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Quest Software, Inc. (QSFT 25.89, -0.08, -0.31%) today unveiled 11 technology predictions for 2011 based on results of its annual survey conducted at The Experts Conference (TEC) U.S., hosted earlier this year by Quest. Survey results were analyzed by Quest experts to extract key insights and compelling trends. Based on analysis of this year's TEC conference survey responses from in-the-trenches IT practitioners, as well as historical perspective gleaned from conducting annual surveys, Quest offers the following 11 predictions about key technology trends and practices. To download the complete description of the predictions or to view the full survey data, please visit

Excellent must read!  Best explanation of what is currently driving Silicon Valley.  Charlie puts all the pieces in context, provides expert perspective, and then pushes everything forward to describe a highly probable future.  MUST READ stuff! excerpts:  I've got a theory, and it's this: Steve Jobs believes he's gambling Apple's future - the future of a corporation with a market cap well over US $200Bn - on an all-or-nothing push into a new market. HP have woken up and smelled the forest fire, two or three years late; Microsoft are mired in a tar pit, unable to grasp that the inferno heading towards them is going to burn down the entire ecosystem in which they exist. There is the smell of panic in the air, and here's why ... We have known since the mid-1990s that the internet was the future of computing.  With increasing bandwidth, data doesn't need to be trapped in the hard drives of our desktop computers: data and interaction can follow us out into the world we live in. .....Wifi and 4G protocols will shortly be delivering 50-150mbps to whatever gizmo is in your pocket, over the air. ......  It's easier to lay a single fat fibre to a radio transciever station than it is to lay lots of thin fibres to everybody's front door.... Anyway, here's Steve Jobs' strategic dilemma in a nutshell: the PC industry as we have known it for a third of a century is beginning to die. PCs are becoming commodity items. The price of PCs and laptops is falling by about 50% per decade in real terms, despite performance simultaneously rising in real terms. The profit margin on a typical netbook or desktop PC is under 10%.  At the same time, wireless broadband is coming. As it does so, organizations and users will increasingly move their data out into the cloud (read: onto hordes of servers racked up high in anonymous data warehouses, owned and maintained by some large corporation like Google). Software will be delivered as a service to users wherever they are, via whatev

Google has released a programming tool to help move its Native Client project--and more broadly, its cloud-computing ambitions--from abstract idea to practical reality. The new Native Client software developer kit, though only a developer preview version, is designed to make it easier for programmers to use the Net giant's browser-boosting Native Client technology. "The Native Client SDK preview...includes just the basics you need to get started writing an app in minutes," Google programmer David Springer said Wednesday in a blog post announcing the SDK, a week before the developer-oriented Google I/O conference. "We'll be updating the SDK rapidly in the next few months."

This ruling could have a major impact on uptake of data storage in the cloud. It's not a done deal until the Supreme Court rules, of course. But the susceptibility of data stored in the cloud to warrantless searches by the government has been a major disincentive for cloud usage.

1)  What's the Best Android Phone for Verizon Right Now? Droid X. This was one of two reviews to break into the top 10, both of them on Android. It hit as the Android frenzy was reaching a crescendo and highlighted how a bigger screen could work on smartphones. This review and the number two post also hit the top mobile posts of the year. 2)  Android Sales Overtake iPhone. This has been a theme that has generated a lot of traffic all year. With Android ascendant, we saw the first quarter where recent sales surged past the iPhone. While the iPhone appears to still have a larger overall installed base, the reports of Android's rise touched off a lot of debate about where the two platforms will end up. 3)  Nexus One: The Best Android Phone Yet. This post went up in January and foreshadowed a big year for Android. While praising the device, Om said it still didn't match the experience of the iPhone, but it showed Google was ready to compete. 4)  4chan Decides to Do Something Nice for a Change. This was a nice change-up and showed that 4chan, despite its reputation for sophomoric humor and sexual imagery, could be used for good. The online community banded together to wish 90-year-old WWII veteran William J. Lashua a happy birthday. 5)  Your Mom's Guide to Those Facebook Changes and How to Block Them. Where would we be without a Facebook post in our top 10? This post looked at the expansion of the "like" button to outside websites and instant personalization and explained how users can sidestep the features. This fit into a larger story about privacy on Facebook, which never seems to get old. 6)  Is Apple About to Cut Out the Carriers? This post stirred a lot of conversation after we reported that Apple was looking at putting its own SIM card in iPhones to sell devices directly to consumers. The move would have allowed Apple to cut out European carriers. It looks like the plan didn't come to pass, but it illustrated the power of Apple and its am

Think mobile data demand is big today, with 94 million smartphone shipped this year and 5 billion mobile subscribers? Well, Cisco ( s csco) says it's going to get a lot bigger by 2015, with worldwide mobile data traffic set to increase 26-fold between 2010 and 2015, reaching 6.3 exabytes per month. That's 75 exabytes annually by 2015 [MIGHT WANT TO THROW IN AND/OR LINK TO A DEFINITION OF EXABYTE]. Last year, I called it the mobilpocalypse, but this year, I'm going to say it's a looming tsunami, driven by everyone's favorite bandwidth hog, web video, and the proliferation of mobile devices. In short, we can blame this wave on Netflix on the iPad.

Developers simply upload their application, and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring," the company said this morning in announcing the service. "At the same time, with Elastic Beanstalk, developers retain full control over the [Amazon Web Services] resources powering their application and can access the underlying resources at any time." Customers pay nothing for Elastic Beastalk, paying instead for the resources used to run their applications. Elastic Beanstalk provides a quick way for developers to make use of a range of Amazon services - Amazon EC2 (for computing power), Amazon S3 (for data storage), Amazon Simple Notification Service, Elastic Load Balancing, and Auto-Scaling.  "Elastic Beanstalk handles the provisioning and deployment of the infrastructure needed to run the application," the company said.

Adobe Systems has proposed a standard that could make it easier to create Web pages with fancy layouts seen more often in magazines. The company proposed a technology it calls CSS Regions (PDF) yesterday to the World Wide Web Consortium, which standardizes the Cascading Style Sheets technology widely used to control formatting on Web pages. Adobe also described the technology at a CSS Working Group meeting in Silicon Valley. "This proposal is intended to support sophisticated, magazine-style layouts using CSS," said Arno Gourdol, director of engineering for runtime foundation at Adobe, in a mailing list posting.

Adobe has contributed the first "CSS Regions" patch to the OS WebKit project.  CSS Regions is at the core of Adobe's flowing Web Typography work, and has been submitted to the W3C CSS standardization effort.   No mention yet as to what kind of CSS3-HTML5 authoring and publication tools Adobe has in the works, but the inclusion in WebKit will no doubt shake things up in the world of visually-immersive packaging (FlipBoard, OnSwipe, TreeSaver, Needle, etc.) excerpt:Today, the first bit of Adobe-written code landed in the WebKit browser engine project, an early step to try to bring magazine-style layouts to Web pages using an extension to today's CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) technology. Adobe calls the technology CSS Regions. The move begins fulfilling a plan Adobe announced in May to build the technology into WebKit and--if the company can persuade others to embrace it--furthers Adobe's ambition to standardize the advanced CSS layout mechanism. WebKit