With only a few exceptions (the iPhone, Amazon.com, the deep-fried Oreos among them), big technology changes in our lives don’t usually come from one new gadget or a single game-changing event. You can trace the lineage of our less-clunky cell phones over the past 20 years the way you’d run your finger along a human evolution chart. Our TVs got flatter, digital, high-deffed, but it’s taken a decade for us to say we didn’t see it coming.
Looking over the past year, though, it’s not hard to see a few trends that are with us to stay and will have lasting impact far beyond 2008. Here are five of the technologies that transformed us last year and will continue to do so in ’09.
It’s basically just a frilly way of saying “the Internet,” the place where companies like Google, Dell and Apple are betting you’ll want to store your addresses, e-mail, family photos and other personal data. Wouldn’t it be nice to live in a world without hard-drive crashes, with all our software and information floating in this indestructible, always accessible “Cloud” thingy? Unfortunately, enthusiasm met with reality. Apple’s launch of Mobile Me in June was a technical disaster, and Dell’s attempt to trademark the term “Cloud computing” was rejected by the U.S. Trademarks Office in August. Those are just speed bumps, though. Much more of our virtual stuff will be up in The Cloud, whether we like it or not.
We’re not just talking about Apple’s iTunes App Store, introduced in June, which opened the floodgates to thousands of downloadable applications (“Apps”) for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The idea of a store where you can download programs, many of them free, to your cell phone to expand its capabilities also was embraced this year for Google’s Android phones (the…