Wille Faler’s Buzzword Bingo

2007 is officially over, and it’s time to lift your eyes and look towards the horizon. I don’t want to be any worse than anyone else making predictions, so here are my predictions for the moust groundbreaking trends in technology and business to watch in 2008:

IP Telephony goes beyond cheap phone calls
The convergence between telephony and IT has so far been mostly about cheap and free phone calls, the natural evolution of new technology and new possibilities is to mimic the old, so it is to be expected. But just as the Internet has ended up being about more than e-commerce, advertising and e-mails, so will IP telephony: lower entry barriers and commoditized infrastructure means that tomorrows winners will create new services unheard of before and enabled by new technology. Technology and features previously only available to telecoms and large corporations will be simplified and put in the hands of SMB’s and individuals – people will be able to create their own “call plans” and call destinations to suit their lifestyle, and location based services will merge with voice services. Interesting times indeed.

Virtualization takes a step to the next level
The potential of virtualization has thus far only been scratched on the surface, VMWare, Xen, Amazon EC2 et al open up interesting possibilities, but so far it has mostly been limited to manually being able to duplicate pre-existing “virtual machines” dedicated for specific purposes.
I predict that the next step will be the obsolesence of traditional web- and server hosting: utility computing such as Amazon’s EC2 will not only be about only paying for the machine hours you use, but also accurately being able to scale infrastructure up and down transparently and automatically as traffic and load differ. Organizations will be able to pay not only for the resources they use, but also for exactly the computing resources they need and not any more or less, this will enable finance managers to sleep easy over the use of their budgets, and IT managers to sleep easy knowing a sudden spike won’t kill their applications.

Social Networking becomes distributed
Let’s face it, Facebook and all the other social networking sites work in a way that is very “un-internet like”, they are big central repositories – if you are on one network and your friend is on another, there is no way to connect the two of you. For the promise of social networking sites to really be fulfilled, social networking sites need to become interoperable and distributed – your online identity should be transparent and portable in the same way that your e-mail address can be e-mailed from any domain, or your phone number can be called from any telephone network.

Credit checks get an overhaul and reputation becomes a factor
The current credit crunch has thrown a light at a few shortcomings of the current credit- and credit checking system, it is simply too easy to manipulate if you know how to do it, and people with perfectly good ability to pay can be penalized for frivolous and nonsensical reasons. Maybe credit checking agencies will start taking a more holistic approach, not only looking into traditional sources of financial information, but also starting to measure more intangible areas that concern a persons overall “reputation”. There are several start-ups trying to deal with online reputation, but I think this area is most valuable to credit checking agencies, and they stand best positioned to make inroads into the area – some leading reputation start-ups may be bought out by credit agencies late into the game, but watch this space for credit agencies starting to care more about your character and slightly less about whom you’ve got loans with.

The man on the street will start watching the watchers
Three out of four trends mentioned above are also potential privacy threats, as we become more and more monitored in all aspects of our professional, private and social lives, there are bound to be some considerable privacy scares – the UK has already seen it’s fair share of Government screw-ups in this area in the last half of 2007. As these screw-ups become more and more common, and larger and larger in scale from both government and private organizations, people will start to care more about their privacy and personal information.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we get a “terror balance” between people and those who monitor us.
People will be monitored by various organizations, and start-ups will pop up that allow people to monitor in more detail how they in turn are monitored and how their personal information is used – and object in cases where their information is faulty, objectionable or they do not consent to how they are monitored and their information is used.