I spent some time at the MIT EmTech conference recently while also spending a little time searching out new technology applications which hold great promise in both the consumer and business space. Here are 10 to watch.

1. I got to MIT a little late to watch the OnLive gaming service demoed at the event, but the audience was still buzzing about what they saw when I arrived.  Those big World of Warcraft social gaming networks were way ahead of business in realizing the power of cloud computing, and now they are leading the pack once again. HD graphics driven to a wide variety of dumb and smart devices portends continued change in the old client/server and even newer virtualization computing models.


2. Flywheels. I did catch Imre Gyuk, program manager of the Storage Research Program, U.S. Department of Energy presentation on new energy technologies. As he noted, most downtime is measured in seconds but is a huge disrupter for business technology operations. He believes flywheels are a cost efficient, environmentally sound way to approach those power glitches. In my opinion it has to be better than banks upon banks of lead acid batteries.


3. I think the presentation that garnered the most immediate attention at MIT was from UMass professor Kevin Fu. In fact, Fu was named as the innovator of the year at EmTech. Fu's research has to do with way to prevent implanted medical devices from being hacked. Can your defibrillator be hacked? Fu and his researchers have shown that they can garner personal data such as social security data from the implanted device as well as wirelessly changing the device's characteristics to potentially send a fatal shock. Now that is a technology to watch.


4. WhiteFi. This is another attempt to use the unlicensed "white spaces" in the broadcast spectrum. These white spaces have been the source of much speculation over the years, but not some really big players including Microsoft think the time as come. Arstechnica has a good wrap up of this technology to watch.

5. Hewlett-Packard  Skyroom. Jim Rapoza, eWeek's emerging technology guru picked this as one of the top business products to watch at the recently concluded Demo conference. Video conferences are a great, green alternative to jumping on the plane, but costs, connections and hassle too often trip up the best video intentions. Skyroom seems to address a lot of these shortcomings.


6. Jim also picked Armorize Hackalert as a useful product that meets the unmet needs of  business Websites. Armorize can scan a Website to find if it has already been hacked and provides a useful technology for companies that want to know the bad news before their customer base starts calling.


7. Jim also chose Cotera. This one is interesting to me as it starts to meld financial data with user ratings to provide credit information for businesses large and small. It would have been nice to have in the real estate industry before the great real estate bellyflop.


8. The next one is not a company, but a process. While at EmTech, Facebook's vice president of engineering Mike Schroepfer made a presentation on the difficulties of building an infrastructure that can scale from 300 million to more than one billion users. Google is always reluctant to talk about the specifics of the big server farms that serve up the Google search results and Facebook is often equally quiet. But what comes across again and again is that the big social network companies have decided it is better to build your own low cost, throwaway servers than work with a server vendor. This obviously holds a lot of implications for server vendors if the big commercial customers start following the big social network company model.


9. Recently the CEO of GM has been showing off the latest feature in the company's On-Star service that will remotely slow down a vehicle that has been stolen. This one caught my attention as it is one of the first applications of geolocation technologies where the application can not only identify location but can act on the item that has been located. Lots of implications in this one.


10. And speaking about location and GPS driven applications, could the recent mid-air collision above the Hudson been prevented by a new GPS application the FAA is investigating. The New York Times has a good article looking at technology that uses location and powerful server compute cycles to outperform radar-based systems. That is a technology worth watching.