6 Major Tech Innovations for 2012

These trends could make for huge opportunities--or huge disruptions to your business. Either way, they are ones to watch



We’re only a few months into 2012, but several technology innovations are starting to show promise. Whether these trends will force you to change how you do business, or present you with entirely new opportunities depends on how willing you are to be an early adopter and take risks. You'll have to find room in your IT budget for these things, too. Whatever you do, keep these innovations on your radar

High resolution displays

The Apple iPad 3 is the first sign that mobile devices are going ultra-high-res. The iPad 3 has a 2048 x 1536 screen that looks super-sharp for videos, e-books, and apps. But the iPad 3 is not the only device to offer much higher resolution. The Samsung Series 9desktop display uses 2560 x 1440 pixels for a screen that looks much more sharp than most monitors.

 Speech for business

One of the great features of Apple's Siri is its ability to understand context. You can add a reminder that tells your wife when you leave work. When you do, Siri sends the reminder based  on your location. Lately, speech tech has shown signs of improving even more. Natural language searches will become commonplace in a few years—you will be able to walk into a conference room and say “tell everyone the meeting is cancelled” and the speech system will know what you mean and send the message.

Business-ready storage

Cloud storage has changed how Big Business operates—in some cases, larger companies are ditching their data centers altogether. But small companies do not even have data centers. Some of the choices for storage are making a huge impact—Dropbox is more popular than ever. But a new service called Huddle provides better reporting, security, and team accounts that is a better choice for business.

HTML5

There has been buzz about HTML5 now for the past few years. The new version of HTML provides a richer framework for videos and interactive content. Steve Jobs claimed it was a better approach to dealing with this rich content than Adobe Flash. One sign that HTML5 may finally replace Flash comes from the automotive world. In the upcoming Cadillac XTS sedan, the dashboard interface uses HTML5 so developers can make new apps without being confined to a specific code base