In Complex's 2009 Style & Design issue (on stands now!), we asked a variety of cultural tastemakers to list their “Predictions”—things that are they feel are going to have an impact moving forward. Representing the “Technology” section is Kevin Rose, Digg founder and all around gadget/tech guru, along with his partner on the Diggnation podcast, Alex Albrecht. Read on as two gentlemen who rarely have to call tech support prognosticate about the immediate future of technology…
VIDEO GAME CONSOLES TAKE OVER THE LIVING ROOM
Alex: Video game consoles are going to become the place where you see TV. Microsoft has a partnership with Sky TV in the UK, which means they're streaming live TV to your Xbox360. It's a tougher sell in the States, because Comcast is going to be like, "eff you, we're making a shit-ton of money and we're not going to give you a free version of our shit-ton of money." But I think that's going to change some things. Sony will try to trump them by doing something in the states, and by 2010 you're going to get streaming television—even if you have to subscribe to it via your cable company And that's a big deal.
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FREE MUSIC, LEGALLY. FOR REAL
Kevin: One of the hottest new products that I've played with that isn't yet launched in the States is a company called Spotify. They finally got the record companies to agree to a model in which they give away unlimited streaming music from any artist, anytime, anywhere. It's working in the UK right now. Their model is called Freemium—they give the basics away for free and they charge you for different layers of the premium service. So they'll be splicing in different audio ads as you're listening to the music, but essentially you never really have to buy a CD again. You can search for any artist, any album, you can browse by genre, you can see shared playlists that your friends created and its extremely high quality, instant on demand play of any song out there. It's nuts.
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NETBOOKS TAKE OFF
Alex: As solid-state memory is getting lower and lower in price, those netbooks are going to be more and more powerful.
Kevin: I think low cost PCs that you can jump in and get the basics of are going to be big. There's a netbook version of Linux that brings together all the things you do. The hardware is so cheap that you're gonna have people walking around with hundred dollar notebooks that do pretty much everything that you want to do.
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TWITTER GOES CORPORATE
Kevin: I see more and more people using it as a business tool. And the amount of followers you have will indicate how big of an influence and how big of a personal brand you are and so I would just really encourage people to to start looking past the, "I'm walking down the street and just got a slice of pizza" and figure out how to leverage this to boost my personal brand and show who I am on the Net.
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THE PALM PRE WILL KEEP APPLE ON ITS TOES
Alex: I want to see what Palm's next phone will look like. They came in, threw the gauntlet down and said, "Apple you don't own this space, We're gonna come in and do as good as we can do." And it remains to be seen how well that is, but it's gonna push the iPhone in a big direction because they have a real competitor. And what the Palm Pre 2 looks like will be some crazy stuff.
