What will 2011 bring? We obviously won’t know for sure until this time next year, but Control Group’s best and brightest couldn’t wait that long. So…they came together to offer their thoughts on topics ranging from Google, Apple, Amazon, Java and 3D movies in the coming year. Their responses follow.

Happy New Year! We only have 12 months left to see if they’re right…

Craig Hillelson, Field Engineer Manager

- Google Apps will continue to be adopted by lots of small businesses.
- Mistrust of Google will grow proportionally.
- Microsoft will become increasingly irrelevant in terms of the general tech zeitgeist.
- Western governments will attempt to crack down on leaks but without much success.
- Iran will be the victim of a leak of information similar to what the US experienced but on a much smaller scale.
- Every movie will be in 3D and no one will care.
- JJ Abrams will remake “Blade Runner.” Nerds will be delighted or crestfallen.
- Putting microchips in kids will spark a ridiculous parenting debate on every talk show in America.

Charlie Miller, Senior Consultant, Media & Entertainment

- Consumer Tech: The Mac App Store will usher in a tidal wave of new desktop Mac apps and developers, following in the footsteps of the flourishing mobile app marketplace. Developers for Mac software will have a new option rather than “shareware” or “freeware,” and the 99-cent or $4.99 app economy will be unleashed. Bring on the Mac fart apps and Twitter clients!!

- Business Tech: Video reaches a tipping point as a standard content type from non-media companies. Sure, video is seemingly everywhere on the web already, but much of this content is from media companies, networks, and studios. I predict we’ll see huge growth of video delivery from within other verticals, such as financial, healthcare, and maybe even medical. We’re seeing this already, with small media groups being set up inside these types of companies, but as iPads, Galaxy TABs, and Microsoft Slates (maybe…) become ubiquitous, the market and monetization possibilities for delivering video content to these devices will boom.

Deb Au-Yeung, Senior Consultant, Products

- Maintaining Your Image: As more and more publicly available information is being aggregated into profiles on the Internet (Facebook profiles, tweets, URLs, personal websites), there will be a rise of privacy services to help manage your virtual public image and protect your privacy.

- Relying More on Friends: You’ll also see a rise in applications that utilize your personal network to make recommendations and provide support.  Whether it’s opinions on a potential purchases, recommendations on restaurants, what doctor to go to, or even micro-decisions like whether you should go to the gym today, we’re going to reach out to our networks to help us make better, more informed decisions both large and small.

- Saving Money on the Spot: With the ubiquity of smart-phones and improvements on pinpointing your exact geographic location, you’ll also see a rise in push notifications in the form of on-the-spot discounts.  As you’re passing Starbucks, you might receive an alert that you’re eligible for a free drink or maybe you’ll receive a discount on an item you favorited online, because a large number of users also favorited the same item.

Toby Joe Boudreaux, CTO

- Apple and Google will continue to move UX away from the desktop metaphor.
- Someone will finally nail Android UX with an open, elegant UI toolkit.
- Amazon will begin (re)selling mobile connectivity as a service, a la AWS.
- By EOY, consumer culture will stop thinking in terms of “mobile” and “apps” and stop seeing the huge cracks that currently exist in ubiquitous computing. Maybe just with a couple of brands. Apple will lead the way with the Mac App Store and iOS marketing integration, but because of the same, won’t be seen as totally seamless. It’ll be a small player.
- The hype curve on game mechanics will dip into the “played out” valley until some new player releases something more nuanced than badges and purple cows.
- Javascript will continue to become the most important language in modern application development, and functional programming will continue to catch on. Huge year for Scala (and Lift), Node.js, embedded JS, and stateless multicore/multithread/concurrent programming in general.
- DevOps will continue to be one of the fastest growing job market for product teams and businesses.
- The war over Java will not be settled, and people will start pulling away. The excitement over Scala and JRuby will keep the OSS evangelists raising hell, and eventually Oracle will cave.

