I did say I was going to seed site this with some of my earlier predictions, and the ones I could remember were wrong. Which is slightly embarassing but there you go, never let it be said I'm not honest!

In the "how wrong can you be" pile today we have Skype. When Skype first burst onto the scene VOIP was a pretty new concept - ICQ was the dominent (only?) IM client and transmitting voice on the net was a pretty hit and miss affair.

There were two competing technologies at the time, or at least I viewed them as competing. SIP was just getting started as an attempt to generate an open standard protocol for transmitting voice over IP. (actually for the pedants SIP is one of a numper of related protocols needed to make this work, but it'll do for my purpose here). Skype meanwhile was proprietory and closed.  To be fair Skype always had noticably better voice quality right from the start. I said at the time though that it's closed, proprietory nature would be it's downfall as people were starting to talk about about standards, interoperability etc.

So what happened? Well it turned out that SIP and it's associated standards were a nightmare to get working on a PC - the complicated nature of the protocol means you're into firewall hell (especially with NAT) and the voice quality of PC based SIP clients remains pretty poor even now (IMHO, obviously). Skype meanwhile has evolved to the point where it "just works" and is capable of better voice quality than my landline on a good day.

SIP didn't die - it's used in enterprise level VOIP applications, inside corporates and big telcos. There's probably a fair chance your international phone traffic is carried by VOIP using something like it. At that level interoperability is pretty important, so adhering to a standard becomes a real necessity and the networking / firewall problems can be resolved by people who know what they're doing and hardware designed to take it.

Meanwhile for the home user who just wanted to talk and didn't care about standards, skype offered an easy to use, good quality and free product which shows no sign of dying out.

Perhaps this is a lesson in "perspective". I was right about skype from a business perspective, in that I don't see corporates rushing to deploy skype across their desktops (I'm sure some do, but I reckon they're the exception rather than the rule). I wasn't thinking like a consumer though, so overall I got it wrong.

Google Chrome should need no introduction. In the past few days the buzz on the net has been about nothing else and I'm not going to repeat everything that's been said about it here. Put simply, Chrome is a brand new browser from Google, based on the open source and standards compliant Webkit engine. There are a bunch of other cool things going on under the hood that make it pretty compelling technically but that's not really what I want to look at here.

I'm trying it out and so far I like what I see. It's fast - really fast - seems stable and has some lovely UI touches. It does need some plugin support and I'm amazed they didn't integrate google bookmarks into it but for a version 1 product it's remarkably complete.

From the perspective of this site though the question is: Will Chrome overtake firefox / IE as the browser of choice?

Actually that's an almost impossible question to answer because generic browser stats are impossible to find so working out which one is more popular isn't easy. It depends on the site's target audience - sites concerned with web development will be 85% firefox but apple.com is probably 85% Safari! 

I think I can make a few assumptions though. To start with I think that firefox is used, by and large, by people who actually know it exists. By that I mean people who are interested in technology or the internet at large and are comfortable with experimenting on their PC. The archetypical "Power user" if you will.

There are an awful lot of other people out there who just use the browser that came with their PC - IE on a Windows box and Safari on the Mac. Those people will be harder to reach because by their nature they're not interested in changing something that already works for them.

Then there are corporates, who are a law unto themselves. Some won't touch firefox because it's not supported by MS. Some won't touch IE because of percieved security holes. Some don't care.

Chrome is really good, especially for a version 1 product and it can only get better with time. So here's my prediction: Chrome will eat significanty into the Firefox ("power user") market. If you own a website, give it 3 months and you'll see Chrome eating into firefox in your browser stats. I don't think it'll dent IE much, not because it's worse than IE but because google have some work to do in convincing IE users to switch.

And Safari? Google need to make a mac version first!

Microsoft Silverlight is, from the consumer's point of view Microsoft's answer to Adobe Flash. It enables very pretty, very rich user experiences on websites, effectively letting web applications have the power and sophistication usually reserved for the thick clients.

Flash is well established in the web world so to some extent Microsoft are playing catchup with silverlight. I'm talking about Silverlight 1.1 / 2.0 here - the one we (developers) were all waiting for. Silverlight 1.0 was basically a technology preview that had as much in common with Silverlight 2 as Javascript has with Java.

There is one single and very simple reason why Silverlight will go places: Developer adoption. Developing in Flash requires learning a whole new toolset. Silverlight enables any C# coder to use their existing skills and development environments to create web content. No messy HTML, no javascript, no page postbacks and stateless environments. Well, mostly. Running in a browser gives you some limitations and XAML is a bit crazy at times but at least it's all within a pretty familiar conceptual framework. (If you're a developer reading this, ScottGu's blog is a good place to start)

There's some incredible technology behind it in terms of how they've managed to take the 30-odd MB .NET Framework and fit all the useful bits into a 2.5MB browser dowload. That's not the point of this post though. The question is - will Silverlight take off, or will it languish forgotten in the dusty technology archives?

A few thoughts:

1) We won't see entire applications done as huge silverlight downloads. Not in this version. A complex business app will still be better off as a thick client. Plus in it's current form (beta 2 as I'm writing this) it's still a bit rough around the edges. I'm looking forward do the day when we will be able to do that but my gut says it's a few versions away.

