U.S. e-commerce will reach nearly $249 billion in revenue by 2014 at an annual compound annual growth rate of 10 percent, Forrester predicts.

2009’s U.S. e-commerce sales totaled $130 billion. Analysts predict between 8 and 15 percent growth for 2010.

Forrester predicts that, while has e-commerce matured, it will continue to drive overall retail growth.

“Much of the overall retail sector’s growth in both the US and the EU over the next five years will come from the Internet,” said Forrester Research Vice President and Principal Analyst Sucharita Mulpuru.

“To maximize that growth, eBusiness professionals will have to help enable a multichannel strategy that responds to consumers’ increased desire to hop between the offline and online worlds and their increasing mobile and social behaviors. The retail innovators over the next five years will demonstrate customer enablement across all touchpoints, not just via a PC-based Web browser.”

The top categories for U.S. online retail, accounting for 40 percent of total sales, are apparel, footwear, and accessories; consumer electronics; and consumer hardware, software, and peripherals.

Forrester predicts that e-commerce will account for 8 percent of overall retail sales by 2014, and that 53 percent of all retail sales will be influenced by online research.

What would be interesting to see is the difference in growth between mobile and PC-based e-commerce. While consumers are slowly adopting mobile shopping, many are taking advantage of smartphones to comparison shop within brick-and-mortar stores. Forrester notes that shoppers who begin shopping online and finish in the store are less satisfied than those who do both in the store. Wonder how smartphones play into that equation?

We’re simplifying the ways we interface with technology. Touch computing will hopefully once and for all get rid of the mouse as pointer, but we still have to hold the device in one hand and manipulate the screen with the other.

What if the screen was our body?

That’s a scenario that Carnegie Mellon’s Skinupt offers.

The goal of Skinput is to compensate for the small screen spaces on mobile computing devices.

“In my research I think about clever ways to appropriate surfaces that are already around us, like tables and walls,” said Skinput’s designer, Carnegie Mellon’s Chris Harrison.

Skinput uses bio-acoustic sensing technology that makes the human body the input source.

Parts of the body are acoustically distinct: different parts make different sounds due to size mass, bone density, as well as from filtering effects such as joints and soft tissue. The sounds are read by a device worn around the upper arm. Skinput’s software classifies the impacts, making the body an input device. A pico projector can be attached to the device to project a graphical interface onto the user’s body (see video for some really cool examples, including playing Tetris on your hand).

“Appropriating the human body as an input device is appealing not only because we have roughly two square meters of external surface area, but also because much of it is easily accessible by our hands (e.g., arms, upper legs, torso),” Harrison writes on his blog. “Furthermore, proprioception (our sense of how our body is configured in three-dimensional space) allows us to accurately interact with our bodies in an eyes-free manner.”

Just watching the demo video is enough to make it obvious how useful this technology could be, and how computing paradigms are in the process of radically changing. Functionalities are improving so fast these days, but until the last few years, the ways we interface with technologies have remained clunky.

Technology like Skinput makes sense for the evolution of computer interfaces. And how can you beat playing Tetris on your hand?

Zenph Sound Innovation currently uses music analysis technology to create new recordings from deceased musicians. As reported this week in Wired, the process analyzes aged, damaged recordings for a musician’s style, and creates a virtual personality that can replay the piece just as the original person would have.

Zenph has already succeeded in creating new versions of previous pieces that are too distorted to appreciate, as if these musicians had access to contemporary recording technology. These new, clear recordings can be licensed to films, and software could let musicians play virtually with famous artists on a level way past Guitar Hero.  In Buskirk’s example, a guitarist could one day run his solo through an Eric Clapton program that would shape it to sound as if it were played by the latter.

Once the tech has evolved enough, it should be able to take an analyzed style, and feed a new composition through it, one that the original musician never played. In effect, a virtual artist could play any available song, whether he was alive or not when it was composed. The artist, or the estate of an artist, would give permission for the style, not the work, of a song to be licensed.

Additional concerns manifest when industry professionals try to define the new licensing terms. While musicians have been influenced by others for as long as the art existed, the imitation was done with a human brain. Now, style is being analyzed by a computer, and the machine must license that particular person’s personality in order to do so.

Eric Singer, creator of the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots (LEMUR) is not in favor of extending copyright, and even less in favor of extending copyright to style. “It basically means that the entire history of music, where people have listened to other musicians and been influenced by their style is basically up for grabs. Whether a brain is doing it or a computer is doing it, how are they going to make that distinction?”

Tuesday night, Atelier hosted our latest TechRadar event, which focused on the latest in mobile innovation.

From location-based gaming and discovery to real-time traffic analysis (and new models of crowdsourcing) to mobile app design, the companies presenting at Tuesday’s TechRadar highlighted some of the many computing innovations brought about by the mobile revolution.

