Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.
-- Niels Bohr, physicist
If hindsight is 20/20, the ability to look forward in time is utterly myopic. It's dead easy to forecast that technology will alter the way we work in the future. It's nearly impossible to predict which, why, when, and how specific technologies -- both hardware and software -- will bear fruit to make this happen.
But it's no fun to sit on the sidelines and watch the future unfold without taking a stab at being a digital Nostradamus. So we're taking our best guess as to which emerging technologies will have the most impact on computing in the very near future.
Over the following pages, you'll read about five specific advances in hardware, software, and Internet tech that should be on every technophile's, Web strategist's, and CTO's radar. These technologies promise such increased efficiency, performance, and functionality that ignoring them would be foolhardy. At the very least, you need to know about them now so your face doesn't go slack when your co-workers bring them up at lunch.
The items on our list aren't a pack of pie-in-the-sky fantasies, either. We expect to see these technologies actively in play by the end of this year. In a few instances, they are already changing the rules of how we compute at both the consumer and corporate level.
