Often times, I wonder what it would be like in the next 5 years. When I was in college , e-mail was a novelty and I remember using green terminal screens with text based editors to send and receive mail. To be frank, I was thrilled to be able to reach out to folks thousands of miles away within a few minutes. Back then, I was riding the cutting edge - But it didn't last very long and as we all know e-mail is not the cutting edge anymore. Technology has virtually created a number of new companies and we all wonder what is next. To answer this question, all we need to do is look at the past innovations - Almost all of them are propelled by a need to solve or simplify an existing need. More importantly they are facilitated by changes in basic technologies and scale of operations leading to cheap resources.
For example, consider digital cameras - A few years back, when storage was expensive , they were the fancy toys of the rich amateurs. Not any more , These days you would be hard pressed find a professional without a digital camera and there are hardly any film based models left in US. Sure, the feature functionality of digital cameras these days are far superior. But it also worth noting that the cost of flash memory has decreased significantly off-late and it is this factor that contributed to the explosion of digital prints. With 15 Megabyte cameras at affordable prices , anyone can create a professional print without going through the rigour of film processing. This to me is the key for predicting future innovations - For sure, memory and processing power will become cheaper - In essence facilitating the developement of complex and storage intesive applications.
Coming back to digital cameras, I won't be surprised if we end up with 20 MB or 30 MB cameras very soon. Further, people will be taking a lot more pictures and videos ( unstructured content ) in future creating the need for solutions to better organize and search their archives. Increasing processing power and cheaper hardware will make it possible to host huge social networks along with the ability to handle complex operations such as speech and video recognition etc. Remembering that the success of any product is a result of functionality and affordability will help us in projecting the future solutions and potentially lead the way in shaping the next wave.
