This Week In Emerging Technology - February 13th

Here are the emerging technologies stories for the week of February 11th.

More Android Sightings - At the World Mobile Congress in one of my favorite cities, Barcelona, there have been several interesting demos of the Google-based Android mobile operating system.

Speeding up Secure Connections - Interesting white paper on research into improving the performance of SSH and SCP connections.

Integrating Identity Management - Expect to see more integration between products in the Identity Access Management market.

The Holy Grail of Nanotech - Researchers at the Brookhaven National Lab have created a three dimensional nanoparticle, a key step in the advancement of nanotechnologies.

More Terabytes Please - IBM is announcing plans to deliver terabyte drives for their data center systems.

Canon Keeps an Eye on Watermarking - Canon has filed for a patent on a technology that takes an image of the photographers retina when taking a picture and then using this image as an embedded watermark to help protect photograph copyrights.

A Solid State Drive Boom

After the recent CES show more and more pundits and analysts are predicting that 2008 will be a big year for solid state of flash drives.

And its hard to argue with these predictions. Just look at some of the biggest products announced or released in the last few months. Both the OLPC's XO laptop and Asus' Eee PC laptop forgo traditional hard disk technologies for much faster solid state drives. And of course it goes with out saying that nearly all of the advancements in Mp3 players, cameras, and smart phones rely heavily on the continued growth and advancement of flash drive technology. Adding to this hype are the continuing rumors that Apple will announce a new laptop that uses solid state drives.

So what is driving all of this growth and excitement about flash drives? Well, there's the constant increases in the size of solid state drives, with many predicting that we'll have flash drives in the hundreds of gigabytes by the end of the year. And as typically happens in most technology markets, as the sizes and prices increase on the high end, the lower end and smaller flash technologies become more affordable (anyone who has recently bought new 2 gigabyte flash cards for their phone or camera can attest to this).

But what will be the effect of all of these solid state drives on the systems and devices that we use to drive our businesses?

Microsoft Mashes It Up with Popfly

Click here to see Popfly screenshots
Every Web 2.0 technology has had its time at the top of the hype cycle, from RSS feeds to blogs to wikis to podcasts. Now, it seems, is the time for mashups to get the lion's share of the Web 2.0 attention, as plenty of technology titans, from Adobe to Google to Yahoo, are starting to release tools to let people create mashups.

Also getting into this game is Microsoft, with the release today of a beta of Popfly, a free service designed to help novice users create mashups that can combine small Web-based applications or gadgets and a variety of Web services.

Popfly is based on Microsoft's Silverlight technology and because of this I found that I was able to successfully use Popfly on both Windows and Mac OS X systems and on both Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Despite being a beta and having a few shortcomings, I am very impressed with the implementation of Popfly and how easy it makes it for nearly any medium-savvy Web user to create a variety of composite Web applications, especially when compared with other mashup tools that require users to understand a fair bit about Web scripts.

With Popfly users can create most mashups simply using a drag-and-drop interface and filling out information in form-based fields. Probably the biggest weakness in Popfly is its reliance on Silverlight for users to be able to view and use most of the mashups that are created. While Silverlight provides cross-platform capabilities, it is still not found on a majority of user systems.

Any Microsoft account such as Passport or an MSN account can be used to log into the Popfly beta. Once in, I was presented with a simple and easy-to-understand interface that provided some useful tutorials to help users get started. Within Popfly users can create mashups, Web pages, and blocks or Web gadgets.

5 Potential Winners from DEMOfall 2007

Click the image to see the list
Over the years new products launched at the DEMO show have gone on to become huge sensations that changed the way people used technology (some of the hits have included Tivo, the Palm Pilot and Salesforce.com).

Of course, the hits at DEMO have been greatly outnumbered by the misses, as making a big splash at DEMO is hardly a guarantee of future success and there are many cases of products that generated lots of buzz at DEMO but failed to generate any enthusiasm in the real world.

But what about this week's DEMOfall show? Out of the overwhelming crush of digital video and social networking products that dominated this week's show, are there any products that might actually prove useful in the real world?

It's always hard to predict the future but looking at products that were shown at DEMOfall, I've picked out five that look like they might have the one characteristic that will lead to long-term success, actual usefulness. And one or two of these products might even turn out to be as influential as the TiVo or the Palm Pilot.

So take a look at my list of Five Potential Winners from DEMOfall.

Also, check back here at eWEEK's Emerging Technology site as I test out and review some of these products as they become available. And please comment here on these choices or other products from DEMOfall that you think are winners.

This Week In Emerging Technology - August 29th

Here are the emerging technology stories for the week of August 27th.

