Technologies

We are in a new decade, and the technologies that are now available to us continue to engage in fascinating ways. The rise and collision of several trends social, mobile, touch computing, geo, cloud etc. keep spitting out new products and technologies which keep propelling us forward. Below mentioned seven technologies that are ready to tip into the mainstream 2011.

Here are seven technologies poised to rock this year:

1. Web Video On Your TV:

We’ve already seen many attempts to turn the Internet into a video-delivery pipe to rival cable TV: Google TV, Apple TV, the Boxee Box, Roku, and a slew of “Internet-enabled” TVs. None of them are quite yet cable killers, but they are seeding the market with simple ways to bring Internet video to your large-screen TV in the living room. The more cable-quality video that becomes available over the Web via streaming services such as Netflix, Vudu, or iTunes, the more that people will turn to Web when they are looking for something to watch. This trend is not about surfing the Web on your TV. It is about using the Internet as an alternative way to deliver movies and TV shows to your flat-screen TV. Even the cable companies will dip their toes into the Internet delivery waters. What looks like a pale competitor to cable today will be a lot more viable in a short, twelve months.

2. Quora Will Have Its Twitter Moment:

Social Q&A site Quora may be the existing darling of Silicon Valley, but not a lot of people beyond the limited tech startup world actually use it yet. That will start to change in 2011, which I believe will be the year Quora has its Twitter moment and start to really take off. Quora represents a bigger technology trend, which is the layering of an interest graph on top of people’s social graph. On Quora, you can follow not only people, but topics and questions. This is a powerful concept and is not limited to Quora, but Quora is designed from the ground up to expose and help you explore your interests. It is addictive, and as it reaches a critical mass of early users, this will be the year it emerges from its shell much like Twitter did in 2007.

3.Mobile Social Photo Apps:

The end of 2010 witnessed a spate of mobile photo apps including Instagram, PicPlz and Path. The growth of iPhone and Android, the ubiquity of decent cell phone cameras, GPS, and existing social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare. Each of these apps is built for mobile first. They let you take a picture, mark your location, and share it with your social network. With Instagram and PicPLz, you can choose a filter to make humdrum pics look more exciting or capture a mood. By building on top of existing social networks like Twitter and Foursquare, they are making popular new ways to use those services. Instead of simply checking in, now you can do a photo. Already Instagram is one of the most popular photo apps in iTunes. Sharing photos is pretty much a universal impulse, and these apps make it easier and more fun.

4. Mobile Wallets:

Everyone from Apple and Google to Nokia want to make that a reality and tap into the mobile payments market. Both Apple and Google are exploring this opportunity. Google bought mobile payments startup Zetawire to gain experience and the latest Android phone, the Nexus S, comes with an NFC chip, the same kind that is embedded into credit cards and lets you pay by waving it over a wireless reader. The iPhone 5 also may come equipped with an NFC chip, and Apple was sniffing around mobile payments startup BOKU last year for a possible acquisition. It is going to take more than just NFC chips in every phone to make mobile payments a reality.

5. Context-Aware Apps:

Mobile or social apps and services, the most useful apps people will keep coming back to are the ones which help people cut through the increasing clutter of the Internet. Apps that are aware of the context in which they are being used will serve up better filtered information. If you search on your mobile phone that means you get local results and local offers served up first. If you are on a service like Quora that understands your interest graph, it means that you are only shown topics that you care about, sorted in realtime. If you are on a news site, you will see the most shared links from people in you follow on Twitter or are connected to on Facebook. Music and movie services will similarly surface social recommendations. In a world of information overload, context is king.

6. Open Places Database:

All mobile app, taps into the geo capabilities of phones to pinpoint your exact location and show you what is around you. But everyone from Google to Facebook to Foursquare creating their own database of places. It would make much more sense if there was an open places database that any company could both pull from and contribute. We are not there yet, we are making progress towards a more open places database. Factual is providing some of the data for Facebook Places and creating a places database is a major focus for the company; MapQuest is adopting OpenStreetMaps, and Foursquare lets other apps pull from its places database through its API. There are economic reasons why some companies don’t want to participate, but expect to see this movement pick up steam in this year.

7. The Streaming Cloud:

As all people will stream their movies and music whenever they want to any device. As already mentioned the forces that will bring Web video streaming to your TV, but those movies and TV shows should also be available on your iPads, Android Tablets, or even mobile phones. Expiring downloads will still make sense for plane trips and other places where the network is spotty, but you will manage your subscriptions and collections in the cloud. Think Netflix streaming applied to all media. If Google or Apple can convince the record companies to come along for the ride, the streaming revolution will hit music as well, with both working on jukebox-in-the-sky services. Plenty have tried with varying degrees of success and failure (Rhapsody, Rdio, Spotify), but it will take someone with the negotiating muscle of Apple or Google to finally bring streaming music to the masses.

What technologies do you think will make it big this year?

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