The future of the Cloud is offline storage, at least for mobile devices

An interesting thought of Jeff Belk in an article at gigaom.com: The future beyond the cloud is in our hands. In, let's say 2020, mobile devices will have a capacity of many many terabytes offline storage. Bandwidth and capacity of the mobile carriers will still be a problem according to Jeff. So many companies like Google and Amazon will make use of local storage to put lots of their online content making it available offline. Synchronizing will take place at moments when devices are in reach of local area networks.

To me it is plausible, although it contradicts with one of my own pred-ICT-ions: 'future mobile devices will be small and with limited functionality'. Jeff's prediction might be the situation for rural areas with wide area networks with limited capacity, mine for urban areas where high bandwidth wide area networks like LTE are ubiquitous.

We'll see if our pred-ICT-ions will contrad-ICT or not!

Pred-ICT-ion: future personal mobile devices will be small and with limited functionality

In 2009 SIMYO and Ahead of Time presented the future of mobile media and communication. See this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FScddkTMlTc
This film is presenting a summary of key results of the open think tank MOCOM 2020.
It always surprises me what those predictors think of the future role of an hand-held device. It will be larger, smarter, faster, with more bandwith than ever and more powerful. But it will still be there!

My pred-ICT-ion is that the world around us will become smarter, always connected and adaptive to us: a user-centric world. So the need for such a super-device will diminish in my opinion. We might still wear an identification device, for security reasons, although the world around us should recognise us and determine our identity unmistakably. Identification, combined with communication facilities, especially for rural environments which world is less smart than in urban areas.

In short: instead of a super mobile device in 2020 the function of our personal device is limited to identification and live communication. That's it. The world around us will provide us the rest.

Next step is an implanted device....

Pred-ICT-ion: Cloud data will be separated to avoid vendor lockin at platform level

In an article 'Cloud interoperability: Problems and best practices' of Computerworld, June 1st, 2011, Bill Claybrook states 'As more applications find their way to the cloud, data portability and other issues are coming to the fore'.
Data portability, by nature, is a platform issue, for the technical data format is usually optimized for the software that manage that data. To solve this problem we already have seen many initiatives, like SQL and XML. However, we need a more semantic format that descibes data in a way that is technologically agnostic and rich enough to describe the peculiar differences of the many datamodeling techniques. No abstraction but a formal description. Business intelligence companies have the knowledge to define such a standard, because they have experience with a variety of technologies for their ETL-tools.

And when the standard is in place, why not separate your data from your cloud software provider? This will solve both the portability issues and the vendor lockin.
My prediction is, that before 2020 data is separated from applications and freedom of choice for Software-as-a-Service is no longer limited because of the data portability issue.

Robots in 2010 according to prediction in 2001

In http://www.cnet.com/4520-6022_1-102091-1.html Amber Ascot asked in 2001 several research institutes about their vision and predictions. One remarkable prediction is from Sony, inventor of the Aibo:

In 2010 advanced personal robots will appear, as will robot-assisted surgery. People will adopt robotics into their bodies.

I might have missed them, but where are the personal robots? There's a few: mowing robot, vacuum cleaners... Though convenient, not very "personal", for anybody can use them.
I predict that we have to wait another 9 years....

Pred-ICT-ion: within 2 years a Super Profile will be introduced

Managing all your profiles is a burden. A new job has to be added to several places like Facebook, Twitter etc.

Solution?
Imagine a super profile, where you can tick which attributes have to sync with your derived profiles. Where you distinguish between business, personal, friends information.
Good idea? If there were such a Super Profile, I would be the first to use it!

Pred-ICT-ion: html5 and server-sent events: a way to port real winforms userinterfaces to the browser

Html5's server-sent events http://dev.w3.org/html5/eventsource/ break in my opinion one of the fundamental design requirements of internet technology for browsing documents. Preventing servers from sending events to the browser took care of many security threads. I suppose and expect that html5's implementation by the various organizations like Mozilla will be very secure.
So, from then we can build real interactive userinterfaces as we are used to in client/server applications. I expect the first port of winforms (with server-sent events, no polling of server data!) in 2013 by Microsoft.

Google+ is too comprehensive

Ok, my first predICTion, solely based on my humble opinion: Google+ will grow but not supercede Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
Why? FB, T and LI are easy to integrate into aggregators, have 'atomic' features. Google+ is too comprehensive and acts too much as 'the central point' for other social networks. It contradicts with the charming aspects of Web 2.0, where users can combine and aggregate as they like, not as Google likes...

IDC: PaaS the "next cloud battleground"

A pred-ICT-ion from IDC in Worldwide Public Cloud Platform as a Service 2009Vendor Shares ($). Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) will be the next battleground after Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) becoming mature. I agree with that, although before companies will invest in PaaS, the business models have to be changed to support Software-as-a-Service. Not the technological aspects like multitenancy, but the subscriptionmodels and service levels.

