What is interesting in tech for 2008

That’s a difficult question, i know what i’m excited about right now. It’s that cloud computing is becoming a reality. More specifically i’m really impressed and excited by the light weight key pair databases like CouchDB. Amazon’s SimpleDB is interesting from an acceptance of the idea perspective, but not very interesting technically. There are whole classes of applications which are hard using a relational database which will be easy to build and scale using key / pair style db’s like couchdb and simpledb. What makes delicious, twitter, facebook, and flickr hard applications to build on the backend are in large part due to a poor match of database storage engines. With that fixed, and it seems like we’re finally getting around to fixing it, we’ll be able to push forward in building social apps which can scale while doing interesting things. Something which hard is going to become easy in 2008.

Let’s see what else? The mobile handset world is going to be interesting. Apple will release an SDK which, if they do it the right way, will create a fountain of new applications. Android will come along and let that creativity of building apps spread to more devices, but it won’t be as slick. Apple’s one device, one screen size, one interface, system will be a massive win in terms of building interesting applications. The iPhone is the Mac of phones, but it remains to be seen if Android becomes linux (hackers doing cool stuff but not much end user acceptance), Windows widespread but clunky because of the hundreds of devices which need to be supported, or OS2 cool, but simply ignored out of existence.

I’m excited about computing and the net reaching out in to non-computer devices. The Dash Navigator is one example, Chumby and Kindle are others, there are lots. So far they’ve had a hard time getting built and released. Hopefully 2008 will be the year that the net stops being about laptops, desktops, and servers. The iphone is a bit along that path, but there’s so much more. Perhaps it’s too optimistic for 2008, building physical things takes much longer lead time. Eventually the device makers will learn what the desktop application makers have learned. That having something which is tied to the net and you can push updates on to will mean you can be much more agile.

The last thing i’m excited about is maps. This isn’t new, it’s been going on for a while, but there are neat things happening with maps, geo, and location based services. I hope there is enough space for people to build something which is social and useful rather than just a marketers dream (find the nearest starbucks).