2006 Unplugged

Looking back at the year gone by…

Another year has flown past. For the tech world, 2006 will go down the almanac as a chapter entitled Lage Raho Munna Bhai, not Dhoom 2. It was a year in which: Wireless technologies like WiFi and Bluetooth made it as household vocab. Microsoft finally delivered a long awaited offspring, IE 7. Cell phones trilled to the sound of music, grew gobs of memory, and delicious displays to slay the iPod; but couldn’t. Intel actually appeared in the sanctum santorum of the Mac. Firefox 2 chugged in as promised and chaffed the competition. Shiny new Apples with fresh cores blossomed forth…

Furthermore, VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), led by Skype (with its over 120 million users), could be heard loud and clear. Sony PS3 powered in to stun. LCD panels wrestled plasmas and their own price tags to capture eyeballs. YouTube and Google Video enriched our online lives as video sharing became a runaway hit. MySpace and the blogsphere flourished and matured. Nintendo Wii began winding itself around non-gaming hearts. And the much delayed, eagerly anticipated 100-tonne gorilla, Microsoft Vista arrived... well almost.

Yet, perhaps the single biggest advent of 2006 was the proliferation of multicore processing. Over five years after IBM gave us the first dual-core processor, the multicore species began to swamp the computing world in 2006 from all directions. Led by thousands of Windows PCs and hundreds of Apple Macintosh machines running Intel plural pacemakers (Core 2 Duo), followed by the Microsoft XBox 360 (with three-core processors), and chased by Sony's PlayStation 3 (powered by the Cell processor with an eight core design)... Keeping in mind Moore Law (the 1965 observation/prognostication by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits on a chip doubled every 18 months), this is obviously just the beginning... A sign of impending times and future thingies to come.

On another front, maybe the most thrilling strides—maturation, frankly speaking--came about in the realm of cyber space with Web 2.0. Web 2.0 generally refers to a second generation of architecture, application development, and services available on the World Wide Web that has let people move towards collaborative computing and information sharing online. This is giving users a richer and more interactive computing experience that is getting akin to software applications rather than merely providing simplistic and static Web pages of the first era. Web 2.0 has led to a burgeoning of web service APIs, AJAX sites, web syndication, blogs, wikis… Yeah, there is something new out there every hour. Where is all this headed? Towards mass publishing, global interaction, social networking... And where are we headed? Towards that oft heard destination: The Global Village.

So as you bid adieu to an eventual year, “graze” upon these unique samples of the brave new Web ahead. Cheers!

24 Eyes
www.24eyes.com
A personal web portal.

3form Free Knowledge Exchange
http://3form.org
A collaborative problem solving website.

Fleck
www.fleck.com
Allows you to add info to any web page.

Librarything
www.librarything.com
An online catalog for your books, connector to like-minded readers.

MediaFire
www.mediafire.com
A free, unlimited file host.

Mousebrains
www.kennieting.com/mousebrains
A “thought starter” for advertising creatives.

Podesk
www.podesk.com
An integrated tool for video blogging.

Properti
www.poperti.com
A desktop POP3 client the plays MP3s from your Gmail account.

Quotiki
www.quotiki.com
A social quotes site.

Yedda
http://yedda.com
A community knowledge exchange.