What's Hot For 2009 !

Nope, I am not referring to the sizzling Deepika Padukone, though I wish I was !

We'll discuss something though not as juicy as a topic on Deepika but equally exciting and important here:

If you are to read NetValue2.0 of the Edge this week, this is what the headlines say.

The article refers to a Cradle Fund event held recently at the the PlugNPlay Centre @ The Gardens, MidValley.

The PnP centre, as its known among technopreneurs in KL is run by Kumpulan Modal Perdana.

Kumpulan Modal Perdana was our largest venue sponsor for GEW 2008.

The 'What's Hot.." event was organized by the Cradle Fund Sdn.Bhd. helmed by her smart, dynamic and articulate CEO, Nazrin Hassan and co-organized by Malaysian Entrepreneurs.

I was briefly at the event and I agree with Karam of the Edge - Entrepreneurship is hot in KL. The room was jampacked !

I enclose a photo I took using my iPhone.

For more on the event, get the Edge or click the link to DocSiva's blog (linked to this blog) where you will find what was discussed. You can see what the Malaysian technopreneurs and ICT players think and predict will be hot in 2009.

So, whats my point? With GEW 2009 approaching fast, I thought it would be a good idea for everyone to be familiar with what our technopreneurs, and players in the ICT area think and predict.

However, I would like to share with you what Mark Andersen, CEO of the Strategic News Service thinks will be hot for 2009. You can then see where the views of our players are similar and where we differ.

According to Mark Andersen in his article titled: The Top 10 Predictions for 2009 :

"The first two calls play from one larger trend, inherent to a declining economy: less money will be spent on platforms, which cost a huge amount of money to develop, and more will be spent on what goes onto platforms.

(Predictions per se are in bold font; additional comments are in regular font.)

1. “Games Look Great on 52-inch Screens”: Entertainment software has a great year. Less money goes into new platforms, and more goes into what goes on those platforms.

Now that many people have made major investments in home theaters, big screens, Surround Sound, etc., it makes sense that they will look at ways of leveraging that investment. The simplest is to add gaming, other entertainment, and other large-screen content; for a few hundred dollars, you double the value of this system.

This also helps keep the legs on sales of these hardware units, for those who have yet to buy large screens.

2. iPhone Applications: “Mobile Apps by the Billions” spread beyond Apple, even as Apple applications climb dramatically. Mobile apps becomes the industry mobile ads was supposed to be. In some cases, the apps become the Trojan horse for the ads.

This is where almost all the action is, to my mind, when it comes to applications. Yesterday, software meant Microsoft Word at $150. Today, software means AroundMe on my smartphone, and things like it, priced from free to $10. There will be many billions of these sold, as smartphone penetration continues to rise above 30%, and as users get the hang of having plenty of them on each phone.

3. “The Blush Is Off the China Rose,” with the country facing political chaos: Chinese GDP dives below 7.5%; and we see the real cost of slave/no-load labor.

Stories of construction workers not being paid after a year of promises will be replaced by increased difficulties for China, as exports drop, GDP growth falls perhaps into the 6%-7% range, and violent confrontations between unemployed workers and government troops increase.

4. Flash price-drop accelerates diskless computing: “Finally, No Moving Parts!” (a dream of decades): The PC shelf life doubles, providing immediate benefits to many sectors, including education.

One person’s loss is always another’s gain. The technology industry is used to the cycle that begins with a drop in memory pricing (in this case, Flash) that sets the table for drops in consumer electronics pricing and opens the door to the design of new products. Computers with no moving parts is a serious step forward, and we should see these at reasonable (not super premium) prices this year.

5. “Wall Computing: The First Installation”: Using big screens goes beyond display functions to small-team collaboration.

SNS Members have just read my proposals about Wall Computers (“SNS: Beyond Touch Computing,” 12/3/08). This is a prediction that the first implementation, not just of big display, but of big display backed by complete compute and storage power, and driven by touch, gestures, and perhaps voice, will be shown to the public. Imagine an SAP management dashboard, with instant access to companywide data, available to a small working team in a conference room. I can’t wait.

6. “CAPCs Take Off,” called UMPCs, netbooks, minis.

I suggested that last year would be the year that CarryAlong PCs, designed in these pages, would start their path of commercial success, and that is just what happened, thanks mainly to ASUS and HP, with Dell following later and Apple getting close. This year, we will see an explosion in these devices, all in the CAPC format (9 inches by 7 inches, approximately), as the fastest-growing sector of computer types.

They are getting ready to become the fastest-growing computers of all time. Geez, that took a while.

7. “LTE Takes the 4G March”: The European broadband wireless standard takes a dominant global position.

The Long Term Evolution (where do these names come from??) version of 4G looks as though it will succeed in getting more installations first, with more long-term support. This is probably one reason that Qualcomm, long a Euro-adversary, threw in the towel a month ago and espoused LTE.

8. “Bandwidth Spreads to ‘The Rest of Us’”: Wireless broadband provides key footprint expansion into Asia and other emerging nations and locations.

Broadband wireless is a critically important enabling technology for many sectors, and will provide “last mile” and “middle 50 miles” connection, in both the developed and developing world. Users everywhere from West Virginia to West Africa will benefit from the low cost and high bandwidth of modern WiFi, WiMAX, and LTE.

9. “Voice Recognition Comes of Age,” thanks to the integration and convergence of data centers, technology, and handsets: Google, Apple, Nuance, and vlingo will be in the lead. By the end of 2009, after decades of talk, more than one-third of mobile users will be using voice recognition regularly.

How long have we all been waiting for this one? The time has finally come when we will expect, and get, very high success rates for untrained, continuous speech, using mobile phones hooked up to server farms running Nuance and vlingo software.

Wow, that took a long time, too.

10. “The Internet Assistant Is Born”: The time has arrived for integration of voice-driven, cloud-based personal service applications into a natural-language interface, with deep access to historic personal data, tailored to you. The IA saves time, saves money, and travels with you via phone, CAPC, or any other access device.

Everyone is now used to the idea of pulling out the iPhone and asking for a nearby Italian restaurant. Now is the time to integrate and personalize these services. You should be able to tell your IA (with name and voice picked by you), “Frank, book me for a (business, personal, vacation) trip to New Orleans from the fifth through the eighth.” The system will know which hotel chain to use, which frequent-flyer mile number, which airline, and buy either symphony or baseball tickets, depending on your profiles.

This isn’t hard, but it does point up the step away from tech for tech’s sake, and toward integration of existing services and technologies to provide better and deeper services to customers."

Hope you find this helpful and together, both views, I hope will help you stay ahead of the game.

Cheers..