Dan Meltz, Consultant

- Cars now have cameras that can recognize parking spots that are big enough. I think they will either add image recognition/OCR capabilities so that cars will be able to tell if a spot is legal. Adding QR codes to the signs is a possibility, but I don’t think that municipalities would be willing to lay out cash for a system that reduces their income.

Colin O’Donnell, Partner

- The world will not come to an end.
- The return of the IPO: Facebook’s IPO will fend off the pop of the latest tech bubble at least for 2011.
- People will realize that tablets are amazing single-purpose devices and not the Swiss Army device many hope them to be — this will usher in more things into the mainstream Internet of things.
- We’ll see the face of tech investment change to match the hyper development lifecycles of products.
- We’ll see the mellowing of gamification and the adoption of more recommendation algorithm services.
- Leaving our awkward digital childhood, we will start to realize deeper uses of social media beyond self promotion and product marketing.

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Google App Engine is Google’s platform-as-a-service for developing web applications. There’s been some people saying goodbye to GAE, and perhaps in response Google has announced several enhancements to the service.

In the midst of all of this, a few of us at Control Group have been developing Tagatag: an Android and iPhone application for commenting on barcodes that uses web services running on Google App Engine.

Scan this QR code with Tagatag to join the conversation!

Barcodes are everywhere around us. You can find them on advertising, products, places and even people. Tagatag provides you with a virtual paint marker to let you make your mark on all of these codes anonymously. Download the Tagatag app and give it a try. Scan a barcode to see comments people have left for you and then leave some for them.

We chose Google App Engine for the back end of Tagatag for a few reasons:

• It’s quick – You sign up for an account, download the SDK and you’re developing. The development server in the SDK lets me run the application on my desktop and interact with the code as I’m writing it.  Uploading new versions, rolling back old ones, or performing maintenance is a snap with the GAE dashboard.
• It’s simple – There’s not much to the web service. It’s small and simple. We used the webapp framework because we didn’t feel we needed anything else. It makes for a very concise application. Believe it or not, there are about 300 lines of code for the GAE part of Tagatag.
• It’s scalable – We don’t have to worry about what we do when Tagatag becomes popular. We’ll just raise our billing quotas in GAE and let them handle spinning up new instances or expanding the datastore. Knowing that you don’t have to be concerned about scaling makes things a lot more fun.

I’m happy that GAE let us bring Tagatag to you so quickly. So, when it’s available at the end of the week, be sure to download the app, tag a tag and make your mark!

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I am really busy these days, but a bunch of things have just been in the news that I need to comment on.

I’m working on the infrastructure for a new phase of QA testing that we are doing on a product. The infrastructure consists of a variety of physical computers, about fifty in all. Managing and maintaining them is more time consuming than the cloud-based computers I work with. The increased amount of attention and time that physical computers take is why I wonder about these things that I’ve read.

First, New York City has entered a “money-saving partnership” with Microsoft, signing up for some massive licensing. Fortunately this includes some cloud-based infrastructure, but it’s unfortunate that the city did not compare the Microsoft solution with something like Google Apps, or with open-source solutions like Libre Office. Since we are paying the taxes that are being used to pay for these services, shouldn’t we be getting the best deal? So, NYC, please call me when you’re ready to talk about your infrastructure.

Have you ever been shivering from the cold in a data center while waiting on hold for the URL to a service pack because everyone’s email is down? I have, and I never want to do it again. I’m sure no one in the city wants to do it either. Why not let Google freak out about keeping your systems up all of the time so you can do some things that really matter. That’s what the cities of Los Angeles and Washington DC do (along with a lot of other people).

Microsoft is also in the news for something else too: Ray Ozzie, their chief software architect, is stepping down. Ozzie seems like a sharp guy and was behind a lot of good things at Microsoft (yes, this is one of the few times you will hear me complimenting Microsoft). He’s asking his colleagues to “close our eyes and form a realistic picture of what a post-PC world might actually look like, if it were to ever truly occur.’’ Guess what dude — we are in a post-PC world already.

