The Times: Tech column - 2004 predictions
By David Rowan
IT IS FAR too dangerous to make predictions for the year ahead, what with every glaring misjudgment being archived online as a permanent humiliation. Instead, we have consulted industry bigwigs and plugged-in analysts to identify ten technology trends that will touch our lives in 2004. Just remember where you read them first - provided, of course, that we are proved right.
1 Dot-com hype will become fashionable again. Britons are becoming more relaxed about shopping online, spending £1.2 billion in November alone, up by almost half, year on year, so that the phrase "e-commerce profits" will cease to be an oxymoron. A vastly oversubscribed Google share offering will encourage that sense of boom - even though it remains unclear how Google's valuation is justified by its projected revenues.
2 Big Brother will be watching you. A vast expansion of location-tracking technologies will make it increasingly difficult to maintain personal privacy. Your boss will track you via your mobile-phone signal, road-pricing schemes will use satellites to monitor your car's movements and tiny radio-transmitting "smart tags" on consumer items will identify you long after you have left the shop.
3 Weblogs will offer renewed competition to traditional media channels. Howard Dean has used his weblog to build a grassroots campaign for the US presidential election; British political activists used theirs to co-ordinate anti-Bush demonstrations.
4 The music industry's troubles will worsen. As corporations such as Coca-Cola and Wal-Mart join Apple in selling digital music via the web, the brutal competition will send prices down and educate consumers to demand better deals.
5 The personalised news service will come of age. The growing popularity of a content-syndication format known as RSS (Really Simple Syndication) will convince mainstream web publishers to provide free feeds of their headlines. Forget surfing: now you can read automated news feeds from all your favourite sources in one place.
6 Free web content will become more scarce. Get used to paying for online information -publishers have decided that you will pay not only for archived news or e-mail services, but increasingly for their mainstream offerings. The trend will marginalise some popular sites, but their owners are more interested in cash than "eyeballs".
7 Computer viruses will get worse despite anti-virus products. Attacks by worms, trojans and hackers will continue to cause mayhem, especially for home PC users. Still, the IT security industry does not seem too upset: its revenues are forecast to double to £30 billion within three years, and will grow with every new scare.
8 Mobile gaming will boom. Millions will download the latest games to their mobile phones. Forecasters estimate that Britons will spend £100 million using handsets to kill aliens or be Lara Croft.
9 Biometric security will be overhyped. The Passport Service's six-month trial of biometric passports will be used to justify ID cards as a solution to terrorism or identity theft. But concerns will grow about the high number of false positives given by facial-mapping software, and those seeking to disguise their identity will find ways of falsely recording their details on the underlying database.
10 Government IT projects will generally go way over budget yet still not deliver.
But you probably knew that anyway.
(The Times, January 6 2004)
IT IS FAR too dangerous to make predictions for the year ahead, what with every glaring misjudgment being archived online as a permanent humiliation. Instead, we have consulted industry bigwigs and plugged-in analysts to identify ten technology trends that will touch our lives in 2004. Just remember where you read them first - provided, of course, that we are proved right.
1 Dot-com hype will become fashionable again. Britons are becoming more relaxed about shopping online, spending £1.2 billion in November alone, up by almost half, year on year, so that the phrase "e-commerce profits" will cease to be an oxymoron. A vastly oversubscribed Google share offering will encourage that sense of boom - even though it remains unclear how Google's valuation is justified by its projected revenues.
2 Big Brother will be watching you. A vast expansion of location-tracking technologies will make it increasingly difficult to maintain personal privacy. Your boss will track you via your mobile-phone signal, road-pricing schemes will use satellites to monitor your car's movements and tiny radio-transmitting "smart tags" on consumer items will identify you long after you have left the shop.
3 Weblogs will offer renewed competition to traditional media channels. Howard Dean has used his weblog to build a grassroots campaign for the US presidential election; British political activists used theirs to co-ordinate anti-Bush demonstrations.
4 The music industry's troubles will worsen. As corporations such as Coca-Cola and Wal-Mart join Apple in selling digital music via the web, the brutal competition will send prices down and educate consumers to demand better deals.
5 The personalised news service will come of age. The growing popularity of a content-syndication format known as RSS (Really Simple Syndication) will convince mainstream web publishers to provide free feeds of their headlines. Forget surfing: now you can read automated news feeds from all your favourite sources in one place.
6 Free web content will become more scarce. Get used to paying for online information -publishers have decided that you will pay not only for archived news or e-mail services, but increasingly for their mainstream offerings. The trend will marginalise some popular sites, but their owners are more interested in cash than "eyeballs".
7 Computer viruses will get worse despite anti-virus products. Attacks by worms, trojans and hackers will continue to cause mayhem, especially for home PC users. Still, the IT security industry does not seem too upset: its revenues are forecast to double to £30 billion within three years, and will grow with every new scare.
8 Mobile gaming will boom. Millions will download the latest games to their mobile phones. Forecasters estimate that Britons will spend £100 million using handsets to kill aliens or be Lara Croft.
9 Biometric security will be overhyped. The Passport Service's six-month trial of biometric passports will be used to justify ID cards as a solution to terrorism or identity theft. But concerns will grow about the high number of false positives given by facial-mapping software, and those seeking to disguise their identity will find ways of falsely recording their details on the underlying database.
10 Government IT projects will generally go way over budget yet still not deliver.
But you probably knew that anyway.
(The Times, January 6 2004)
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