As an IEEE member, this is an issue I receive eagerly annually. The IEEE has issued its list of technology winners and losers for 2010:
(please click to enlarge)
Here are summaries of the winner and losers.
Winners:
1. Google Chrome
The Chrome suite looks an awful lot like a dagger aimed straight at Microsoft’s heart. Who needs 500-gigabyte hard drives and a 6-megabyte L2 cache when lots of input ports and a fast wireless connection will do? That’s the rhetorical question that has lately prompted the meteoric rise of the netbook, a bare-bones laptop that gets most of its muscle from online services. Google, in Mountain View, Calif., is the first software company to truly capitalize on the promise of these machines: to allow casual users to live entirely in the cloud, without realizing they’re there.
Chrome OS has no built-in applications—no iCal, no Outlook, no TextEdit, no Word. You just turn on your netbook and you’re on the Web, in what we now call the cloud, where all your stuff lives: all your photos on Flickr, a long trail of your daily foibles and frustrations on Twitter, your purchasing history on PayPal, your prolix unpublished novel on LiveJournal, your music collection on Rhapsody, and the stuff that might be a little embarrassing if your coworkers came across it on Facebook. In fact, cloud computing is what makes Google’s strategy possible.
2. Russian Railways and IBM
The backbone of the Russian Federation is its railways. With 85,500 kilometers of track and 664,600 railcars transporting people and goods across 11 time zones, Russian Railways is practically a force of nature.
Russian Railways has struck a technical partnership with IBM. With IBM’s help, the railway is at last overhauling the hardware, software, and communications architecture that underpin its operations. The overhaul will centralize the management of data into new computing hubs, restructure the collection of information on the railroad’s field operations, and integrate new automation software to help the railway strategize how to deploy its assets. When the redesign is completed in 2014, the company will do business in a fundamentally new way.
3. Pixel Qi’s Everywhere Display
The picture quality is fine, if nothing special.
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
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