trends

Technology trends that I think will become improtant and selfevident within the next five years are:

Utility on demand: application servide providers:
. Utilities need to be reliable, inexpensive and easy to use. Examples are electricity (we don't use home generators), water & gas (we don't have our own water and gas wells), telephone. With always on internet acces using dsl, cable, dish, and other boraodband network stuff, we have inexpensive, easy, and reliable internet access. Current outside provided applications include web mail, on-line banking, genealogy, photo albums, etc. This trend will continue and will impact home and business users.

Robotics: very long temr: examples are roomba (vacuum clearners), lawn mowers, auto breaking and traffic speed maintenance, mars rover.

Content delivery: examples of existing facilities: Rss, wiki, blogs, news, music, education. Often provides a foundation for collaboration by first delivering a set of content and then providing facilities for a gorup of persons to joi8ntly and separately act on the content and to interact with each other in the context of the delivered content.