Technology trends ...

Readers of this blog will already know that I like speculations about directions the development of technology may take - well, here a three more links with interesting speculations.

The German "Feldafinger Kreis" published a new report[german] about what it sees as important technology trends. This years study talks about self-managed systems, software agents, web services, networked smart labels, grid computing and peer2peer. Well yes, the Semantic Web is absent - but at least it was in the last report (published in 2002).

Juergen Luebeck has a scan of Gartners current "IT hype cycle" on his blog. It shows "Corporate Semantic Web" still in the initial ascend - so in Gartners oppinion the Semantic Web will get hyped a lot more before the (inevitable) desilusionment and then the realistic assesment of the technologies potential.

And not related to IT, but nevertheless interesting: The New York Times writes about "Beam Powered" space travel [free registration required].