Can you imagine the future world of Modern Technology? It’s totally amazing that the Web World is 20 years old now. Children ask us what we all did before the Internet by which they mean the browser based world of Google, E-bay, You Tube and Club Penguin.
How did we communicate when there were no computers and modern means of communication? Well, I remember that we used to write lots of letters to friends and relatives to stay in touch and were thrilled when someone wrote back. Also it was too expensive to make long distance phone calls in those days. I also spent a lot of time in the library and in book stores looking for books, magazines, research papers etc. for want of information.
Now, after Personal Computer revolution and World Wide Web transformation, it definitely feels like the golden days that my grandparents lived in. Now-a-days we blog, post, comment, Google, Instant Message, Twitter, Web conference, share screens, capture group chats. We can turnaround our ideas in minutes, feel Real presence, Global distribution, Shared authoring in real time.
What about the Future?
I do not think we have to look very far to find what lies ahead in the next five years because it’s already here in primitive form. It’s user friendly IM, VoIP, desktop and Tele presence video conferencing, real-time co-authoring, Web-centric productivity and collaboration tools, much better search through company information and data, virtual world meeting spaces, unified conferencing. Remote team members as connected to you as those a single floor away, meeting centric collaboration platforms, content derived expertise identification, tag clouds at the heart of semantically drive search, analytical graphs at the heart of expertise location, and of course all services available from a mobile Internet device. More and more online shops are defining new ways of shopping.
