A new year and a new decade is here. Many consider the last decade to be the worst ever – with events like September 11th, Hurricane Katrina, the Pacific Tsunami, several terrorist attacks and a severe recession. Even with those events, the technology sector has an excellent decade of great innovation and new tools to communicate with people.
Even though the technology sector started with the dot com bust in 2000.
Looking back at some of the great technology-related items that occurred in the last decade:
– We went from a sitting at a with a huge desktop with a heavy monitor to portable computing.
– Connecting to the Internet from dial-up over the phone line to an always-on, extremely fast connections.
– Blogging and podcasting created new media companies that started the downward spiral of old media conglomerates to crumble.
– Wireless telephones kept us connected without a landline and the phones kept getting smaller.
– Text messaging and social networks kept us informed with friends from the past as well as history-changing events.
– Television viewing was enhanced with high-definition broadcasts on bigger and smaller screens.
– Taking photos went from film to digital.
– Watching movies went from video tape to digital disks to watching movies online.
– Thanks to Napster, music fans can buy single tracks instead of overpriced CDs. Listening to music also changed from CDs to MP3 players with a hard drive
Since everyone is making a list, I might as well make one as well. Since I spent the holidays fixing a severe code crash on this website, I didn’t do any research into these statements so either these statements will be correct or a failure.
– Death by location on social networks
People seem to forget basic safety precautions when they give out personal information that criminals will take advantage of. Even celebrities aren’t afraid of presenting their personal details about their lives. We’ve already seen criminals take advantage of robbing peoples’ homes when they announce their departure and I do see a time when a person will get killed by a follower. How will that happen? Many third-party apps have the ability to pull co-ordinates from GPS satellites and Twitter recently added support to geo-tag your tweets.
I don’t see this happening to geo-location networks like Loopt and foursquare because they’re not as popular as Twitter and Facebook but an event will occur when a person is killed by a follower and our ignorance for personal safety.
– The end of satellite radio
Howard Stern is currently in contract negotiations with SiruisXM. His current contract with SiriusXM expires in January 2011. Stern has already said on air that he is considering leaving the company. Stern fans that listen to his show will tell you that this is a classic stunt that Stern has done in the past to get negotiations go his way.
However, there’s an element that may push him to retirement; his new wife, Beth Ostrosky.
My prediction is that Stern will announce that he will retire from the satellite broadcaster which will cause mass cancelations for the satellite broadcaster, which is already struggling to stay afloat. The large amount of canceled accounts will cause SiriusXM to file for bankruptcy and DirectTV, which already owns a small percentage of the broadcaster when they bought some of SiriusXM’s debt load, and Dish network will bid to buy the broadcaster.
– Competition for Internet
Wi-Max is being built and already available in major cities like Atlanta, Houston, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Seattle, Portland, and Las Vegas. LTE (long term evolution) is currently being built in Columbus, Ohio. Cable networks like Comcast, Time Warner and Cox communications are using their recently acquired spectrum to build a new wireless network for cable TV and Internet.
And that doesn’t include T-Mobile upgrading their network to 3G as well as the newest standard for HSDPA, HSDPA+.
What it means to you: more options to choose your Internet service provider.
Companies that provide landline Internet services – like cable and telephone – will increase their download and upload speeds to keep customers from switching to these new WISPs.
Will this will have an effect on making high speed Internet access cheaper is another question.
Those are my only two big topics I thought about. Here are some honorable mentions
– Apple’s e-book reader will slowly gain traction.
– Apple will announce an unlocked iPhone that will work on T-Mobile.
– A la carte cable channels will be mentioned as online video sites like Hulu and YouTube as more people drop cable in favor of watching TV shows on their computers.
– NBC will move from broadcast to cable-only.
– Netbooks will get more powerful but will slow down in sales.
– Every device will have an app store.
– Amazon will buy Netflix.
– A major newspaper – New York Times, USA Today, LA Times, etc. – will drop national distribution of their newspapers and will move to an e-book format.
– 3DTVs will be introduced but will not be adopted widely. Will be used for advertising in heavily-traffic areas instead of home viewing.
– Solid-state drives will start to take market share away from hard drives.
– Smartphones will be targeted for attacks. One example could be using your phone to send text messaging spam.
– Another major event will cause disruption to social networks and the Internet.
– PS3 will overtake XBOX360’s market share but will not become the number one gaming console in the world.
That’s all the predictions I have at the moment. If you have a tech or media-related prediction, please leave it in the comments below.
Hopefully this year will be better than 2009 and here’s to a new year.