Video to dominate future networks

By 2013, 90% of traffic on the Internet will be video, according to a leading Cisco executive, reports Techworld.

Marthin De Beer, senior vice-president of Cisco's emerging technologies group, said video was going to have a major impact on the way that networks were designed, constructed and implemented.

De Beer, whose team was responsible for the development of the telepresence range of video conferencing equipment, said there were still large numbers of people who were yet to grasp the way the new generation of video conferencing products were going to transform communications. "Video is like chocolate: you can't describe it, you have to taste it," he said.

Companies should expect to see more regulations introduced and increased government intervention take place as emerging technology gets deployed in the enterprise sphere, according to an analyst, says ZDNet Asia.

Steve Prentice, Gartner's fellow and vice-president, highlighted four broad trends during the research firm's Gartner Predicts 2010 event this week. He believes the following - social computing, contextual computing, advanced analytics and cloud computing - will herald long-term changes in approach for IT professionals.

As these emerging technologies get adopted by companies, "regulation will start to come in", Prentice noted, citing the example of Internet advertising in the US.

An investor consortium led by HSBC has made a huge private investment in green tech company Better Place, despite the business being one which has yet to be embraced by consumers: electric vehicles, writes The Atlantic.

In fact, its specific aspect of electric vehicles is even more distant to the emerging technology: the company mostly specialises in the infrastructure, like charging stations. The investor consortium has invested $350 million in the firm's efforts.

Clean-green-tech seems like an obvious play for investors, as people become more concerned with global warming and carbon emissions, there is lots of profit to be made in defending Mother Nature. Yet, electric vehicles haven't exactly celebrated widespread success. There are worries that ample resources may not be available to accommodate the demand for batteries.