Well, its the season for predictions and we are on time rolling out our Trend spotting dice for the new year 2012. I saw this list from IBM which predicts trends out for next 5 years !

With big blue on their side, who are we to dispute that call ? A lot more has been said from various quarters for sure by now, but we simply had to throw our hat in the ring and add our 5 cents on the tech sector. So, here are our top five spinners for 2012.

1. Our Business Edition scores with SMB- The much whispered and soon to be baptized Business edition of Zukmo will blaze a trail in the SMB space. In fact, we envision our journey in 2012 to be toeing the lines of a similarly attempted voyage of an ‘Enterprise’ by borrowing from their famous observations.

“Cloud, the final frontier. These are the new deployments of our service Zukmo. Her one-year mission: to explore all SMB markets, seek out new segments, tap old channels and to boldly go where no Dropbox or Box has ever gone before.”

2. Hybrid clouds gather – Hybrid cloud pours cold water on the currently hot debate on whether on premise gets beat up by cloud or vice versa. MSPs dont fret the headlines this year. In 2012, after all the pros and the cons have evened out, everyone (on premise, public cloud, private cloud) and their grandmother will live happily ever after under one hybrid roof. The agility and scalability of cloud computing will not be outdone by the concerns over security, compliance, interoperability and vendor lock-in. Hence the hybrid settlements.

3. Desktop is dressed to kill: Desktop catwalks the ramp as a Size Zero model out-fashioning the thin client hipsters and will be the rage on stage for the first part of the year. we mean those derivatives of HP t5335z and t5565z will start looking up. But then sales will go anorexic once the hype cycle turns down and users begin to understand it still needs firmware upgrades to experience the future enhancements.

4. Big Data gets busted for nothing: Big Data, that untamed bully and cynosure of all eyes will certainly succumb to the elephantine crush of rising methodologies. However, results of successfully processing all that big data will deliver only reality checks and leave you wondering if you were Haduped ! The new question arises “Is humongous amount of data worth at all for harvesting precious insights or does it simply cloud the picture ?“ or rather the old question resurfaces “ will Eureka moments still be experienced in bathtubs ?”

5. A nursery rhyme is born. Doc now says “A million tablets a day will keep all the desktops sales away”

In case, none of this works out, we wont be a tad bothered.Since the goal has been always to

Remember Nothing ! Zukmo Everything !

Alas, things have prompted a relook on our choice since then. Not the message but just the particular example.

We happened to stumble upon an absolutely BRILLIANT, enlightening curve ball of a post by an ex-Apple UI wiz Bret Victor. He too complained about trend extrapolation and then caricatured Microsoft Vision 2019 as an increment of the status quo! Talk about being on the same page and still reading different tea leaves.

But once we finished reading his compelling article, the volte-face ensued. You can check out this groovy post by clicking on his image link below.

As always, Remember Nothing ! Zukmo Everything !

Recently we have been noticing online media outlets of certain stripes going viral with their semi promotional trend castings. Overwhelming our embedded tubes are glorified mirages of their slanted visions and thunderous sound bites from their decaying wisdom teeth. So, we decided to pull the wool over the crystal ball and tell it like it might be otherwise. For the techies contemplating and crunching mythical accounts of the future, read on and peep.

Recently we came across these screamers in the headlines about how popular cloud based services will simply continue their windfall ad infinitum.

Evernote CEO Phil Libin’s Top Three Tips For Building A Hundred Year Old Company

Dropbox:  (Founder Stories) Houston: “In 18 Months, You Are Going To See Little Dropbox Buttons Everywhere”

We have heard this story before. It seems like a concerted attempt in spot fixing the future as a linear magnification of the currently obvious.  History has repeatedly cautioned us about the unknown yet lurking presence of potential spoilers.  Far far away from those hogging the limelight today, some may have started revving their engines and will be racing ahead with the last laughs.  Kindly spare your 2 cents for that unforeseen genius who will blow the cloud away with the winds of change and bequeath a radical future.

Perhaps its one laden with information galaxies storing and emitting content waves or hanging them real time in ether waiting to be transmitted to your content receiver. Do we really have to bide for a Hollywood thriller on information management to concoct the subtle ?  Oh wait, there is a breathtaking trailer that is close enough. How about this sophisticated conception of the Future Vision 2019 by Microsoft ?

Now, that’s no small bang for the future Euro & Dollar (if they still exist) ! An absolute game changers delight, wont you say ?

Along these lines, our question to staid outlets extrapolating current trends – is it hard to conceive an entirely plausible alternative future where everybody is whispering vocal notes into the ears of SIRI’s  grandchildren ?  A future that might turn Evernote to Nevernote.  A bright future without silly old fashioned carpal tunnel inducing buttons everywhere!  Future grapevines may welcome Eavesdrop and say bye bye to Dropbox.

Rest assured, there will be clouds that hang over the Dropboxes and Evernotes of today. And regarding whatever is said of the future, Remember Nothing. Zukmo Everything!

Additionally, if the person making the presentation is a paying client who is launching a new product or service, you’ll typically also have a lot of polite moments where you go “Great Idea, but haven’t companies A, B, E & K done something somewhat similar before?”. Typically, the accompanying thought stream is “Yeah, Yeah, tell me something I don’t already know – so I can stop pretending to be excited”

When we made an analyst/media briefing ppt for Vembu Home, we thought we’d spare them the “nested points in font size 10” approach – and make it really ‘easy to digest’.

We also had something new to say – with our dual backup approach, the iPhone inspired UI, Amazon Cloud backup, etc. That certainly helped!

A copy of the ppt is embedded below. For all you pptholics, it’s a good intro to Vembu Home.

PS: speaking of ppts, there is an amazing tool we came across. Stay tuned for a ‘fluid version’ of the ppt below.

(note: Scribd seems to have ‘mutilated’ slides 3,14 & 20 a bit; forgive the pagination on these slides)

OH NO Not Another Online Backup Service

The above post was written by Lakshmanan (Lux) Narayan of Vembu Technologies. Vembu Technologies is a backup software vendor whose product, StoreGrid, powers the online backup services of a large number of service providers across the globe. Besides remote backup, StoreGrid is also used for on premise backups of workstations and servers at various companies & universities.

Vembu Home is the only FREE consumer backup solution for free local backups and optional Amazon Cloud backups. Get your FREE COPY now.