iTechNote

According to Gartner’s 2006 Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle, the following technologies will have an impact in the coming ten years.

1. WEB 2.0

Web 2.0 represents a broad collection of recent trends in Internet technologies and business models.

Social Network Analysis (maturity: less than 2 years)
SNA involves collecting massive amounts of data from multiple sources, analyzing the data to identify relationships and mining it for new information.

Example: Digg

Ajax (maturity: less than 2 years)
Ajax is a collection of techniques that Web developers use to deliver an enhanced, more-responsive user experience in the confines of a modern browser (for example, recent version of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Mozilla, Safari or Opera).

Example: Google Map

Collective Intelligence (maturity: 5 - 10 years)
Collective intelligence is an approach to producing intellectual content (such as code, documents, indexing and decisions) that results from individuals working together with no centralized authority.

Example: Wikipedia

Mashup (maturity: less than 2 years)
A mashup is a lightweight tactical integration of multi-sourced applications or content into a single offering.

Example: Mpire

2. REAL WORLD WEB

The emergence of this Real World Web will bring the power of the Web, which today is perceived as a “separate” virtual place, to the user’s point of need of information or transaction.

Location-aware Technologies (maturity: less than 2 years)
Location-aware technology is the use of GPS (global positioning system), assisted GPS (A-GPS), Enhanced Observed Time Difference (EOTD), enhanced GPS (E-GPS), and other technologies in the cellular network and handset to locate a mobile user.

Example: Nokia N95

Location-aware Applications (maturity: 2 - 5 years)
An increasing number of organizations have deployed location-aware mobile business applications, mostly based on GPS-enabled devices, to support queue business processes and activities, such as field force management, fleet management, logistics and good transportation.

Example: Graffiti

Sensor Mesh Network (maturity: more than 10 years)
SMN are ad hoc networks formed by dynamic meshes of peer nodes, each of which includes simple networking, computing and sensing capabilities.

Example: MIT Media Lab $100 laptop

3. APPLICATIONS ARCHITECTURE

The software infrastructure that provides the foundation for modern business applications continues to mirror business requirements more directly.

Event-driven Architecture (maturity: 5 - 10 years)
EDA is an architectural style for distributed applications, in which certain discrete functions are packaged into modular, encapsulated, shareable components, some of which are triggered by the arrival of one or more event objects.

Model-driven Architecture (maturity: not specified)
It is a registered trademark of the Object Management Group (OMG). It describes OMG’s proposed approach to separating business-level functionality from the technical nuances of its implementation to reinforce the focus on business first and technology second.

Corporate Semantics Web (maturity: 5 - 10 years)
It is about application of semantic Web technologies, aka semantic markup languages (for example, Resource Description Framework, Web Ontology Language and topic maps), to corporate Web content.

via Gartner