The Internet

“This will be the year that a peer-to-peer technology will be developed that will support communication between individuals and networks of individuals, and, will not require accessing a network, satellite, or cell phone system. This may be some kind of innovative extension of Bluetooth technology. For instance, if bluetooth connectivity could be extended to create networks of connections between individuals, then, people could make calls to each other and create network systems that are independent of any corporation or service provider.This would create true democracy of the airwaves and eliminate Big Brother and Big Business from the equation. Of course, the technology and methodology probably already exist and this is being kept bottled up due to security and economic concerns. Thus, the launch of this technology will not be in the US or major western country and more likely in a BRICME (Brazil, Russia, India, China and Middle East) country and in a high population area.”–Michael Sojka

“US consumers start to realize how slow their internet is and start complaining.”–Jason Voskuil

“I predict that dial-up internet will truly die, either via public access high-speed or high-speed becoming really affordable.”–Brandon Backlin

“Twitter will begin monetizing Twitter in 2009, first with targeted advertising on their Web pages, then with charging marketers for access to their Twitter data stream, then adding capabilities for targeting users based on their geographical location, interests and opt-in requests for offers. They also will add the ability to thread tweets and group tweets based on interests or other qualifiers.”–Rod Bauer

Chrome market share will not even reach 5% Some predict as much as 10%, but unless Google is able to do some magic to Chrome, they will not be successful. For me, it would require six different plug-ins to be available in Chrome–for others, many others are required. And I will be very amazed to see them replicate the Firefox ecosystem within just one year. Additionally, when they do open up for plug-in development, it will be very painful for them to see the number of Chrome+AdBlock users–Chrome users will be mainly Firefox switchers and judging by the number of ‘Digg has ads?’ comments on Digg, AdBlock is pretty popular. Even my mom uses it!”–Lars Henriksen

“Internet Explorer will continue to be chipped away by the surge of new standards-compliant web browsers. Mozilla Firefox will continue to go as it always does, Safari may start losing what little share in the market it has on Windows platform to Chrome, which uses the same technology for its backend. Chrome will be improved so much that by the end of 2009, it will be feature equivalent to IE8, while still being more secure and stable than any other browser due to its sandboxing model.”–Neil Gompa

Laptops and Desktops

“While many manufacturers introduced netbooks in 2008, all the big ones will introduce slim laptops like the Macbook Air, possibly starting with Dell’s Amadeo. These ‘slimbooks’ will dominate the businessmarket. Perhaps we will see the first touchscreen slimbook by the end of 2009.”–Bouke Timbermont

“More netbooks. And in effect, more carpal tunnel and other hand/finger pain from those ungodly tiny keyboards.”–Dave Moyer

“We’ll see a rift in the old model of Moore’s Law as applied to the average Joe. Computers will continue to advance in power and capacity according to Moore’s Law, but mainstream computers will actually regress in power due to ultra affordable and ultra portable computers. Atom based computers and their competitors will rapidly grow market share until they become the mainstream home computers. After they become mainstream for home use, we may even see enterprises adopt them for many tasks. High-end Moore’s Law-pushing computers will become increasingly niche market computers while the mainstream market will settle on lower price point, portability, simplicity, and energy efficiency.”–Dave McCall

“The shaky convergence of PC and entertainment center (example: Windows Media Center) is going to be perfected like never before, with a modified PC becoming able to serve as receiver and ‘signal director’. The declining prices of CPU and storage will make this all the more possible, as more storage and more processing power for less will be the order of the day in ’09.”–Dave Mackey

“Touchscreen computers will become more prevalent. They’ve proven their worth in smaller devices, now they will become an alternative to the old keyboard/mouse input.”–Dave Mackey

“We will see the development on integrated augmented reality, that is to say touch screens that will be developed into holo-screen technology.”–David Shorb

“Gaming physics will be at last embraced by almost all developers, because nVidia will make sure its physics platform is supported by most of their chips as well as a lot of AMD’s chips.”–Bouke Timbermont

