5 breakthrough technologies that will go mainstream in 5 years

This is my list of 5 technologies that you probably don’t know about yet, and that will go mainstream in less then 5 years. I’d like to check back here in 5 years to see just how right (or wrong) I am.

1. Online rendered games

OTOY delivers server based live rendering. That is a cool thing that can enable live playing of console games that you don’t own. Of course it can also be used more professionally by e.g. architects and film makers.

video

2. Peer to peer hosting

Opera recently announced Opera Unite, their server-less website technology. Although it may not be Opera itself that brings this mainstream, it will certainly change the world. Currently websites are all hosted and delivered by servers not owned by ourselves. The middleman known as ISP will always be in between, charging for services, blocking stuff at will, and basically controlling our behavior on the internet. We (that is everyone) don’t like this, and it needs to change. P2P (peer-to-peer) technology like BitTorrent is key to this, but only supports file sharing. What is needed is web-sharing. Opera Unite is still very beta and techie, but once a “publish button” is available, that could well change. You don’t need Flickr to share pictures with friends, really. But we do need powerful technology like PHP, Java, .NET to be integrated. Javascript alone doesn’t make for the most interesting sites.

3. Augmented reality

It will take a bit longer than just software, but the world is advancing fast to a point where we can start using this. Simply glasses with small screens on the inside will work. GPS in your phone and netbook help to render relevant scenes laid over the exact location you are at. “Assisted reality” may be the first step: point your phone to a product and see it’s specifications, price comparison etc directly on your phone’s screen.

Wikipedia article

4. Flexible displays

This is another one that I envision to arrive on the market soon (a couple of years). You just roll up your e-reader, or roll it out of your netbook. It’s already for sale.

5. Online software development

Sites like topcoder, guru, but especially oDesk will become the trend. But the people you hire will not be unknown to you. Through social networking, virtual presence and web cams they will be much more part of the company then just outsiders. This will require a change in culture though. Currently people are quite ’scared’ of showing their face to someone on the other side of the Ocean. But just like social networking it will grow quickly.

Things that will go unnoticed

• social networks – ok, they’ve already made it, but they will not change drastically, and you notice a fatigue starting in everyone who has had the facebook rush for a while. The close circle of friends will continue, but 900 friends? C’mon. Facebook/twitter will end up in Google’s or Microsofts hands anyway.
• Google wave – It’s the marriage of IM, picture album, bulletin board and email. I believe it actually will take over as the next version of GMail, but it will not be much more than that.
• Wolfram Alpha – one of the latest hypes. Ultimately just one of the places people may go to to find answers. Will probably be bought by Google anyway.

I had no place for it on the list, and it may take more then 5 years, but solar power will also make it, eventually (within 10 years).

sIFR reloaded

 

sIFR

sIFR (scalable inman flash replacement for the outsiders) is a technique to embed custom fonts in a webpage. You know, traditionally web pages can only show a couple of fonts reliably – the ubiquitous Arial, Times, and a couple of others.

 

When sIFR was introduced I was pretty psyched out about it. Showing any font, and still accessible, selectable, etc. However, it’s giving me nothing but headaches. Let’s recap some of those:

• sIFR needs Flash. At a certain point there was a security issue and I had to disable Flash. No more sIFR.
• Lots of people block Flash, because of the ads. 
• Special characters weren’t showing. It appeared my font didn’t even have these defined. Well that’s not sIFR to blame, but still
• It’s almost doing a good job presenting the CSS correctly. Almost.
• Documentation? Don’t get me started. Besides a collection of pages on several blogs, that are badly maintained, there’s absolutely nothing.
• Every time you install a new version you have to recreate your font files. Now that’s annoying!

Here are some alternatives I found today

TrueFontFamily

trademarks: JS, PHP, CSS, commercial. 

Server side generating is of course a good idea, but I can’t see if the textimages are cached, it looks like not.

Facelift

trademarks: JS, PHP, hosted, commercial

This one seems very good, but a bit too commercial. Hosted? No thank you.