We thank Booyah, Aloqa, Waze and Bamboudesign for presenting their wonderful products at the event. A huge thanks goes out to Cathy Brooks for moderating the event, as well.

We’ll follow up with posts on each of the presenting companies.

Atelier’s TechRadar series explores the latest computing innovations, presenting companies that we believe highlight the best of the Silicon Valley ecosystem.

The theme of our next TechRadar will be payments. Please check back – or feel free to contact us – for more info.

Image via CrunchBase

The abundance of location features in social networks, such as FourSquare, Brightkite and more recently Twitter and Google, raise the problem of privacy. Many experts think that these privacy issues will disappear as the localization trend becomes more and more common. Defenders of localization features claim that they don’t raise any privacy problems as users themselves made the choice to participate and share private data with their friends.

This is where Google may be crossing the line, as it chose an “opt-out” solution rather than an “opt-in” solution. Meaning that users are automatically enrolled without being asked and have to “opt-out” if they don’t want to participate.

Indeed, when enrolling in the location-aware mobile app Google Latitude, all of your Google contacts will receive notifications about where you are even though they didn’t sign in to get them. Google sends these alerts automatically if one of your contacts opts in for the service launched early February 2010. As Google explains on its website:

“Alerts are sent to both nearby friends if they are sharing their location with each other, even if only one of them has enabled alerts.”

To prevent being harassed every minute by these kinds of notifications, Google will notify you only when your friends are in “unusual places.” In Google’s words: “Location Alerts are only sent when your friend is at an unusual place during a given time of the week based on their location history, filtering out routine locations such as a daily commute.”

Google Latitude is so intrusive that if you refuse to receive this kind of notification you’ll have no choice but to opt-out of these emails by visiting its website.

The intrusiveness of Google is even more worrying when remembering last week’s Google Buzz, again an “opt-out” solution in which people saw themselves following friends and being followed without being asked. Consequently they were sharing private information with people they didn’t want to.

These new and intrusive products don’t seem to match Google’s corporate motto of “don’t be evil.” On the contrary it makes the giant of the Internet industry even more disturbing…

Brain-wave computing is most likely two or three tech generations down the line but it looks to have other implications beyond just making computing faster and more streamlined.

It might also strengthen your brain signals, believes a team of researchers from the University of Washington. Stronger than day-to-day activities do.

“Bodybuilders get muscles that are larger than normal by lifting weights,” said the study’s lead author Kai Miller, a UW doctoral student in physics, neuroscience and medicine. “We get brain activity that’s larger than normal by interacting with brain-computer interfaces. By using these interfaces, patients create super-active populations of brain cells.”

In experiments in which epilepsy patients were asked to imagine that they were controlling a cursor, scientists found that in less than 10 minutes the brain signals were stronger than if the patients had been doing the actual physical gestures.

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Mobile renewable energy has received innovations with limited usefulness. Solar or other methods have so far given us little to power our mobile phones, laptops, music players, etc. But our own bodies may provide the means to energize this category of devices. A type of rubber film can now be used to store the negligible power generated from walking, breathing, or other previously non-optimized activities.

Engineers from Princeton have improved upon previous piezoelectric films with a combination of silicone and lead zirconate titanate (PZT) nanoribbons. Paraphrasing the Britannica Concise Encyclopedia, piezoelectric materials generate electricity in response to applied mechanical pressure.

PZT is the most efficient of kinetic-energy harvesting materials, "converting as much as 80% of mechanical energy into electrical energy," according to TreeHugger.

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With the increasing amount of devices we use, and the increasing mobility these devices allow, recharging has become a vital part of our lives.

If wearable electronics ever really catch on, our clothes will recharge our devices using our body heat or other energy sources.

Scientists at Stanford have developed a new method for creating wearable electronics, making “ink” out of single-walled carbon nanotubes that are 1/50,000 the width of a human hair.

This ink, which has “excellent” energy-storage capacity, is applied to cotton or polyester, creating an E-textile — a “conductive energy textile” – which, yes, stand up to the challenge of the laundromat, retaining their form and charge through many washes.

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Something that really caught our eye at CES last week is Iron Will Innovations’ gaming glove, The Peregrine.

The Peregrine has 18 touch points and 3 activator pads that allow for over 30 programmable actions. Players map hotkeys to the pad, which eliminates having to look down at the keyboard for every command. Touching an activator pad – which are located on the thumb middle finger and palm – to a touch point triggers the command. Two of the activator pads are on the thumb; the other is on the palm.

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Computers and peripherals had more than twice the amount of new patents than any other technological category in 2009, according to Thomson Reuter’s 2009 Innovation Report, based on information from the Thomson Reuters Derwent World Patents Index.

There were 226,293 patents awarded for computers and peripherals, 95,106 for semiconductors and 90,867 for telecommunications in 2009.

Computers and peripherals accounted for 29 percent of all new patents last year, while semiconductors and telecommunications each represented 12 percent of 2009’s inventions.

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