“With hardware support improving towards graphics, sound, and gaming input devices on Linux, we may see more focus on gaming on Linux this year, with kernel modesetting to be made available in 2.6.29 and included in distros by April. AMD will continue to follow its open source strategy and gain more support from the open source community as a whole, while nVIDIA will stagger around and eventually announce to attempt AMD’s strategy. Unfortunately, it isn’t likely that nVidia will follow through.”–Neal Gompa

Storage

“Solid State Drives will become cheaper and more reliable, as well as usable. Currently, Solid State Drives are somewhat weak when it comes to performance and space size. During 2009, Solid State drives will increase data space by a large factor. We will possibly have 200GB SSDs by the end of 2009.”–Neal Gompa

“64Gb memory cards will be less that $10 (US) by the end of 2009”–Jeff Shuey

Phones

“Cellphones will continue to get smarter. What happened in 2008 in the high-end cellphone market, will happen in 2009 in the low-end. There will be no more cellphones that are just a phone, they will all have multimedia support, extended browsing capabilities and better screens. This will be a shame though, because carriers will keep on charging way to much for slow mobile internet.”–Bouke Timbermont

“Nokia will come out with a really good Android-based phone, able to compete in the cool factor with the iPhone. Apple will respond with a still cooler iPhone that will start the whole fight again.”–Luis Garza

“Android will come to Verizon and AT&T. They’ve got most of the high-end phones, and it just makes sense that they get the OS in its next round or two. I expect Sprint to be last in that race, just in terms of size and usage.”–Dave Moyer

“Android will capture 20% of the US smart phone market by Q3 2010”–Mathias TCK

“The cell phone service providers–Sprint, Verizon, T-Mobile – will make it less restrictive pricewise to use cell modems and ‘smart phones’ and PDAs will become a more attractive option. I recently had the option to upgrade my phone to a Blackberry but I couldn’t see clear to pay the $40/month fee to surf the web once in a while. The lower prices would create more power users.”–Dave Mackey

The Economy

“No shortage of innovation, but a drop in consumer tech spending. This hurts many companies andtech progress lags in 2010.”–Jason Voskuil

“The future for open source is bright for 2009, the economic downturn in the USA helping matters along quite nicely. However, the IT industry isn’t suffering too badly from the economic issues, but just about everything else is. I doubt that the IT industry will suffer badly throughout the course of these economic problems, but economics are somewhat unpredictable during this time.”–Neil Gompa

The Media Biz

“3 major news media companies will go bankrupt in 2009”–Jim Peake

“While television still tops our source of news, a recent Pew study said for the first time the Internet has passed newspapers as a more popular source of news. We will see the failure of many newspapers and you can bet they’ll go to Congress for help in keeping the news print tradition alive.”–Bill Pytlovany

Beyond the Digital

“Nanobots will hit the scene and impact the medical field this year!”–Dennis Williams

“Catalytic converters used in automotive technology use the metal platinum as the catalyst of choice. 2009 will see the shift toward the use of gold as the catalyst of choice.”–Bert Van Wijck

“Cloud computing will continue to be a buzzword, but… still not get anywhere. At this point, I just don’t think that the technology is stable, secure or sensible enough to be a reliable alternative to desktop computing. I do expect virtualization and VPN access to continue increasing, however.”–Dave Moyer

The Silly

“I predict that Microsoft will single handedly rule the OS market this year after they merge their XBox division with Sony’s Playstation division and buy out Ubuntu Linux along with Apple’s OS division to cut down on all of the competition. Well, either that or they are going have a long battle on their hands with Mac. The Mac users are growing by the hundreds and Microsoft really needs to do something before we have to start installing Exchange 2010 on OSX Server.”–Jason

“Steve Jobs reveals he is not ailing, rather, his lack of public appearances has been due to his development of a hyperintelligent and realistic AI version of himself, cleverly named the iSteve. Apple stocks soar, and the company rejoices as its new robotic CEO settles in for the long haul. Steve Ballmer is not amused, declares hyperintelligent AI technology to be, ‘dead in 2 years'”–Michael Buhman

Got more predictions, or thoughts on the ones you just read? Make ’em in the comments…

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