On his way to convince someone to make a universal remote that’s easy to program, and is intuitive enough to use in the dark, Ed Kohler *[altered] *pointed me to Technology Evangelist, where his colleague Ben Higginbotham* made some predictions for 2006, which I kindly stole from that blog. You should follow the link down under to get the entire list of predictions though, because it’s really good.
- BluRay and HD DVDs will finally hit the market with much fanfare, but at a very steep price.
- Apple will release a HDTV living room solution. Maybe based on iTunes, maybe not, this system will allow users to download HDTV shows and movies legally and play them on their Macintosh via their Front Row application.
- To compete with Windows Mobile 5, Palm will release an all new Treo, above and beyond the Treo 700w, based on a Linux version of the Palm OS.
- A VoIP war will be raged between Microsoft, eBay/Skype, Google/AOL, and the traditional VoIP providers such as Vonage. We will see a lot of innovative features, the least of which is video. Expect to start getting WebEx type functionality in these applications.
- Applications will continue to move to the web, try Writely, Bloglines and Yahoo Mail and they will become more integrated – think OnlineOffice – so that users can access their data from their Handhelds, Tabnotes, and Media Center PC’s: The web will fundamentally disrupt every industry, while we have heard this before, it will truly happen in Web 2.0.
This and much more on [TechnologyEvangelist]