Predictions for 2007

This is the season to try and predict and prepare for what the coming year will bring. Here is what I expect ...

On the Consumer Front: 2007 will be the Year of Widgets and Webtops (Web Desktops). Netvibes, PageFlakes, Google Personalized Pages, Live.com (from Microsoft), etc. have all gained traction with early adopters and I expect these to go mainstream. I know several techies who have setup Webtop sites with Widgets (Calendar, e-mail, News, Weather, YouTube) for their friends and family members and received positive feedback. In addition, with the significant increase in the number of smart phones in consumers' hands, I expect specific function mobile widgets (Google Maps, etc.) to gain consumer acceptance in 2007.

On the Enterprise Front: Business users have noticed the speed at which technology is evolving on the consumer front and are wondering why IT is unable to deploy new Enterprise Solutions at a quicker pace. In 2006, Enterprise IT took action and piloted wiki and blogging frameworks, AJAX, mashups and other consumer technologies. I expect wider deployment of these technologies within the Enterprise in 2007. SOA will continue to be implemented in large enterprises to enable software reuse, enhance flexibility and reduce time to market for new solutions.

Hard Disk Encryption at Fed Gov

It seems that the Federal Government is getting ready to encrypt all data on local hard disks. Saw this post on Slashdot. The information for the evaluation is in the public domain. The post on Slashdot includes links to the list of vendors and the requirements for the project.

This is how all machines should be setup by default.

Indian Curry and Advertising on Google SMS

About a week ago, I used Google SMS (short code 46645) for the address and phone number of a South Indian restaurant - Madras Palace in Gaithersburg, MD. Back came the information with an advertisement for an inexpensive calling service to India. This is the first time I saw an advertisement on SMS search.

Google is clearly continuing to open up new avenues for customers to place ads: radio ads, newspaper classifieds, etc.

BTW - Madras Palace is one of the best South Indian restaurants that I have tried in the DC area. The other one my wife and I absolutely adore is Indique in Cleveland Park.

Freewebs

Spent a very interesting hour with Haroon, Shervin and Zeki of Freewebs at their Sliver Spring digs. They are the executive team at one of the few internet startups in the DC area with significant customer penetration, all created by viral marketing. Non-technical users can design and build web-sites and host them at freewebs. Customers must like their service as they are currently hosting about 13 million websites. Impressive!

You can either get a free site with ads from Freewebs or a ad-free site with a subscription. They claim that they are 2nd only to geocities (owned by yahoo) in this category.

The visit took me back to my days at a small startup I worked at in the mid 80s in southern California. There was no signs of excess I saw at startups during the Bubble. They seem to be building their business the old-fashioned way.

Will try to build a web-site on their site over the next few weeks!

Dapper

Very interesting and easy way to create services and widgets. I saw the demo and they have created a screen scraping engine that can be configured by a user and wrapped in a service.

Will give it a whirl when I gat a chance.

US SMS use is significantly up

Finally, the US is catching up with the rest of the world on text messages. It is growing in popularity with 12.5 billion messages sent in the US during the month of June 2006, up 71 percent from 7.3 billion messages in June 2005.

2-minute Mobile Blogs

Winksite helped me put my blog on the cellphone in about 2 minutes. Here is the link to my mobile blog. Impressive! I will be trying out the other features of the product over the next few days. Will report back later.

Marketing Blogs

Recently researched technologies to support marketing and loyalty programs. Came across a couple of interesting blogs on the topic:

Helen Keegan (London, UK)
Scott P Shaffer

Comments? Other blogs that I should look at?