Holy cow! How 7 big tech trends will change our world in 2009.

None of these are new-new things, but they are gaining traction. This means they will become The Way We Do Things in the near future, and 2009 is likely the year where we will see the shift.

Moving to the cloud. Microsoft is joining the nimbus wagon, with Azure and Live Mesh, and if Apple ever gets mobileme and the cloud iteration of iWork up to Applish quality standards, then we’ve officially got a movement, started in a big way by Google. What this means is that any documents that you do not absolutely need to have in an absolutely secure location will move to the cloud, and your list of applications you actually have installed on your laptop will fall. For home use, the security of the cloud is probably enough for most people. Business users will still need to have a segment of their data on local storage, but not as much as they do presently.

Shared content and professional content living together. One of the great things about iTunes and myspace was that music from the garage band down the street could live in the same place as studio-produced music. News outlets are transforming to include local vlogging and viral journalism. Now  YouTube is offering network- and studio-generated video alongside the homegrowns, squatting on hulu territory. Teachers are asking that textbook publishers allow online repositories of teacher-generated materials alongside the “blessed” work of the editorial staff and authors. More and more, apps that were once limited to amateur content are pulling in professional content, and apps that were once owned by professional content providers are admitting amateur content, to the point where “professional” and “amateur” are adjectives with blurred meaning. We just want lots of stuff, and we want to find it in the same spot.

Cheap applications and freeconomics. The fact that most of the apps on the App Stores are $10 or less should tell you something. It should tell you that most of the time, people need only applications that serve a small range of functions, which can be provided for $10 or less and still turn a profit for the developer. The market for monolithic applications will start to see a decline, in much the same way that personal computers reduced the need for mainframes. The other thing to notice on the App Store is the large number of free applications. Even those these are often demo or lite versions of $10 apps, they are often enough for a user, and they serve as advertising for the for-fee apps, which is important in a long-tail economy.

Hyperlocalization. It has finally occurred to developers that one of the great benefits of a netbook or a handheld is not just that it is portable, but that it knows where it is. This means that you get lots of apps that are “location aware”, and the breadth of the potential is actually fairly stunning. Geosavvy twittering tells you where all your friends are, so that you can choose your next activity according to who you want to be with. But hyperlocalization can also tell you which restaurants near you have got a waiting list presently, and it can tell you not only that Target has got the same product as WalMart for a lower price but where the nearest Target is. It can also tell you where your children are, if that’s important to you.

Audio interactivity. With more computing being done on handhelds, it’s also obvious to most designers that you are likely doing something else at the same time, like walking or driving, which would make focussed attention on the itty bitty screen and a virtual keyboard not only inconvenient but dangerous. The fact that most of these devices are also phones and media players, though, means that developers can take it for granted that they have access to both your mouth and your ears. Expect voice-recording apps to do automatic transcriptions, and expect that your phone will be able to recognize frequent callers by voice regardless of the phone they’re using. Also expect that virtually any app, even a weather or stocks app, should be able to read its display to you or give you some other audio indicator. But Shazam and Ocarina should also tell you that this is only the tip of the microphone-enabled iceberg.

Televisions just turn into home screens. Once February is done and everybody is receiving television digitally, then it makes no sense to have a set-top box that connects the TV to the net, like the Apple or Sling experiments. Why have a box at all? Why not make the TV’s connect directly to the net? And indeed, this is already happening. Of course, once you have TV’s accessing your live Netflix streams the same way your desktop computer can, then there’s really no reason why your TV shouldn’t be able to switch to your desktop and your Bluetooth keyboard can’t be used from the sofa by the TV. Look for the blend of wireless keyboards and universal remotes.

Freelancing through social networks. Social networks are being used more and more not only to share personal lives but professional lives. And since there are likely to be 3.5 million people put out of work by the recession, there will be a lot of people looking for ways to make ends meet. Outsourcing now has a healthy ingredient of crowdsourcing: “We need a solution for a specific problem. Who can do it?” The genius tool here is connecting crowdsourcing to social network profiles. Imagine a facebook app that takes a crowdsourced task posting and pulls in the top 20 profiles of people that can do the job. It may be only a month’s worth of work rather than a full-time job, but it’s a month with food on the table. And companies can get stuff done for cheap even during a hiring freeze.

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Tags: 2009, cloud, freeconomics, hyperlocal, LinkedIn, tech, trends

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