Although HTML 5 is still a draft specification, it's impact is being felt across the technology landscape as this is written. In creating a new standard, the W3C was mindful of the latest developments in applied web application technologies, such as the growing popularity of media-rich Web sites over static brochure-ware, and innovations like AJAX.  I say applied because one of the key drivers behind the new specification was the understanding that the last decade or so of web development can be summed up as "forcing browsers to provide an experience they were never intended to," as I often mention to my colleagues. Anyone who has worked as a web developer can sympathize with the amount of hacks, workarounds and plugins needed to deliver a modern, interactive experience. And that's just within a single browser, let alone making your site cross platform. Hopefully, HTML 5 can begin to address this quagmire by making the underlying markup both relevant and applicable to what the web is actually used for these days. I won't go into detail with regard to the specification and it's potential,  but instead focus on how it will change the game specifically for the CMS software industry. So how will this impact authors, administrators, contributors on the web? Let's dive into the features and see how. Clearer separation of navigation, header and footer elements With the new elements types for navigation items and such, you'll not be surprised that browser safe, standardised and design-agnostic navigation can be provided out of the box in CMS. With standards around the underlying HTML of the navigation, CMS vendors can reliably provide more advanced site creation, navigation management wizards without having to worry about supporting the top 15 AJAX libraries and approaches out there. This portability can be achieved today with good effect using CSS and List elements, but these new elements should also help put to rest the debate about what type of navigation model to use and perhaps more importantly, provide the syntactic sugar to help search engines understand your site structure that much easier; for example, without the need to generate an XML sitemap. Local storage database Arguably the most obvious benefit to software vendors of all types is the local storage facility. No longer do we have to worry about flaky connections and long-workflow-abandonment. With local storage comes the promise of authoring web pages while on your flight to Texas, replying to blog posts in the train tunnel and a slew of other offline scenarios. Immediately, the mobile application development realm becomes far more interesting as offline caches can be stored in the device for interrogation when not connected, and in general, a faster experience when checking the local cache for your documents, as opposed to constantly "pulling" from the web server.  Long, multi-step online business processes won't be abandoned as often when users realise they can pick up right where they left off. Essentially, web apps will behave much more like desktop applications in their statefulness. I expect the memory allocation for each domain to be increased quite quickly, as pressure from vendors to store local caches of binary documents and other rich media will quickly surpass the 5MB suggested limit. Flash, Silverlight and Applets, oh my! The impact of web sockets, or the ability of web pages themselves to call and respond data sources, based on the socket pattern. If that sentence just flew right over your head, think about chat or instant messaging applications. They have traditionally been implemented in Flash or other RIAs du to the in built capabilities of the 3rd party plugin to supply the infrastructure. Although corporations like Facebook and Google have overcome this with their COMET based chat clients at significant development cost; this new infrastructure provided in the specification, could level the playing field for everyone else that is not as fortunate. "Essentially, what it does is lays the groundwork to have equivalent functionality that Flash or Silverlight provides," says RedMonk analyst Michael Cote. With the addition of new elements or tags for video and audio, the specification is pointed squarely at vendors like Adobe and Microsoft in an attempt to swing the balance back in favor of Google, who employ's HTML 5 lead editor Ian Hickson open standards. What does this mean for CMS software as we know it? For one, vendors will have an option outside of siding with Adobe or Microsoft, avoiding allegiance and licensing headaches when it comes to picking a video player of choice. Outside of the media player debate, CMS vendors can hope to bring a level of control and configuration not found in RIAs today. Most CMS struggle with anything besides supplying a basic XML file for Flash objects to ingest. That's about as far as they go today. With the new specification opening up the breathing room a bit, we could see a standardised approach to feeding parameters, content and even deploying objects within the RIA. CMS are great when it comes to deployment, rollback and versioning of code, and up until now, CMS functionality has been for the most part shut out of the equation because it had to hard stop at the executable level: the .SWF file. It was impenetrable. Now, CMS vendors can perhaps go deeper into the actual DNA of the RIA and allow authors to probe, create and adjust the contents and interactions just as richly as pure HTML or any other text markup. As with most trends, we'll have to watch for the final evolving uptake and following impact of these new standards. If the mind-bending Jedi tricks AJAX developers have crammed into ailing browsers is any indication of the future, we're sure to see many uses no one can anticipate right now. What are some ways in which you think the popular CMS platforms will be affected by the coming of HTML 5?

