Stories about: MIT Media Lab

High powered programmers may soon be moving over for an unlikely source - kids.

MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte railed against complexity in mobile phones, recently, and said that "simplicity is the biggest challenge that handset makers face."

Michael Schrage has some advice, and it's not just for IT managers.

This year has been a time of realignment and redefinition, as Apple launched its second zeitgeist-defining product of the new century, Dell and Intel battled to regain their former dominance, the software sector consolidated, Google rallied industry heavyweights around a common mobile device platform, and major vendors scrambled to embrace social networking. These, not necessarily in order of importance, are the IDG News Service picks for the top 10 stories of the year:

Greeted with fanfare and kudos when its prototype PC was shown off by Nicholas Negroponte and United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan more than two years ago at the World Symposium on the Information Society in Tunis, the One Laptop Per Child project is now beset by waning orders and competition from commercial vendors that threaten to sideline the nonprofit effort.

While the U.S. feds and carriers are taking turns taking the heat for warrantless wiretapping (and a pox on both their houses, say I), I'm beginning to wonder why we ordinary Joes and Janes don't spend more time watching each other. Or more accurately, wondering when we're going to start.

As the number of virtual environments increases, standards and vendor collaboration will help make teleporting between different worlds a smooth experience, ensuring, for instance, that your avatar arrives in a new world still wearing the clothes it donned in your home world.

At a time when news of advanced technologies seems dominated by the likes of robots, nanogadgets and supercomputers on a chip, the subject of radio might seem a tad boring. But software-defined radios and cognitive radios hold promise for making our wireless networks far more powerful and useful.

"The single biggest mistake IT managers make is listening to their customers," says Michael Schrage, a research associate at the MIT Media Lab.

Today's enterprise SANs are measured in multiple terabytes as IT executives push size, complexity and functionality to the limit. The sprawling nature of these networked environments is driving the adoption of new and emerging technologies. One of them is an IP-based storage solution which complements Fibre Channel.

Imagine things like doorknobs, toasters and lightbulbs communicating with each other in a network that far exceeds anything we know today. The concept, often referred to as ubiquitous computing, isn't new. What's new is that technologies are now emerging to make it happen sooner than many of us imagine.