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!