It’s time for a look into the future to see what technologies will make it this year.
Last year we predicted that LTE, the real 4G cellular technology, would flourish. It’s now a growing percentage of cellphone sales. The other practical technology we examined, near field communications (NFC), has morphed into several technologies that are beginning to appear in more devices. (NFC is something akin to Bluetooth, which provides for data exchange for your mobile devices.)
This is about par for the course as innovative technology goes through rapid evolution before it becomes the next big thing. A good sign of a technology that is not going to make it is one that does not go through rapid change spawning similar technologies.
OK, so what is coming?
Apple has been struggling lately. (How a company with a $137 billion war chest can struggle is another question, but it definitely needs a new product that is more than just a smaller iPad.)
The and the Wall Street Journal have both identified iWatch as Apple’s new hope. (They may be correct, but hasn’t the watch been killed by the smartphone?) That said, wearable devices are hot for 2013. An iWatch could maintain connectivity to your iPhone and iPad, displaying messages using the new Bluetooth Message Access Profile. Bluetooth MAP is already included in iOS 6.
Google is not one to be left behind. The tech world’s attention is on Google NOW, which will be showing up this year in Google phones with Android 4.2.2.
So what is Google NOW?
This could be a minor convenience tool or a very big thing depending on how it evolves over the next few months. Google NOW takes information that you are interested in such as news, sports scores for your teams, messages from your contacts, your schedule and your current location and gives you information in one place. Depending on what information is captured and what you choose to use, this could be the centralized messaging center that has been missing from our lives. We will have to wait and see. It’s reported that there could be a widget in Android 4.2.2 that would display your Google NOW cards on the lock screen.
A new self-publishing e-book service could be big for media. I’m betting that it will be big for education first. Apple’s iBooks Author is the first to provide tools for self-publishing of e-books. This had great potential but was overly complex, and the end products were basically usable only by Apple devices.
A new company, Inkling, has developed a simple, Google-friendly self-publishing tool called Inkling Habitat and is now free for consumers. It appears to be much easier to use than Apple’s iBooks Author. It is also not limited to one company’s devices. The goal of Inkling Habitat, according to its founder and CEO Matt MacInnis, is to transform e-book publishing from simple text to full multimedia, and Inkling Habitat is designed to do that. As an example, you can instantly put an authoring team together and begin writing, adding video, collaborating and producing media immediately with no additional software. Everything is stored in the cloud. This could transform what educators produce for their classes in a way that Apple couldn’t.
Stay tuned!
