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Gazing into the technological future
You can leave the charger at home…

By Nick Heath

Published: Monday 14 April 2008

Self-charging devices and real-time language translation are among technologies pinpointed by future gazers that will change the world.

Analysts at Gartner have mapped out the key challenges where technology can change lives and revolutionise business over the next 20 years.

The seven challenges are:

• Developing self-charging devices

• Developing hardware and software based around parallel processing

• Full gesture and speech recognition

• Real-time language translation

• Persistent and reliable storage lasting approximately 100 years

• Recycling and automating code to increase programmer performance 100-fold

• Developing clear indicators to spell out the financial benefits of IT investment to business

Ken McGee, VP at Gartner, said in a statement: "IT leaders should always be looking ahead for the emerging technologies that will have a dramatic impact on their business."

He said CIOs should identify which of the challenges were most relevant to their organisation, how they relate to trends in business and society and monitor progress on research into those challenges.