One of the predictions I made about the effects that the recession/depression will have on the IT spending was that it would separate the wheat from the chaff in the startup space, validating those companies that provide real value and impaling those that are built on hope and coolness-factor.  In an incredibly tough economic environment like the one we're currently in, companies that don't actually provide value quickly go to zero.  Deflationary credit collapses have a nasty habit of popping bubbles of any and every kind, technology bubbles included.

Today Seth Godin complains about the rising level of stupid content on the Net:

Now that everyone has their own channel, their own newspaper, their own station, it's pretty shocking how low the average has sunk. The question is: will it be so noisy and offensive that the rest of us just tune it out completely? Do you care enough to dig through the pond scum comments to find the pearls? My guess is that few people do. It's like most cell phone calls... not a lot of people listening, just waiting for their turn to talk.

This sounds eerily similar to Nova Spivack recently, talking about information overload as it relates to our future workflow:

The Web is constantly changing and the biggest challenge is not finding information, it is keeping up with it.

Both men (along with a large percentage of the Internet population) are worried about missing out on the information they should be paying attention to.  While Nova takes the shotgun approach and subscribes to everything and then worries about missing the good content, Seth is worried about being able to find the good content in the first place.  Nova thinks that the solution to this problem is to have software think for you and try to figure out what you should be paying attention to.  Seth thinks that we to reduce anonymous information contribution because it's lower-quality and adding to the overall noise.

Nova Spivack from Twine wrote an interesting post over at Read/WriteWeb about the future of the desktop which I'd like to comment on.  It really ties in nicely with what I've been thinking about recently around user interfaces, especially since any hardware innovations will necessarily involve an ACTUAL operating system.

I agree 100% with Nova when he says that everything is moving to the cloud.  SmugMug lets me store my high-res photos in my own Amazon S3 store, Jungle Disk lets me back up everything else to the cloud.  Storage is, for me, a monthly utility expense (and last month it only cost me $3.18, so for me this is much cheaper than hard drive space, backup, backup tapes, tracking everything, and worrying).

There have been some really interesting developments and concepts in the human-computer interface area recently.  This is one of my favorite areas of technology to play with.  It's just plain fun and I can't think of another area where the future is available for several years before it hits the mainstream market.  Plus, there's just something exciting about trying to bridge the virtual and the real. I own a 3D glove, VR goggles, and the first commercial multi-touch interface.  If we had the room I'd love to get a virtual reality ball to play with :)

Google has access to an AMAZING amount of data.  Every time they crack the access window to that data even just a little bit I get excited about it.

As reported by TechCrunch, their most recent offering in this area is their Google Search Insights.  This site is very similar to one of my favorite toys, Google Trends, but with significantly expanded functionality.  For example, it allows you to fine-tune your search so that you can specify that you're searching for Apple the company vs. Apple the fruit, and it lets you drill down into geographic regions.

Now, I must play :)

First up, unified communications, because it's on an interesting trajectory lately. Let's see what Search Insights has to say about unified communications concepts:  unified communications, unified messaging, and telepresence (Cisco's way cool video conferencing product).

This makes it pretty easy to see that unified messaging has historically been the most popular term, but has been losing ground since 2007 to unified communications and particularly telepresence.  It's actually pretty incredible that unified communications and telepresence have been able to go from zero to popular in just two and a half years.

We can also look at how popular these terms are in different regions around the world:

From this graph I would deduce that if you're selling unified communications products you'd better be putting some focus on Singapore, Malaysia, India, and Australia, because they're looking for it even more than people in the US.  It would also seem that the telepresence and unified messaging marketplaces have not matured yet in Singapore and Malaysia.

We can also see the most popular searches around these concepts:

From this I can safely say that Cisco is spanking the competition in UC at the moment (woohoo!)  But wait, there's more!  Search Insights also shows you the rising stars in related searches:

So while it's safe to say Cisco has a commanding lead at the moment, SBC (?!), Nortel, and Microsoft are starting to gain mind share.  To continue to dominate we had better continue to lead in innovation.

The results for this service are still relative as they were in Google Trends, so you can't see the exact search counts, but this is still a quantum leap forward.  It can really give you some interesting insights--plus, it's really fun to play with :)

TechCrunch just posted a video of a new user interface concept by Adaptive Labs called Aurora.  I'm a big fan of new and unique ways for humans to interact with computers--I think it's one of the best ways to try to get a handle on where the future of technology is going (see: Apple).  I think it's definitely worth a look, if only to get yourself thinking outside of the box for few minutes.

I love the way communications from others pop up unobtrusively, and seamlessly transition from text to voice.  As I've often said, a message is a message is a message.  This demonstrates that concept well, and is an excellent demonstration of the true spirit of unified communications in my opinion.

The graphic elements are nice and fluid, I really see this as the future of design trends.  Well, somewhere between this and the current Web 2.0 "standards", because I really like the simplicity which is emphasized in the current crop of Web 2.0 applications.  This Aurora concept is FAR too cluttered in my opinion.

"It's gotta be here somewhere" - LOL.  Yes indeed.  Notice that the woman spends about 3 minutes looking for the information she needs.  Although not as pretty, Gmail implements this function right.

I really like the idea of search results appearing in a visual thumbnail tag cloud format.  I think for applications where you know exactly what you're looking for (because you've seen it before) this works very well.  However, if you were looking for a concept ("novel ways to tie my shoelaces"), it would suck.

The mouse interactions are contrived in my opinion.  The weird mouse contraption the woman is using is big and clunky, much less elegant than a Wii-style 3D control.

Not only that, but I fail to see where the 3D capabilities are even being used at all in this video.  It seems like it's there just for the sake of being different, just like this unhelpful "radial" context menu:

This menu, while looking pretty, manages to provide LESS information than the standard context menu we have today.  If anything we need to work on letting browsers provide context menus that actually apply to the application being used rather than letting us view the page source or save the HTML to disk.

One thing I really LOVED was the way authentication was done--via fingerprint on your mobile device.

This is, I think, the way ALL authentication will eventually be done, and I'm glad to see it somewhere, even if it's only in mockup form.  This is the future.

Overall this is a very nicely done mockup, they presented some novel new ideas in a thoughtful way.  The R2D2 sound effects were especially nice :)  I really enjoy videos like this because they force you to think outside the box and ponder a future that might seem far-fetched at the current time.  Plus, they're fun.