Things I want in 2011

New year brings freshness, excitement, energy and also expectations. Here are a handful of things I hope 2011 brings for me. These are not predictions by any means, just some wishful thinking on my part enroute to India.

Broadband Anywhere We pay for broadband access many times over. Wired broadband at home, 3G/4G for smart phones. And increasingly on device specific plans, monthly (as in ipad) or part of the device (as in kindle). If you own multiple connected devices, chances are you also are paying multiple carriers for same internet access sliced and diced differently. I hope in 2011 carriers come out with unlimited internet access plans with no restrictions that work everywhere, or any device of my choosing.

Digital wallet Our smart phones are becoming smarter with each revision. I hope in 2011 they take over our wallet. I recently lost my physical wallet and had to go through the pain of individually calling the various card providers and then waiting for a physical replacement to arrive in mail. I hope smart phones become smart enough to replace a physical wallet. Upcoming technologies like NFC, or Pay-by-sms are promising steps in that direction. Phones should be able to allow me to complete a transactions via a payment method of my choice (via secure pin, phrase, finger print recognition etc) and let me remote wipe it, if I were to loose a phone (and thus the digital wallet). This Idea can be extended to other physical cards typically carried in a wallet i.e. membership cards, passes etc. I hope in 2011 smart phones get rid of my wallet

Video on demand 2010 was a year where a myriad of devices struggled to get video on demand to our TV sets. I believe a large number of people are waiting for a true video solution in order to get rid of their cable/satelite TV. Google TV, Roku, Boxee, Apple TV are just a few players. They all are struggling to sign up enough content from the various content producers to make video on demand an viable alternative. I think technology is there and it is waiting for a business model/plan to make it work. I hope in 2011, the players in this space get together to give us a true video on demand, where I can watch what I want, when I want for an decent price - iTunes for Video.

Death of CD We all thought CD was dead. Apple even told us so [TBD]. But wait, why did I buy handfull of them just in a last few weeks ? Game Consoles rely heavily on CDs for their games to prevent piracy. Most of my games are kid oriented. kids and cds dont go togather, I am always worried about cds getting scratched and unplayable. I hope with Kinect, Move & Wii focusing on more kid oriented games, an kid friendly alternative to CD is developed in 2011. That will save me some yelling.

Try-before-you-buy-apps Not sure if apple realizes, but in my opinion the biggest obstecle to an even more widespeard use of apps is lack of “try before you buy”. I hope in 201l, the appstores come out with an innovative way to let us try apps, before we acutually purchase them. They can just hold charging the card for a day or so. I know, I would definitely buy a lot for apps, both for me and my kids if I could experience the functionality before making a commitment. Like dating before you pop the question ;)

What does the techie inside you want in 2011. Post your thoughts in comments :)

10 significant tech tends of 2010

As this year comes I started to wonder about the tech trends that have affected me personally. There are quite a few and I decided to pen 10 of them down. here they are in no particular order.

Cloud Sun had been saying for years network is the computer. Google continues to convince us of moving to cloud by “assembling” google documents as a credible alternative to office. But its only now that cloud is showing signs of coming of age. The rise of smart phones and apps has led to radical shift in the way software is architected. Instead of thinking of applications as client/server or as a 3 tier systems, we have started thinking of them as set of cloud based services that can be accessed from anywhere: web, smart phones, tablets, PCs etc. They continue to work when offline and magically sync back once online. dropbox evernote two apps I love the most and use regularly on various devices are perfect examples of such apps.

iPad I don’t own ipad yet but lust after one. Its a game changer. It is single handedly killing the netbooks. Ipad’s sucess has beeline of vendors touting their android netbooks. Msft will attempt to re-peddle its tablets too. Like iphone reinvented the smart phones, Ipad reinvented the tablets. It has encouraged us techies to think about form along with the function. also, if they complete its ok to drop the function in order to keep the form. This usualu goes against our engineering acumen, but iPad proves it by doing less than otehr tablets, but doing is extremely well. I am looking forward to see how the tablets evolve in 2011

Developers,Developers,Developers 2010 was a great year to be a developer. Success of apple app store and its reimplementation by almost every other platform is very exciting to an individual developer. It is nice to feel wanted for a change :) The app phenomenon can and will turn the life around for many a developers. We just need a strong passion, lots a caffeine and a strong belief (and may be a understanding spouse ;), almost all tools needed to be an app developer are very affordable or available for free. Also, social media makes a good product take off virally.

Andorid is rising up fast. It is showing a lot of promise. Almost every single manufacturer has an android offering or will shortly. Andorid is being used in almost every major consumer electronic appliance: phones, tablet, tvs, stbs etc. Android will surely become the “windows” of the consumer device market and thus it will become increasingly hard to avoid it. Android definitely provides healthy alternative to iOS. It will be interesting to see how the eternal open vs close battle plays out. I think technically they both are about the same and there is a place for both of them.

