In the year 2020 — the death of locality and other predictions

I had a talk with Hossein Eslambolchi, former president of AT&T Labs and CTO for the company. He ran down for me, ala David Letterman top ten style, his predictions for high tech in the next decade.

Number 10 —

Next generation speech recognition and Natural Language Understanding [NLU] will redefine human machine interface.

As speech recognition and NLU improve they will become the medium for the creation of the so-called Semantic Web.

According to most, the semantic Web seeks a “common framework that will allow data to be shared and reused across multiple boundaries.”

At least that’s how Wikipedia puts it.

In order to do this machines, not necessarily people, need to understand the meaning and context of the data which it stores.

Eslambolchi believes speech recognition and NLU are the mediums to achieve this.

Number 9

Knowledge mining will transform the way we do business

By 2010 individual databases will store 5 terabytes to 10 terabytes of data. By 2020 Eslambolchi says a single database will contain 100 petabytes of data.

Something has to change. “Normal indexing won’t work,” says Eslambolchi.

Number 8

Open source components at network edge will dominate

Stuff that sits on the edge now, like security and XML messaging will be integrated into the heart of the network and new things will appear at the edge.

Number 7

Broadband will be common — death of locality.

This is a beauty. See my upcoming column on August 1st for my take. I think the death of locality could lead to the emergence of more localized services filling in the gaps where online doesn’t work.

Number 6

e-collaboration and P2P will dominate the workplace

Maybe

Number 5

Sensor networks will proliferate

Yes, if you sneeze into a tissue there will be a sensor on the tissue and you’ll find an email in your inbox when you get home asking if you want to reorder.

Number 4

Wireless Internet Access will grow exponentially

Sounds obvious but Eslambolchi says currently we have connections down the superhighway but not on the smaller country roads so to speak and that will be filled in over the next gen.

Number 3

Networks will become personal

Wireless IP networks will create a new class of personal devices and services. A network dedicated to you. I suppose its like a personal portal on steroids.

Number 2

Security requirements will continue to increase

Maybe even Microsoft will get it right. That’s me not Eslambolchi talking.

And the number 1 technology change we will see by the year 2020 is —

Emerging networks and the Internet will be ready for the “sextuple” play.

Voice, video, data, wireless, gaming and sensory information.

Okay, go forth and build a business around one of these. You can’t lose.