Tim | 
12 23rd, 2009| 
Brain Imaging The first high-resolution map of the human cortical network generated by scientists using a new type of brain imaging known as diffusion imaging.
(Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/21042/page1/)
Smartphones This is the year that smartphones took off with the application market – becoming worth over $1 billion. Everyone and his dog began to “tweet” while Google Android snuck into Apple’s Marketplace, leaving Nokia, Samsung and BlackBerry trying to stay in the race with their own app stores.
Social Media Last
year, barely anyone had heard of it (apart from Stephen Fry), today it is in the world’s lexicon and has even been added to the Oxford English dictionary, as well as being named the year’s most popular word: Twitter. Whether you can’t get enough of the service or think its the refuse of people with too much time on their hands, you cannot ignore the rate at which Twtitter has gone mainstream and its effects on global Tech. These are the trends that iTeam is paying close attention to into the next decade.
Real-time Searches With sites like Twitter and FriendFeed rising in popularity and usage, Google and other search engines rapidly began to look out of date when news stations and the like began to pick up stories from users’ tweets. Case in point, the Mumbai terror attacks. As such, both Google and Bing ahve been securing real-time search elements, by signing deals with Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and others in order to produce results in a much new way.
Biological Machines Its a bird, its a plane…no wait, its a giant flower beetle that is being forced to fly a path controlled by implanted receiver, microcontroller, microbattery, and six carefully placed electrodes.
By remotely delivering jolts of electricity to its brain and wing muscles, an engineer can make the cyborg beetle take off, turn and top midflight. Don’t squash that! Its worth millions of dollars.
Nanopiezoelectronic what? Zhong Lin Wang (not to be confused with our graphic artist Zhimin Wang), a professor of materials science at Georgia Tech, is working on nanoscale devices that convert mechanical energy into power from the nano world. Although the tech has been around for a while, 2009 showed huge strides toward these little devices being able to power themselves…after all, a nano-bot with an extension cord is not very useful.
Despite the economy, the tech industry is still pulling forward in great strides. The web has proven that it cannot be stopped by economic downturns and, in fact, unemployment has strengthened many aspects of the virtual world we call the Internet.
The future is getting more and more tech and if you think the last decade has been amazing, watch the next one. The snowball has only just started to roll down the hill.
