Three Tech Trends for 2011

2010 was a seen as a good year for innovation in consumer technology.  The year’s hottest product was the iPad and many innovative smartphones also came on the market.  For 2011, Patrick Gray, IT consultant and author of Breakthrough IT: Supercharging Organizational Value Through Technology, has offered the following suggestions for new tech trends he hopes will come to fruition in the new year. 

Content Creator’s Tablet –while the iPad is a compelling device, Gray sees it as primarily a content-consumption tool. The interface and software are exceptional for tasks like watching a movie, reading a book, or playing a game, but writing a document, leading a brainstorming session, or taking notes in a meeting are poor experiences, despite a raft of add-on keyboards and the like. What Gray would like to see is the stamina, ease-of-use, and form factor of an iPad coupled with the drawing and handwriting capabilities of something akin to Windows. The biggest piece currently missing is a software layer that would make Windows faster and more iPad-like during the initial content-creation stages, yet also retain all the full capabilities of Windows productivity applications for refining penned notes and diagrams into documents and presentations that can be shared.

The Computer on a Stick – with virtualization rapidly becoming the standard approach for data centers in companies big and small, aside from a few technical niches, virtualization has done little on the desktop. Where it could be very compelling is to separate corporate personal computers from the hardware that they run on. Rather than issuing new laptops every few years and managing a fleet of machines with different configurations requiring different images, just deploy a USB stick with a virtual machine that meets your company’s specifications. Users could bring their own preferred computer, be it a PC, Mac, or Linux, and merrily run the company’s standard operating system and applications.

A Split-Personality Smartphone – while smartphones are an indispensible part of modern life, where they tend to lack, according to Gray, is in being sensitive to what someone is doing and how that drives their preferences for interacting with their phone. When at work, one wants to see different information prominently featured, interact with a different e-mail account, and be notified of different things than when at home.  Smartphones could use their GPS and location features to drive how the phone displays fundamental information like contacts, appointments and e-mail accounts.

According to Gray each of these innovations requires mainly just a matter of integrating existing technologies, adding some software and rolling out a system that could change the way we work with technology.

For full details, see the story in TechRepublic.