2002 Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle

Nanocomputing is the engineering of computing devices by manufacturing objects in a bottom-up atomic manner, rather than by shaping macroscopical quantities of material to obtain microscopical structures. However, despite some early success in the areas of materials and composites, nanotransistors will not start competing with silicon transistors until after 2010 (0.8 probability).

Identity services provide online users (Internet, mobile and, later, interactive TV) with unique user identifiers. These services -- pushed actively by MicrosoftMicrosoft's Passport and the Liberty Alliance, led by Sun Microsystems -- aim to store personal information to facilitate electronic payment and single-sign-on functionality, so that users do not need to remember multiple passwords or have personal information stored with many different providers. However, consumer privacy concerns and fear of security flaws in software-only digital wallets mean that they are unlikely to be accepted before 2005 for buying valuable items or transmitting sensitive information. Demand may be greatly increased, if pay-per-view or pay-per-use business models for online content gain acceptance. Alles zu Microsoft auf CIO.de

At the Peak

Biometric techniques confirm a person's identity based on physical or behavioral characteristics (for example, hand geometry, fingerprint, face, retina, iris, signature, gait, voice or keystrokes) that are hard to forge. Because of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, biometrics enjoyed a surge of recent attention in security applications such as physical access control, airport security and surveillance. Nevertheless, corporate adoption for network or PC access will continue to be slow, until mainstream computer manufacturers offer reliable biometrics embedded into hardware (such as mouse or laptop), and IT managers lose confidence in authentication based on single-factor user IDs or personal identification numbers. The complexity and privacy implications of biometric processing will continue to be another major roadblock to adoption through 2005.

Grid computing knits together geographically dispersed and distributed computers to create a single massive computing resource, with the aim of taking advantage of spare processing power. Popularized by the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), whose followers donate their idle PC cycles to support SETI's computer-intensive requirements, the concept is now being commercialized by a variety of large vendors (including Sun, Hewlett-Packard and IBMIBM). It is interesting for enterprises that need vast amounts of inexpensive computing power for nonsensitive high-performance computing (HPC). Alles zu IBM auf CIO.de