In reading a well-articulated yet unsurprising article on the eco-friendly sub-trends emerging in 2009 by TrenWatchers, I was reminded of a non-profit idea I had decades ago. We all throw out things we shouldn't. The VCR remote that has a single broken button, the microwave that simply had its turntable belt snap yet still warms food fine or the laptop with the broken screen. Naturally, the "repair vs. buy a newer better version" decision is one that we have traditionally chosen to favor cost over environmental responsibility. What better excuse is engrained upon consumers than "if it's broken, don't fix it. Buy a new one?" As we see the perils of this shortminded logic come to the forefront of politics, I can't help but think about a primitive idea I had. What if we could begin to explore repairing items and craftsmanship again in the United States and other developed nations? Why is it that we can't repair the microwave in today's day and age? Becauase it costs you $100 dollars just to have a technician (if one even exists in your town) look at your microwave, when you could buy a brand new one from China, albeit of crap quality that will fail in a year, with some new trendy feature of allure. I thought about this on my commute as my bus rolled past a TV and Electronics repair store, in shambled and definintely without marketing investment since the 1960s. Transistors and tubes anyone? I won't go into the obvious follow on costs that we as a nation are oblivious too when chosing to buy the new microwave: the cost of waste, removal, impact on the environment, lost service revenue and economic stimulus for the repair person, etc. I can hear the greed-driven counter argument from capatalism: if consumers were taught to spend less, how would that adversely affect the economy? Simple: it would hurt China's trade surplus and corporate shareholders, it would only help local consumers.

"We are living in a false economy where the price of goods and services does not include the cost of waste and pollution," Lynn Landes, Founder and Director of Zero Waste America.

Fact is, we are finally coming to terms with the 1980s "greed is good" lifestyle and the hangover is sobering. With less and less value creation occuring within US borders and as a result of true US GDP (hint: try adjusting our GDP for goods produced locally with local resources, very enlightening) we are simply siphoning the consumer spend out of this nation. Now, this is a gross over simplification of a long term trend towards globalisation, and taking advantage of labor price differences. The US auto-industry is a great example of our failures to capatilise on local resources and ingenuity. But I digress. This train of thought made me recall an idea about leveraging labor price differences in developing countries for the sake of good. Imagine the possibility that these often discarded yet serviceable goods were made availible for repair. Based off of the model of self-sufficiency, capatlist farming schemes used in Africa to teach economics to fringe villages, this method could be applied to harnessing the latent value in all things we typically call "garbage." Instead of filling up landfills, goods in need of minor repair could be donated for free to these trade schools and the students would learn vocational skills to repair these household goods: either selling the refurbished unit or simply donating to needy homes. Although a microwave may not seem necessary to the average sub-Saharan tribal villager, these goods could be of value to neighboring cities and metropolitan areas in poor socioeconomic standing.The students in return get vocational and business skills necessary for partaking in the global economy. Naturally, there are many hurdles: logistically transporting tons of microwaves and washing machines from other nations, funding for the teachers, incentivization for donations, etc. By no means small hurdles. However, at some point, self-sufficient agriculture is not going to be a feasible trade for villagers looking to enter society as whole. This could simply be another venue for value creation, fortunately out of thin air. Please, send your thoughts and poke holes in the idea. Its far from pefect, so I'd love to hear your thoughts on making it so.

It's that time of year again when PEW / Internet reports on the not-so-distant future via its predictions for our internet-enabled lives. Here's my take.