Can I say that  more people are interacting with technology that’s in the cloud via their cellphones than through their PCs? Probably not, but I will tell you that what’s going on in the cloud and mobile space is a lot more interesting than the PC space. Will PCs even be relevant in a few years? We’ll see. Also interesting to note is that these articles indicate that no one will take Ozzie’s place as chief software architect. That makes me wonder about who’s driving the bus there. This probably doesn’t mean MS is going to just dry up and disappear, but will they ever be innovators again?

Well, enough pondering for now, I have to get back to punching power buttons and checking for failed hard drives — things that you never have to do in the cloud.

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Our coffeemaker is broken.

Coffee is a big deal at CG. Most of our geeks pride themselves on being caffeinated and with the coffee machine down panic is on the rise.

The thing about this is that it’s not the actual coffeemaker that is broken, it’s the grinder built into the coffee machine that is having issues. We have a fancy machine that grinds coffee right before brewing it. When it’s working it’s pretty magical — nothing tastes quite like freshly brewed coffee made from freshly ground beans. It happens automatically and other than the noise from the grinder we don’t even know that it’s there.

When the machine is down it’s obvious. Some of us need coffee to work. We are dependent on that machine.

Thinking about the caffeine situation in the office made me wonder about other pieces of technology that we’re dependent on. Our email software runs in the cloud on Google’s computer. Our data traverses networks and is converted to light, microwaves, electricity and back again before it arrives at its destination. Do you know how an email sent from your phone is routed to its destination? What other things does technology do for us automatically that we don’t notice? Heck, I can’t even remember my wife’s phone number — my phone does it for me.

Someone sent me an article the other day entitled, “The Cloud Fails Again.” In the article, John Dvorak complains that a power outage left him unable to function because all of his data and services existed in the cloud and not in his own machine. He goes on to describe a “priesthood” of systems administrators that has existed since the early days of computing whose sole purpose is to “beat back the individualism” that desktop computers brought to all of us.

I was unaware that this cabal existed (if you are a member, please send me an invite) and I feel like the advances that technology has brought us in life, business and communication are really amazing. We live in a magical world. But even though the advances are great, they have made us completely dependent on technology. I think Dvorak’s article is a pretty good example for people who rely on technology and refuse to invest in their own infrastructure. In other words, we need to understand what we’re using so that we can evaluate the risks and benefits of using it.

Control Group’s mission is to help people and their organizations better understand and utilize their technology so they can be more efficient. That’s why Control Group is a great place to work — even when the coffee machine is down.

Our engineers were able to create a temporary workaround for the coffee situation. We’re also not exactly stranded in a coffee-free wasteland: Kaffe 1668 and The Blue Spoon are within walking distance. So, no worries, we’ll stay jittery.

Image via coffeeaddict/Flickr

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I recently asked CG’s Support Group Director, Josh Alexander, what he thought about Google Voice and Priority Inbox. Here’s what he said:

“Email volume is a legitimate problem and no viable email platform has really offered a feasible solution until Priority Inbox. Google is the only company looking to fix how we use email and finding ways to use email better. The first two big steps were seen when Gmail used labels to replace traditional folders for email organization and when conversation view grouped messages by subject.

“Priority Inbox isn’t going to change the world but there is no denying Gmail is redefining the paradigm on email solutions. This shift is clearly evident with each small feature Google releases for Gmail. Microsoft and other traditional software developers update their products every few years, ship the products out and then expend tremendous energy pushing for customer adoption of the new version that will never be able to keep up with Google’s continually improving email service.

“Google’s VoIP service may be spotty, but it’s free and — as a free service — it’s nothing short of exceptional. I like that Google will take some calculated risk on a great idea and release it for free to their user community.  The VoIP service they integrated with Gmail is another in a long list of service additions intended to make Gmail a portal for all communication. It’s interesting to follow Google’s evolution as they are leading the charge to make the operating system and all the applications tied to the OS unnecessary. This has definitely simplified my life and I’m grateful.”

Image via Google.

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