Tech trends shaping the future

Here are some of the questions I ask when thinking about what trends will shape the business and technology worlds in the years to come:

• What is becoming cheaper/more abundant/ubiquitous?

• What is improving productivity across many industries?

• Does an innovation seem like an inevitable step in the progression of technology?

• What happens when everyone uses it?

So with that said, what are some of the technology trends that have been, and will be shaping the business landscape? Here are five that I came up with:

1. Bandwidth and ubiquity of internet access

   1. Software as a Service (Netflix, CRM, Google Docs)

   2. Hardware/Infrastructure as a Service (AWS, Dropbox, Heroku)

2. Mobile computing

3. Answer engines / modularized search (Quora, Wolframm Alpha, Wikipedia)

4. Abundance of simple manufacturing

   1. 3D printing: allows consumers to solve jobs as they arise + democratizes rapid prototyping

   2. Simple electronic programming (Arduino)

5. Open-source platforms/frameworks (GitHub, Thingiverse, jQuery, Ruby on Rails, other smaller plugins and building blocks)

6. Distributed funding (Kickstarter, Gittip)

If you can think of any others please comment.