Here are the key findings on the survey of experts by the Pew Internet & American Life Project that asked respondents to assess predictions about technology and its roles in the year 2020:

The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people in the world in 2020. Nothing surprising here, compare the number of cell phones to personal computers and we're talking orders of magnitude difference. 2020? That's quite a safe margin. I would place this closer to the 2015 mark, depending on how you define "primary." Are we talking total time spent online, frequency of usage, availibility or an aggregate metric? Either way, the masses of non-PC owning, lower income populations will easily sway this in the favor of the mobile. The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness. I refute that personal integrity does not grow with transparency, in as much that personal integrity to a degree requires transparency. Just look at Obama's tactic of clearly stating his stance on political issues in an easy to access format on the web for everyone to read. Consider the opposite case: could you entrust someone who rarely divulged any personal information?As for social tolerance or forgiveness, I wouldn't suspect these to ever necessarily be tacit outcomes of transparency Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the internet will be more prevalent and accepted by 2020. Meh, no offense, but this proposition smells as if the researchers were searching for a theory due to lack of standouts. Consider how it is written... these interfaces coupled with internet usage. Of course, these interfaces have been around for sometime. Heck, my current employer made touchscreen kiosk software in the early 1990s that were in fact remotely updated over the internet. Surely, the prevalence of the intersection of "voice and touch interfaces" with "internet" will grow, as this is a fairly new space. The researchers aren't really going out on a limb to state that these will be dominant forces in UX or become mainstream. Or, we could just sum this up as 2 good features from the iPhone and call it a day. Those working to enforce intellectual property law and copyright protection will remain in a continuing arms race, with the crackers who will find ways to copy and share content without payment. Considering there's been very little grounbreaking enhancements in pircay in the last decade, this is also another non-surprise. Perhaps content producers will sooner realise that piracy, in its current definition, is flawed. Much like the quote that an idea can never be destroyed, content producers should focus on creating revenue streams from their content that don't rely on distribution or consumption (read: middlemen). Sigh. The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who is connected, and the results will be mixed in their impact on basic social relations. Completely agreed. As I just tweeted, I am a nanabot. Next-generation engineering of the network to improve the current internet architecture is more likely than an effort to rebuild the architecture from scratch. If you're a fan of software and systems design, you'll know this as an old truth. How often do projects or vendors succeed in ground-up rewrites or masse switches? Without totalitarian control, this is typically a death march. Just look at attempts to ratify HTML 5.0, the lingua franca of the web, let alone rewriting HTTP. In summary, nothing groundreaking. Move along.