In my humble opinion, the SaaS battle has to be settled before the PaaS battle can begin.

Pred-ICT-ion: The HTML5 boom is coming. Fast

In July 22nd, 2011 Colleen Taylor states at her blog at http://gigaom.com/2011/07/22/the-html5-boom-is-coming-fast/ that Flash will very soon be replaced by html5/css3. Although html5/css3 is key for Apple, it is not as rich as Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight at this moment. But we all know that these developments are not about functionality but about adoption by the public and the availability of killer apps. So, it is hard to predict when html5/css3 will supercede Flash/Silverlight, but that it is growing fast is undeniable.

My prediction is that in 2013 html5/css3 will be rich enough to be a substitue for 80% of the flash applications.

1997 - pre-Google time

In The nature of prediction and the information future: Arthur C. Clarke's Odyssey vision David Bawden predicted in 1997 the pain of information overload if we should not have Google or Bing in 2010. He used the vision of Clarke in 2010: Odyssey Two.
Note: Archie has already been used since ArpaNet, and webcrawlers were in their early stages. So this article might be in itself a paleofuture item. Anyway, Clarke's vision is interesting enough to cite both him and Bawden.

Clarke:

At least there was a sporting chance that what he was looking for was hidden somewhere in the immense body of existing scientific knowledge. Slowly and carefully, [he] set up an automatic search programme, designed for what it would exclude as much as what it would embrace. It should cut out all Earth-related references — they would certainly number in the millions — and concentrate entirely on extraterrestrial citations. 

...Intelligence was frequently wrong, and even more often confused by the avalanche of raw facts it had to evaluate... when you did not know what you were looking for, something that at first sight seemed irrelevant, or even nonsensical, might turn out to be a vital clue.

Bawden:

The prospect of having essentially all information available in digital form, rapidly accessibly from the desktop by a consistent interface, may seem an information worker's dream. In fact, it will rapidly turn into a nightmare, if systems and procedures are not quickly developed for filtering, prioritising, discarding and forgetting information, as well as for extracting nuggets from the pile: data mining, visualisation, etc. Philosophically, this may go against many of the 'traditional' values of the library/information professions, which have tended to emphasise acquiring, preserving and accessing 'all relevant material'.

Did Google help us to prevent Bawden's concerns? All required functionality is in place, although controlled by Google...

Using Xbox Kinect for business applications?

In Microsoft's Evolving Vision of the Cloud Michael Otey hopes in June '11 that the use of the Xbox Kinect for IT never materializes.

M. Otey:

We all saw Minority Report and Tom Cruise with the cool virtual monitor, but who really wants to have to connect their Xbox to a business system and wave their hands at it? Not me. The cloud seems like it could be the real future of computing, but the Kinect just seems like a desperate attempt to try to be cool. Hand waving is never good for demos, and I don’t think it’s going to replace the mouse anytime soon.

I personally think he's wrong at this point. My company for instance is developing solutions for healthcare, where kinect technology helps patients do their excercises in the right way. Medics can analyze the data instead of hoping the patients did the right thing.
We will see!

Chriet Titulaer and the future of Internet

A very popular scientist in the Netherlands was interviewed by Koen van Santvoord about his life as an often consulted space expert:  http://www.koentext.nl/art/carp-titulaer.pdf (published in Carp, date of publication unknown). According to an interview in WAVE 1996 above mentioned interview must be dated before 1995, for he regretted his mistake about the future of internet.

Carp interview:
Titulaer:

'Internet is here to stay. But it is not being used. Only large companies are still present'. ('Internet is er gewoon gekomen. Maar het wordt niet gebruikt. Alleen de grote bedrijven zitten nog op internet.')

WAVE interview:
Titulaer:

'Internet is one of my biggest mistakes during my career. I never saw that the use of it would be booming, especially by businesses.' ('Internet is één van mijn grootste missers in mijn carrière. Ik heb nooit ingezien dat het gebruik door met name bedrijven zo'n vlucht zou nemen.')

Not to blame Chriet Titulaer, for I was a big fan of his interviews in the nineties.
And, what about Microsoft? Before 1994 they also underestimated the importance of internet, while other companies already made their start with browsers, like NCSA.

My blog is superfluous...

I had the intention to blog about:

• Predictions about ICT in the past en their outcomes
• My predictions, for future input of my blog (creating a perpetuum blog)

But, to be honest, I am too late. This is what they call 'Paleofuture'. A great blog on this subject is Paleofuture blog, written by Matt Novak started in January of 2007. Matt has since become an accidental expert on past visions of the future, and oversees a tremendous physical archive of materials related to retro-futurism. A nice example is the prediction of face-to-face phone call in 1957, see http://www.paleofuture.com/blog/2011/1/30/face-to-face-phone-calls-1957.html

Nevertheless, I will make my own selection of past predections and their outcomes. If they came true or not! Submissions by you are highly appreciated!