Location based services will increasingly become popular. Rise of the “checkin” based services like 4square, gowalla, facebook places, and location tracking apps like latitude and loopt are constantlt evolving. Slowly these apps will become commercialized with vendors offering e-coupons or other forms of incentives. This combined with social element, local content providers and crowd sourced reviewes/recommendation will make location based apps increasingly popular. I think gps enabled mobile devices & location based apps form a very symbiotic relationship and if traditional gps providers don’t do something soon, everybody else will eat their lunch.

HTML5 is a crowned prince of the internet, its just waiting for flash to die before it can take its rightful place on the net. Flash is being kept alive by the community to differentiate themselves from the iOS (so they can have an extra checkbox). Its been proven again and again that there is some truth to Steve’s rant. Mobile devices are defining the landscape of tomm, they need battery life and reliability (no bosd). Any technology that can provide that will be the king, and others will die off. HTML5 is a step in that direction. Its still premature to write a flash eulogy. I just hope in 2011 html5 becomes the platform on which web development is based on.

Family Gaming is another welcome development of 2010. Microsoft & Sony one upped nintendo by releasing kinect & move. They both seem to be family oriented gaming platform with a large variety of “E” rated games. They are definitely fun to play with. I think they will make parties more interesting and may be will bring back the family game night :)

3D TVs tried to make a big splash this year, riding on the avatar wave. They still might have a ways to go. I personally don’t seem to be interested in watching regular TV fare in 3d. It might have some potential in games. 3D Kinect game does sound very appealing to me

Google TV made a big splash with some marquee manufactures behind it. The major networks were quick to pull the rug. Video still remains a tough nut to crack, thus there is still time where apple/google tvs, or services like roku/boxee become mainstream.

Sun being acquired by oracle might have a major implications on tech industry. Oracle is slowing either closing down or significantly altering the open source technology landscape that blossomed under Sun. There already have been lawsuits flying with oracle & google for use of Java as part of android platform. I just hope these technologies continue to thrive elsewhere and continue to fuel the tech startup industry

These are a few things that caught my attention in 2010, I am looking fwd to what 2011 will bring to us. Its really a exciting time to be part if the tech industry

Is Ad-Blocking unethical ?

I Hate Ads. Both on TV and online. There are 5 main reason I hate online ads.

1. Ads slow my browsing experience. Significant number online ads are use rich media (google text ads are notable exception) and thus take up a significant bandwidth on an page. Its unacceptable to me that ads slow my browsing experience, even more when I am browsing for text (like news sites or blogs), or researching something online. See Venturebeat study.

2. Ads are a battery drain Its been proven that flash drains battery a lot faster. Significant number of non text ads are in flash, and I don’t want them draining my precious battery. See Ars Technica study.

3. Ads are a bandwidth hog. We now live in era of tiered mobile data plan. We tether our computers to our smart phones, browsing via our mobile data plans. I want to maximize my browsing experience by seeing the content I am interested in, and do not want ads taking a bite out of our data plans.

4. Ads compromise my privacy. Quite a few ads plant tracking cookies. I hate being tracked online, as much as you would if you were tracked in real life. see this article

5. Ads profile me. Most ads I see are totally irrelevant, or profile me. They tend to be just white noise that I would rather not have. Look at this Wall Street Journal study.

All first tier web browsers have very effective ad blocking plugins (chome, firefox, safari ). These plugins are smart enough to prevent the browsers from downloading the section of the websites that looks like an “ad”, they use variety of heuristics to do this - they look at the size of the image, the source of the image, placement of the image etc to determine that. By blocking Ads they promise a faster, more secure online browsing experience, a longer battery life and saving on the data plan. All this for free. Also the ad blocking plugins preserve the site layout, and thus they do not compromise the content. I use ad blocks on all my browsers. It is the usually the first plugin I install. In fact, I don’t even upgrade to a newer version of the browser if the ad blockers are not available.

While the venture capital industry is crediting with fueling the tech startups, the Ad industry is truly responsible for keeping them alive. Most startups depend heavily on Ads as a revenue source. I do understand the online rule : If you do not pay for your product, you ARE the product. And I do not want to pay for stuff. So per the law I need to give up my privacy and let the site productize me, or I compromise my browsing experience by viewing ads. Hence my ethical dilemma. I don’t want to pay of stuff online. I don’t want to watch ads (which indirectly pay for my online stuff). This means I essentially want to consume my online services for free. Is this analogous to shop lifting ? Am I being unethical by blocking ads and disallowing the potential revenue the site could have made ?

I think the ad industry needs to innovate. They need to make sure that the ads are not a nuisance.

1. They are not heavy (the ads should not increase the bandwidth usage/download time by say 5 to 10% of the actual content).
2. They don't use technologies that are detrimental (flash).
3. They should not track me, if I don't want to.

I think Ad industry is taking a right step with Open data alliance. Hopefully they will figure out a way so I can live with ads, and do not feel like a shop lifter when I am browsing.