As the analyst covering all things emerging information technology, I spend a bit of time watching web and social feeds looking for interesting and potentially disruptive stuff. Fortunately, it’s a good time for me to be doing this, as there are all kinds of things going on. I’ve decided to pass some of the best on to my readers in periodic “What’s Cooking” posts.

Here are a few items you might want to check out:

  • Major updates in battery technology will redefine what it means to be mobile. Mobile devices must be, well, mobile so they need a battery. Current technology limits the time a mobile device can spend away from a charging station and put some shape limitations on device shapes. This will change – check out: 1) Flexible Battery Could Lead to Gadgets That Fold Up, and 2) Battery Breakthrough Offers 30 Times More Power, Charges 1,000 Times Faster.
  • Digital currency will turn retail and financial services on its head, eventually. Digital currency fascinates me, especially the enigmatic Bitcoin creator and its so far unbreakable code*. Also the way you have to mine for more coins is very interesting. Whether or not Bitcoin succeeds as the de facto standard, I think digital currency is inevitable and the more firms that accept is, the crazier things will get. Check out The Antisocial Network of Bitcoins.
  • Augmented reality is upon us with Google’s long awaited Glass. The products are coming off the assembly line and shipping to early adopters who registered to get the first batch <jealous>. I checked the specs on these puppies out and was impressed. What is Google going to do with all the data it collects? Check out Google releases specs for Google Glass.
  • In-memory meets big data and the particle collision produces some really fast offspring. I’ve been writing about this for a while; now it’s happening. In-memory technology and parallel processing meet at big data to yield schemaless analytics that beat current batch Hadoop processes by several orders of magnitude. Need real time for your business – you got it, now go disrupt! See: 1) File System Provides File Sharing at Memory-Speed Across Cluster Frameworks, and 2) Lightning-Fast Cluster Computing.
  • Advanced analytics gets its own languages. The spike in advanced analytics, fueled by big data hype is underscoring the limitations of more traditional data programming models. I’ve been predicting for a while that specialized analytics languages will emerge to fill the gap and accelerate creation of advanced models. Check out What is probabilistic programming?

Each of these has enormous disruptive potential. One of the key messages in my speech today at IBM's Big Data Integration and Governance conference in Charlotte is, "Victory goes to the speedy." Is your firm ready to seize opportunities that these create?

I tweet these out as I find them, so if you want to get more real time feeds, please follow me @pracitingEA. More in a month or so here!

* Will quantum computers be able break digital currency encryption? Hmmm…