No Muni WiFi for Chicago - The dream of cities offering WiFi Internet service to citizens took another hit as Chicago just announced that they are stepping back from their own Muni WiFi plans.

Super Aerogels - Interesting little Wired post on the possibilities of aerogels, which have a wide variety of uses, especially in insulation.

Five Terabyte Optical Disks - An Israeli company is working on a new technology that delivers 5 terabytes of storage on a DVD sized disk.

Microsoft Serves One Up for the Home

Click the image to see the slide show
I have to admit that when I first heard about the Windows Home Server I didn't really think that much of the concept. After all, it's pretty simple to take an existing Windows server and turn it into a home storage and backup system. Also, there are plenty of easy-to-deploy Linux appliances that can quickly turn any system into an effective network-attached storage device, and never mind the many inexpensive network hard drives available at many stores.

And all of this is still true. But after testing the release candidate of Windows Home Server that was made available last week at connect.microsoft.com, I must say that I am very impressed with its implementation, simplicity and functionality. At least on the software side, it looks like the Windows Home Server could not only turn home digital media storage into an easy task, it may more importantly make home system backups much easier for users.

I installed the Windows Home Server on a do-it-yourself server system in our labs by simply booting to the installation DVD and letting the install run its course. One amusing aspect of the installation process was when it went from the Vista-like Windows Home Server screens and transitioned to installation screens for the Microsoft Small Business Server, which has clearly played a big part in the underlying code of the Home Server.

The Ten Most Wanted Future Technologies

Click the image to see the slide show
Every day here at eWEEK's Emerging Technology site we look at the newest and most disruptive technologies effecting the technology market today. And we've also taken some time to look back at past emerging technologies, including those that we deemed to be flops.

But what about the next generation of emerging technologies? What are the products in the future that will have a major impact on the entire world?

To answer that question, here is our list of the future products and technologies that we are most excited to see come to reality. Some of these technologies are still in the realm of way out science fiction. But others, including some that may surprise you, are already being tested and could be here before you know it.

So here's our list of the Ten Most Wanted Future Technologies. Comment here and let us know which technologies and products would make your list.

Google Gears Up for Offline Apps

Click the image to see the slideshow
There's no underestimating the current impact of web-based applications. Everywhere you look it seems as if more and more core applications are moving to the web from the desktop and the 800-pound gorilla in this whole shift is clearly Google.

But there is one big weakness that web applications have in comparison to their desktop-bound brethren, it's the whole "web" part. Without the Web, there's no application.

Anyone who relies on web applications like those from Google or popular products like Zimbra has felt the frustration of sitting on a long train ride without any access to their on-line applications, while the passenger next to them happily works away on their offline versions of Office, Outlook or Lotus Domino.

And outside of the whole anticipated separations from the web there's the problem of unexpected disconnections. Nearly everyone has experienced the situation of entering information into an on-line application only to lose everything when their network connection drops out.

That's why it's no surprise that Google themselves are trying to solve this problem. Released at Google's Developer Day today (May 31st) is the beta of Google Gears, a tool designed to bring offline access to web-based applications.

Google Gears runs as a browser-plugin and it currently supports Internet Explorer and Firefox on Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. However, Google Gears is first and foremost a developer-play, as in order for the offline capabilities to work the web-application developer has to enable this functionality using the Google Gears API.

This Week In Emerging Tech

Here are the emerging technology stories in the news for the week of May 21st.

Cisco, RSA Combine on SAN Fabricwide Encryption - Looks like we may finally see some results from EMC's acquisition of RSA. Potentially interesting solution for providing encryption throughout the storage architecture.

IBM Comes Out with 6G-bps Pipe Cleaner - Both IBM and Mcafee are claiming to be able to provide super-fast in-line protection against malware.

Holographics set to feed a market hungry for data backup - 600GBytes of space on a disk the size of a CD?

A New Breed of Mouse - One of the winners of Popular Science's Innovation awards, a 3D mouse that you wear as a ring. Was created by a group of students at Worcester Polytechnic Institute here in Massachusetts.

One Big Honkin Hard Drive

Over at our Ziff Davis sibling site Extreme Tech, Loyd Case has done an interesting review of a new terabyte hard drive. That's right, it's a regular hard drive that holds one terabyte (or 1,000 gigabytes if you prefer to look at it that way.

And I thought I was cool for recently picking up that 500Gbyte drive for my home system.

The drive is the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 and it has a 7,200 RPM rotational speed. Pricing for the drive is $399. Quite a bit more than what I paid for my 500Gbyte drive but still not too bad for being on the cutting edge of hard drive capacity.

For all the nitty gritty details on the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 terabyte hard drive check out the Extreme Tech review here.