Jetpacks are for Next Year

2011 baby! The future! Jetpacks and rayguns for everyone!

Alright, I’m almost ready to consider the 2000s as normal and not some sci-fi date involving silver jumpsuits. Same goes for the tech we get in our hot little hands: baby steps, with just a few holy-crap advances to make sure we’re paying attention. Here’s the stuff worth paying attention to for 2011, teleportation be damned.

• Motion: The Wii, Xbox Kinect and Playstation Move got the ball rolling, but motion control will hit way more than just games this year. Imagine web pages thrown around like a scene from Minority Report, DJ applications with no need for turntables, and even lame PowerPoint presentations conducted like an orchestra. Yeah, they can already pull this off, and it’s just a matter of time before it hits your living room.

• Near Field: Wanna use your phone as an Oyster card, a key to your flat, or debit card? Sure you do. The next Android and iPhone hardware is coming with near-field communication which, with the right app, can let you do all this just by bumping your phone against a special receiver. They do this trick in Japan with vending machines, but scale this up to your Nectar card, and you get an idea of where this can go.

• Online ID: There’s been a push for this for a while, but with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Gmail all playing nice together, you’ll start to see the slow consolidation of all your logins to just a handful of IDs. All your contacts, your mail, your messaging and networking go under just one login, accessible from any device, and it’ll mean any new applications that come along don’t have to start from scratch as long as they know your Facebook profile.

• Privacy: Forget about it. If you’re really paranoid of someone looking up your stuff, you’ll ditch all online profiles, run your own mail server, encrypt all your drives, and never sign up for any online service. If you’re not exactly running WikiLeaks, then remember the old adage: security through obscurity. Use a few different passwords, don’t leave data lying around, and accept that you’re probably not the prime target for Chinese hackers.

• The Cloud: The reason a device like the iPad can work is because it hooks up wirelessly to the cloud, connecting to your files (on a storage program like Dropbox), your contacts (saved in Gmail), your notes (in Evernote), and even your applications (like Word and Photoshop, all running online). Your hardware is just a window to your real stuff, whatever it is, and if you lose the device, you’re only out some cash, not that mystery series you’ve been writing since 2002.