On the tech radar

ZDNets Dan Farber covers a set of realistic technology predictions for the next 10 years from Gartner, a major research firm which in the same vain as Microsoft gets dissedat times because of its clout. Heres what the analysts are predicting:

By 2008, intermediary services that manage the dissemination of personal data, purchase authorizations, payments and other transaction processes will develop in the United States and Europe.

By2010, 70 percent of the population in developed nations will spend 10 times longer per day interacting with people in the digital world than in the physical one.

By 2015 the average city dweller in the U.S. and Europe will use at least six wireless networking technologies in a day.

The infrastructure for e-commerce will be transformed over the next 10 years with the availability of improved micropayment schemes and services.

While these predictions sound feasible to me, some futurists think the next 10 years has more in store for us. Take Ray Kurzweil for instance. He recently told CIO Magazine that in ten years, everybody will be online, images will be written right to our retinas,we'll have very high-speed bandwidth connections at all times, and thatthe computing substrate will be everywhere. Apart from the retinal interface,he may not be too far off.