughts, pictures and videos, asking nothing in return.
In the process they have brushed aside conventional news and information sources, and substituted their own 'take' on everything that happens around them.
The Internet was born 15 years ago — and came to India some three years later. The proportion of Indians having access to the Internet is still rather small — it is roughly estimated to be between 50 and 60 million.
Sharing connection
Exact numbers are difficult to get because 4 or 5 persons in India typically share a single connection.
But the power of the (connected) people was still manifest a few months ago when thousands of angry mails forced the Indian government to quickly reverse a ham- handed attempt to gag a number of blogging sites, citing anti national content.
What does 2007 have in store for them? The insights that follow, have been gleaned by a careful scanning the Usual Suspects among industry experts, who issue global technology predictions every year at this time.
Message Labs, a leading provider of secure messaging systems says financially motivated attacks on individuals and corporate networks, committed for bucks rather than kicks, are slated to rise, affecting 75 per cent of all businesses.
The coming year will see a `convergence' between spam, viruses and spy ware with instant messages (IM) like Yahoo and MSN, as well as social network sites like my Space becoming bigger targets. Look out for "Geek spam"— use of technology buzzwords hidden in the body of the spam to dupe traditional anti-spam tools.
In its exercise in future speak, IDC predicts a `hyperdisruption' in 2007, "as IT market leaders step up their relentless hunt for growth", software is becoming a service, service offerings becoming a software, and the "lakshman rekha", between consumer and corporate technologies and strategies becoming blurred. Virtualization — the big buzzword of 2006, will continue to drive developments next year as users spread their risk and their investment by ditching the silo-like structures that servers and storage used to resemble.
Another IDC prediction: the hyper growth area in the IT business will continue to be BRIC — Brazil, Russia, India, China — but it may be time to look `beyond BRIC', at emerging Asian nations, the southern cone of Latin America, the Middle East and NEW (North, East, West) Africa. For India the message is clear: don't get too complacent; the competition is building up.
Emerging trend
The global technology services company EDS in its own take on what chief executives need to know for a Happy New IT year, points to the emerging trend known as Cloud Computing — the idea that all your data and programmes should be out there in a `cloud' on the Internet, and you really only need a browser and access at your end.
They used to call this by more boring names in 2006 — like `managed services' or software as a service'. EDS also thinks mobility device technology will sort of flatten out in 2007 — because users will ask for better battery life and human interfaces with the technology they already have.
ANAND PARTHASARATHY
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