Zooming in

Last year was exciting, as expected. Innovation trends continued to evolve as companies did their best to outdo their competitors. And they promise to continue to do so throughout 2011. From exploring the workplace uses of social networking sites to the global acceptance and use of tablets and mobile applications, and the possible demise of the hard disk, we take a look and even predict how 2011 is going to turn out for the innovation world.

Applications and tablets Mobile devices aren't phones anymore. They are nevertheless devices, and if the trend continues, they will be tablets. They are effectively becoming computers with an immense amount of processing and bandwidth. iPhone set the trend with hundreds of thousands of applications. Already, according to various estimates, more than a billion people are already using handsets with rich, mobile commerce capability.

The time there are tablets

And at the time there are tablets. Look forward to the iPad2 and Blackberry's entry into the market with its expected PlayBook. Android 3.0 Honneycomb and HP's PalmPad are some of the new nifty gadgets to drool over.

Cloud computing Nevertheless this is a term that we've been hearing for a during now, and 2011 looks like the year when it will come into its own. Vendors will offer personalised private cloud implementations that deliver the public cloud service technologies and methodologies in a form that can be made to work for specific customer needs. Many will as well offer management services to be able to remotely manage the cloud service implementation.

The Facebook

Social communication Moving beyond than just the Facebook, this year companies will begin to explore the use of these services which will be more than just leisure activities. They will bring at the same time their social CRM, internal communications and collaboration, and public social site initiatives into a coordinated strategy devices.

Of course, research trends in digital photography, consumer electronics, the web, social software, unified communications, digital and internet-based television and mobile computing will all play their role.

Context-aware computing The concept of using information about an end-user or object's environment, activities connections and preferences to improve the quality of interaction with that end-user will take off in 2011. A contextually aware system will anticipate the user’s needs and proactively serve up the most appropriate and customised content, product or service.

Storage Apple has done away with hard disk preferring flash memory and USBs. In short, the game has begun and looks set to take off this coming year. Unlike Ram, the main memory in servers and PCs, flash memory is persistent, even when power is removed.