Ask HN: What will be the bigggest technology story of 2010? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What will be the bigggest technology story of 2010?

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In light of TechCrunch's wrapup of the biggest stories of 2000-2009, what do you think will be the biggest technology story of 2010? Apple undermining the cable networks? Facebook going public? Twitter getting bought? The CrunchPad getting fixed? ... Let's hear it!

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The rebirth of the technology IPO. Two of the following five will IPO: Facebook, Zynga, Twitter, LinkedIn, Skype.

I'm going to be a contrarian and predict that tablets fail to gain traction outside of a small niche market. The Apple tablet will be an amazing piece of technology, sure, but I don't think that people are going to want to carry around a device of that size without having a physical keyboard for input.

Seems every ~10 years, a major computer company has to re-discover this themselves.

There exist some turds which even Steve Jobs cannot polish.

Gorilla Arm alone makes tablets a total nonstarter. Even if you don't have to awkwardly cradle the thing in your arms while you use it, you still have to hold out your arm to poke at it.

Microsoft only persisted with their Tablet PC crap for so long because the thing was designed for their middle managers to fiddle with in their constant meetings.

At the point where the display is as e-ink readable as paper, the touch part is as sensitive as an iphone, the screen is also as sensitive to pen input as a wacom tablet, and the software is good enough for touch-doodling, pen-drawing, typing, sketching, all interchangably and neatening up diagrams for you, then you will have it on your desk instead of a notepad, instead of a phone message pad, you will look down and work on it like a jotter instead of cradling it like a child or mouting it vertically at head height and arms length.

But we're not there yet.

The Apple tablet revolutionizes modern medicine as a simple checklist app tailor made for doctors reduces hospital mistakes by 50%.

Cell networks as dumb pipes.

EDIT: "becoming" to "as"

And it's complement, anything and everything can be given access to the network over the air. Your car, your washing machine, your golf bag; the wiring closet at work, the front door of your apartment building, fire hydrants, parking lots.

Data everywhere is a precondition for endowing the world around us with intelligence.

Hmmm, that strikes me as something to hope for in the next decade, but I can't see it happening in the next year, if for no other reason than the network buildouts required (e.g. after so many years of cutting capex, how long will it take AT&T to merely catch up with current demand?)

The thing is it's already here to some extent, and there are some widespread deployments of embedded OTA data products, kindle, On-Star, various netbooks with modems included, commercial washing machines(for laundromats), alarm systems; there's a lot of product already out there.

Yes, it's a long term trend, but it's growing stronger and there's a lot of equipment that's only going to be reporting 20-30kb of data per month. And the cost of the parts has fallen along the same curve as most other electronics. A $40 dollar broadband module can pay for itself with one service call or critical alarm, depending on the context.

Augmented Reality. Facebook in school. Teaching through Social networks. Elimination of old studies and introduction of new concepts. Nano technology more in your face. Mobile devices replacing computers. We getting a cure for cancer. We growing limbs again. The futures fine to look forward to.

Unless we destroy ourselves before that.

Tablets, tablets everywhere.

Foundational cloud computing becoming really big.

By "foundational" I mean the raw level stuff like Amazon Web Services such as S3, EC2.

Real-time web starts being much more a part of the average user's browser experience.

Not just the web but services such as http://waze.com as well. Indeed though.

A huge step forward towards real broadband ubiquitous Internet access (A larger clearwire wimax rollout perhaps?)

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