2) Because it's instantly accesisble to developers we'll start seeing it crop up in all sorts of places - as non-web developers realise they can create web content they'll start using it more. I can see it in internal corporate intranets.

3) The need for a supported runtime player could really hurt it. In that sense it's no worse than flash, but flash has had the time to become adopted on all the major platforms - in fact it's one of the few "essential" plugins you really need when setting up a new machine. MS need to keep up the runtime support if they want to break Adobe's grip on that space. 

If you hadn't guessed, I'm quite excited by it. Personally I'm not in love with how we do web development today - I think we've stretched a whole bunch of unsuitable technologies to breaking point in order to get where we are now. We need a new techology to take us forward and Silverlight might just be it.

The impetus has to come from developers though - I don't think users care how their experience is delivered as long as it works. So Silverlight will become another plugin you need to download in order to make things go. It'll probably become as popular as flash in time but if it was going to be the backbone of "Web 3.0" (or whatever idiot name the marketing types come up with) then pretty much everybody developing web apps now would have to stop and start again in Silverlight. Which ain't going to happen.

The final verdict: Great technology, will become adopted but won't set the world on fire. Yet. 

OK, who remembers WAP? In particular the over-hyped drivel being spouted in adverts of the time about "mobile internet".

WAP was the first major attempt to get mobile phones doing something else besides making phone calls. It was, to put it kindly, rubbish. Even the internet as it was then (and we're talking about last century here folks, when having a 56K modem was luxury) was still too much for the tiny mobile phone screens and bandwidth available at the time.

So the industry created WAP, which was an attempt to introduce a slimmed down version of HTML that could be transmitted over the available bandwidth and interpreted by the phones of the time. WAP sites were text only (perhaps you'd get a banner graphic if you were lucky) and slow.

You've probably guessed by now that I wasn't in love with it when it first turned up and if I was writing this prediction then it would have been a solid "going nowhere".

I think that's true by and large, WAP itself did go nowhere. It did spawn user interest though and prompt the development of phones and networks that make "mobile internet" more than a pipedream. It might have taken 8 years for the iPhone 3G to turn up and do the job properly, but "Mobile internet" is very much a reality these days and things can only get better from there.

So was I right? Yes, mostly. WAP was useless, but I didn't see what it would turn into. Or at least if I did, I didn't record it anywhere so I can't prove it! We'll call that one a draw...

E-Ink technology has progressed from the lab into consumer products, but it's still a pretty niche item - even though it's been around for a few years most people probably haven't heard of it. One common use is as secondary screens in mobile phones but it has also spawned a whole new product category in Ebook readers and I think this is what will bring it to people's attention.

Ebook readers are essentially mobile libraries that hold hundreds of books in a tablet the size of an A5 notepad. The Sony PRS-505 is probably the most mainstream of these, but there are other devices available from a variety of manufacturers.

E-Ink / E-Paper has two defining characteristcs that make it uniquely suited for a book reader:

1. It can be read in bright sunlight, just like normal paper.
2. It draws no power while displaying a static image, it only uses power to change the displa. This means battery life can be extended to weeks of regular use.

These properties also carry two large downsides:

1. It's monochrome only.
2. Refreshing a whole page takes a *long* time - seconds or at best milliseconds, rather than the nanoseconds conventional LCD screens require.

This diagram shows the make up of an e-ink display (lifted directly from E-Ink's website, hopefully they won't mind)   

If they could make it colour and faster refreshing they'd change the world with it, but I can't see it. Colour possibly but I suspect the refresh speed is an inherent consequence of the design (I'd love to be proved wrong though).

So what do I reckon - will it sink or swim? Well it's not going to sink, as it's in production already and new devices keep popping up. The question is will it get any more traction? I think it'll go places. It won't replace your TV, but I have a feeling that ebook readers will become big business and they'll take e-ink with them.

Here's something pretty cool I saw in New scientist. Here's a 4 year old link, but the idea seems to have resurfaced recently. Basically create a self contained, tamper proof reactor that will fit on a large pallette. Plug in a generator and presto - power on tap. They're talking about low maintenance units that can be transported around the world safely, are cheap enough for developing countries to buy and come with enough fuel sealed in for 30 years of operation.

I'm a fan of nuclear power. Which doesn't automatically make me an "enemy" of green power, before anybody gets on their high horse. Renewables are great when you have the raw material - i.e abundant sunlight, a nice handy coastline etc. And I'm sure in time the technology will get better, to the point where it's actually practical to power a country with a few acres of wind farm / solar panels. Right now though, in the short to medium term I don't see a better alternative than nuclear power so if we can make it cheap and safe that has to be good, right?

The reactor designs they're talking about for these things are not Chernobyl - that happend over 20 years ago and we have made some progress since then! The modern designs (so I read) create less - and less dangerous - waste than their predecessors and incoporate many safety features to help prevent the china syndrome.

Conceptually I like it. Whether it'll ever get off the ground politically is a whole other question - do we want to be handing over a large chunk of nuclear material to people who we don't trust? I can see it being used to provide power for remote installations of "friendly" nations, but I can't really see the US selling Iran a nuclear-power-station-in-a-box!

Try these links for a taster of things to come:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSTAR

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S