Das Scoble recently discussed what he thought was a trend in which Chinese manufacturers are creating new avenues of direct sales via internet commerce. I personally have been using DealExtreme to snatch up my favorite Canal Street goodies since 2005. A pioneer in this revolution, we'll see more and more manufacturers and wholesalers cut out middlemen and thereby make the economy overall more efficient for consumers and value-generators. In general, I am stoked. Other personal examples include my recent purchase of 40 pairs of no -brand knock off sunglasses for... $40 USD. Not bad when the exact some pair sells for $10 at a sunglass hocker on the street. Let's face it, the whole concept of having a "wholesale license" or equivalent protection only creates unnecessary intermediaries. Now, we all know that the art of being a good businessman is being a good middleman, but this model is flawed for easily distributable consumer goods. There's no reason to believe that the WAL-MART battle will not be fought 100% online once the vision of a completely internet accessible populous is established by low cost or free access methods. Does this spell the end for revilers? Perhaps, I can't rule this out. Some of the musings I've had with partners range from envisioning "flagship" stores for brands where would be consumers can kick the tires, try on the expensive clothing item, before then simply going home to purchase the product from the same manufacturer - or directly at a local kiosk, much like at an airport terminal. Maintain stock and sales people at the store? Are you kidding me? Waste of expenses, thank you. Besides, who wants to talk to any sales people these days. I just want to make sure the shoe fits, know what I mean? Finally, and this is at the verge of science fiction, I envision the democratic and open knowledge sharing forces of the internet to drive the market economics much closer to theoretical perfect knowledge than years prior. I can't rule out the possibility that this would spell the demise of modern advertising as we know it, if not the complete demise of advertising. That's right, I said it. The demise and deprecation of advertising. We're already seeing the effect of digital media consumption upon the informed masses: we no longer respond to one-size-fits all broadcast media and dumb billboard adverts. No, for years now, the digital strategists recognize the need to connect by providing a service: the branded application, the mobile utility - something that adds utilitarian value in order to foster brand value. And then, maybe if you're lucky, they'll buy your soft drink. So, yes, I can't rule out the natural evolution of the intelligent consumer. Given that any sales process can be defined using game theory and probabilistics, if we make the assumption that the consumer acts at any given point in time based on the information and intelligence at hand, and that they will make the best decision given that information, who is to say that consumers wont simply purchase the best product based on ultimate, social and collective intelligence based on concrete reviews and customer experience as opposed to branding, positioning and the must enlightened of campaigning? Imagine if at any time, consumers could access real-time, social recommendations down to the exact need for product or service, and at such a time, information was provided with such statistical confidence and volume that the "Zyco Com" Car is the best based on their provided, sliced and diced criteria, how could a consumer choose anything but what the other 14,345 Five-star giving consumers exactly like Punjib bought? And so, perhaps, we are seeing the very beginning of the end of formal advertisement as we know it, with the moves in digital marketing today.

Yes. Yes. YES, the iPhone is finally out. Nearly the entire IT industry came to a grinding halt as Steve Jobs announced the iPhone officially. Alongside some of the moust highly receptive praise from the analysts, comes the near certain barrage of doubts. We all know that fame begets criticism, and I'd like to share with you a piece from one of my favorite industry rags and stomping grounds of crazy-man Jim Cramer, The Street

. As much as I'd like to send out a big NYC boo-yah to Kaas, I've found several shortcomings in his argument. The vast majority revolves around a very myopic view of the product lifecycle, and it's phases. Just like enterprise software roll-outs, you cannot expect everything to make the first iteration, not just due to bandwidth limitations, but it's not practical from a feedback perspective, as you need to hedge your bets and adjust your strategy based on the success of each phase. High selling price spells limited marketing potential. An 8GB iPod nano and a high-end handset with similar features to the iPhone would retail for under $300, so the planned pricing implies a 100% premium for device integration and "the coolness of all things Apple." First, I'm not sure where he's getting his numbers. I think "similar features" is a stretch, the size of the Grand Canyon. Industry experts (you know, consumers?) agree that the benefits of usability are priceless. I don't know of a single phone that is more usable than the iPhone. Granted, the iPhone is not cheap - for now.  Like any product who's price is governed by evolving hardware, you're going to see prices fall - quickly. It's no guess that the highly proprietary (read: low production volume, demand and hence high cost) LCD touch screen is taking the lion share of the handsets cost. Expect this price to halve by next year. This is an old concept, and I won't waste time repeating it. Just look at the evolution of iPod pricing over the years. 2. Why not target the corporate market? One word: Blackberry. The last thing Apple needs to do as an emerging entrant in a completely new market, is make it obvious to the current market leader, that its going for it's throat. I blogged on the business vs. consumer segmentation prospects for the iPhone earlier, and still feel that Apple is not yet poised, or flat out even interested, in the business user sector. Microsoft and the stodgy B2B crowd usually beat Apple to the punch, simply becuase I don't think Steve Jobs and the rest of the Apple bunch love to serve that market, they love consumers, and each market has a separate set of expectations. Now, that's not to say that Apple won't ever go there. However, I don't see Apple recreating BlackBerry type functionality. I would love to see them partner with Google Office. Just a wish, here. More post upcoming on this topic.