IBM on the near future.
You’ll beam up your friends in 3-D. “Let’s have our holgrams meet for a chat at 5 pm.”
Batteries will breathe air to power our devices. Or maybe energy-scavenging will replace batteries!
You won’t need to be a scientist to save the planet. Real-time sensors everywhere will communicate massive amounts of data to help in planning contingencies and during emergencies.
Your commute will be personalized.Real-time info everywhere. Our GPS already does this, and automatically re-routes us if there is a big traffic jam ahead.
Computers will help energize your city. Use excess heat from data centers to heat buildings and water.
I’m starting to think we reached some sort of singularity and no one has defined it that well. The information “revolution” is too amorphous a term for it. That thing you mentioned about the “cloud” being more prominent in 2011 has me thinking the same thing. I was thinking about it earlier based off of Google’s recent media leaks about their developing notebook designs — all cloud based, of course. I’ve done a cursory look of books on the topic but most things talking about the singularity tend to go off on some tipping point type flotsam, which isn’t very helpful. Either way, things are looking interesting for the future. I’m wondering at what point the predictions we make at the beginning of the year are going to be outpaced before we even get through it. Given the increasingly exponential rate of change it almost seems hard to comprehend.