At the end of this year, it’s not the time to look back, but to look forward! I’d even like to fast-forward, to skip 2009, and hereby present my technology predictions for 2010.
e-Health
The Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) will be introduced, which is a first step towards true telemedicine (m-health). The WBAN consists of intercommunicating wireless sensors, either wearable or implanted into the human body, which monitor vital body parameters and movements. These devices transmit data to a home base station, from where the data can be forwarded real-time to a hospital or clinic. By the way, in 2004 Microsoft obtained US Patent 6,754,472 “method and apparatus for transmitting power and data using the human body”. That means if WBAN’s start making use of conducting properties of the human body, Microsoft will benefit.
Security
SHA-1 will not be the preferred algorithm for generating 160-bit secure hashes anymore. Recently, Chinese researchers have shown that it is possible to generate collisions in the full SHA-1 in 2**69 hash operations, much less than the brute-force attack of 2**80 operations (Birthday attack). History shows that reducing the brute-force key space is only the beginning of the end: the attack will be optimized and improved. I expect the first publicly generated SHA-1 collision to surface by the end of 2010. Because NIST is already holding the first-round (with 51 candidates) of its hash algorithm competition, a new official hash algorithm (mostly likely 512-bit) will be available before 2010.
Virtual Worlds
At the moment, Virtual Worlds for adults without a game concept are still not a great success. For example, Second Life currently only has 1,5 million logins in the last 60 days. In comparison (the paid) roleplaying game World of Warcraft (WoW) has 11.5 million monthly subscribers. Communities for kids are doing better: Habbo Hotel typically has 8.5 million logins a day. In 2010 there will be a huge revival of Virtual Worlds, because they finally will be easier to use and will have better graphics that leverage the newest GPU’s. This should make them at least as attractive as WoW is now. By 2010, games (in all their forms) will be by far the biggest platform for the advertisement and sales of music; later on, Virtual Worlds will follow.
Hardware
In 2010 Blue-ray Disks (BD) will be a mass product, surpassing the dual layer DVD as the main storage for consumers. Beware that long before 2010, you should have converted all your old VCR tapes to something digital, because the last company that offers this service recently closed. Solid State Disks (SSD) will be sold more than SATA harddisks, not only in mobile devices. Furthermore, the trend of multi-core processing will go on. In addition, the CPU will also contain an integrated GPU. An example is the upcoming Intel Larrabee that can be considered a hybrid between a multi-core CPU and a GPU. It will be in production with 12 cores (or more) in 2010. I also predict a great future for OpenCL running on this new hardware.
Networking
In 2010, IPv6 is finally coming to your home. The aim for ISP’s in the European Union is to have 25% of its consumers on IPv6 by the end of 2010. In The Netherlands, pushed by SIDN, the coupling of telephone numbers and Internet domains (Enum), will in place. Notwithstanding caching technology and the use of AJAX (which is there to stay), the Internet will yearly keep transporting 50% more data, mostly peer-to-peer traffic and video data. Between 2003 and 2008 the size of the average webpage (HTML only) has grown about 233%, but the next two years HTML size will not grow much anymore, because of the rise of separately loaded client-side scripting and the need for smaller page footprints to surf on mobile devices. Many web pages will be better accessible by cleanly separating their structure (XHTML), style (CSS) and behaviour (client-side scripting).
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