TypeFace

trademarks: JS, SVG/VML, free

Typeface is a diamond among these, so it seems, if it doesn’t suffer from the lack of documentation that is. But if it’s really good it doesn’t need documentation.

Yahoo, winner or loser?

If it’s up to Michael Arrington, Yahoo loses, but it’s not clear why. Yes, stock is going down, but that doesn’t define them. Just like your wallet is not your personality. Yes, Jerry Yang looks like a nerd, but so does Bill Gates.

If they go under they fail, of course, but how could they, having been nr 1 on the net for so long… There will always be advertisement money then, it’s simply a matter of downsizing and waiting for better times.

I am almost always impressed by the services of Yahoo, as delicious and even Yahoo Photos (deceased). It’s too bad that they don’t get what they deserve. Google is becoming like MS, they do great things, but always a little too late. Yahoo had autocomplete on their search a looooong time before Google. But when google delivers Google Suggest it’s suddenly something ‘new’. All eyes are on Google, but Yahoo technology stands already. Google doesn’t have BOSS, or YDN, or YUI. Google code is usually a bunch of spaghettiballs, so smart it doesn’t understand itself anymore. Yahoo code is clean, organized.

But inertia happens. It’s hard for such a big company to get rolling in a different direction. At least I hope they stop pursuing the social network dream. Let it go to Facebook and try to improve search this time, for real. Why don’t Yahoo index the dark matter in the web? There are still many new ideas to be tried which can result in a big success. Google is betting everything on keyword search, Microsoft is already in the natural language game (with Powerset), but real indexing done right hasn’t been done yet.

How about the interface? I need to do ‘hum hum hum’ and get the song title on my screen. Like that. I need to be able to sketch a flower and get the word ‘flower’ on my screen. And instead of ‘did you mean’ I need navigtion through association. By the way, I believe it was Excite that had that functionality a decade ago. You would type ‘Gibson’ and it would come up with ‘Mel Gibson (person)’ – ‘Gibson – guitar’, etc. It can’t be that hard if it was already possible ten years a go.

Yahoo, you have my vote.

Do a full background check on anyone in the US

Well, that’s pretty amazing. At intelius.com you can do a full background check on anyone in the US, online, instant, for only $39.95. With it you get details about home ownership (all real estate actually), history of marriage and divorce, and criminal records (yummy).

I always knew this would be technically possible, just practically pretty difficult to accomplish.

Someday, I believe, it will be offered world wide, and it will include the full DNA string, picture, and videos of important moments in that person’s life.

Virtual presentations and conferences

The internet makes travel unnecessary… Of course it’s much more fun to actually go to a science conference somewhere in a distant country. But, at least if we want to explore the information presented, we don’t need to go anywhere anymore. As long as we know where to find this information. That’s the hard part. Today I stumbled upon ted.com, where I watched a presentation by Richard Dawkins. It was almost as if I was there. A bit of virtual reality would really help there. Perhaps another 10 years…

• www.ted.com
• Richard Dawkins presentation on ‘the limits of the mind’

OTOY Video Demo Video

Yes that is “video” twice in a sentence. What is OTOY? It sounds like a toy store or a game, or a silly web2.0 name, but in fact it is an interface to a huuuuge rendering farm (go look that up). And wow, does it render. If you have seen movies like ehm… yes, Toy Story for instance, well, now you can get the same amount of pixels and cool graphics right in your browser, and soon in say.. an iPhone!

OTOY Video Demo Video

MarkMail – a great way of keeping track of mailing lists without subscribing

• Home – MarkMail
  This is a cool site where you can view several mailing lists at once! No need anymore to signup for mailinglists and get your box flooded.
  (tags: xquery xml web visualization tools searchengine search research programming opensource)

Show delicious bookmarks as screenshots and browse them by dragging

• show delicious bookmarks as screenshots
  visually oriented people are going to love this! Oh and it’s also using the crazy caroussel flash script that everyone loves these days.
  (tags: delicous screenshot caroussel)