2013: The Year Ahead

As we say good bye to 2012, there is a good chance that a lot of us are stopping to take a moment to look back at the year and what happened, what was done, and what was accomplished. As far as the year in tech goes, there have been plenty of ups and downs, most recently the outage of the Amazon cloud which knocked down Netflix for most of Christmas. This showed the vulnerabilities of the cloud services but also just how promising the service are going to be. The coming year will plenty of its own surprises but some predictions are pretty solid. For example, augmented reality will really take off and the IT world is getting more interested in hybrids of the tablet and laptop. Augmented reality has been in the works for some time now but I think this might be the year that it is going to go mainstream. By definition, augmented reality (AR) is a technology that lets a person view a real-life scene, ad, kids book, game or movie poster, for example, via their mobile device and then adds information to the device’s screen to make whatever the person is viewing come alive with additional content. The sky is the limit with the different applications. What are your predictions?