Five Tech Themes for 2010
By JENNA WORTHAM
NYT
It’s hard to believe that a decade ago, there was no Facebook, iPhone, Wikipedia or YouTube. Almost shocking, considering how those entities have shaped a culture around the Internet, disrupted business models and affected how and what information was shared through the Web.
So what big Web themes might we see emerging into the next few years? Based on reporting and informal chats with venture capitalists, here’s a quick guess at what might be big in 2010.
The third wave of mobile applications: Mobile app stores continue to evolve from kitschy collections of games and novelty programs into robust catalogs of applications that push the limits of what a cellphone can do. So where can we expect to see the next big innovation? External attachments. So far, Square, a device that plugs into the audio jack of a mobile phone, turning it into a credit card machine, has made the splashiest entrance into the market, but that is just the beginning. Example: a glucose monitor that could directly port blood sugar readings and other health information into a program for analysis.
Location, location, location: Start-ups like Hot Potato, Foursquare, Grindr and UrbanSpoon have generated a lot of buzz for their forays into the mobile location-based arena, but it’s only the beginning — particularly in light of the new geo-location features made available to developers and users on Twitter. It’s likely we will begin seeing many more useful location-based applications.
(More here.)
NYT
It’s hard to believe that a decade ago, there was no Facebook, iPhone, Wikipedia or YouTube. Almost shocking, considering how those entities have shaped a culture around the Internet, disrupted business models and affected how and what information was shared through the Web.
So what big Web themes might we see emerging into the next few years? Based on reporting and informal chats with venture capitalists, here’s a quick guess at what might be big in 2010.
The third wave of mobile applications: Mobile app stores continue to evolve from kitschy collections of games and novelty programs into robust catalogs of applications that push the limits of what a cellphone can do. So where can we expect to see the next big innovation? External attachments. So far, Square, a device that plugs into the audio jack of a mobile phone, turning it into a credit card machine, has made the splashiest entrance into the market, but that is just the beginning. Example: a glucose monitor that could directly port blood sugar readings and other health information into a program for analysis.
Location, location, location: Start-ups like Hot Potato, Foursquare, Grindr and UrbanSpoon have generated a lot of buzz for their forays into the mobile location-based arena, but it’s only the beginning — particularly in light of the new geo-location features made available to developers and users on Twitter. It’s likely we will begin seeing many more useful location-based applications.
(More here.)
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