According to Needham analyst Charlie Wolf, the iPad will dominate the tablet market for the better part of the next decade. It will end this year with an 85 percent share, and while that percentage will decline gradually over the ensuing years, it will never fall so much that Apple loses the lead it claimed when the device first debuted. In 2015, for example, the iPad will still have a 72.5 percent share, with more than 101 million units shipped.

And in 2020?

Wolf figures the iPad will command a 60 percent share of the tablet market by then, with nearly 140 million units shipped.

How is that possible, given the unceasing cavalcade of new tablets parading to market? Simple, says Wolf: None of those tablets has managed to gain any traction with consumers.

“Future tablets are more likely to steal share from one another than from the iPad,” Wolf explains. “The tablet market has been inundated with new models — the Xoom running on Android’s Honeycomb operating system, RIM’s PlayBook running on the company’s QNX operating system, HP’s TouchPad running on webOS, and many others. All of them have been greeted with a yawn and lackluster sales. None have been able to undercut the aggressively priced iPad, because the iPad’s component costs are materially lower than those of competing tablets. In the case of tablets, the only thing that matters — that turns what’s otherwise a slab into a versatile device — are the apps. And the applications available on the tablets introduced this year number at best in the hundreds. In comparison, more than 100,000 applications are available on the iPad.”

That will, of course, change over time. Still, that’s quite a lead Apple has nabbed, and one that it will undoubtedly continue to extend even as its rivals rush to catch it.

That’s the conclusion of a new survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project that found a majority of tech-savvy folks believe they won’t be doing nearly so much work on the desktop a decade from now. Seventy-one percent of the 900 “technology experts and stakeholders” Pew interviewed agreed with the following statement:

“By 2020, most people won’t do their work with software running on a general-purpose PC. Instead, they will work in Internet-based applications such as Google Docs, and in applications run from smartphones. Aspiring application developers will develop for smartphone vendors and companies that provide Internet-based applications, because most innovative work will be done in that domain, instead of designing applications that run on a PC operating system.”

Given the growing enthusiasm for cloud-based social networking services (Twitter, Facebook), cloud-based entertainment services (Hulu, YouTube, Pandora) and cloud-based productivity suites (Zoho, Google Docs and the latest version of Microsoft Office), this doesn’t seem like a particularly aggressive prediction.

Clearly, though, there are some obstacles to be overcome. Privacy and security are, and will continue to be, big issues here, as is bandwidth. But once they’re resolved, the division between “cloud computing” and “computing” as we think of it today will likely be gone, as Google’s (GOOG) chief economist, Hal Varian notes. “In the future we will neither know, nor care where our data resides,” he said. “In fact, our data will be distributed in the cloud, where it can be accessed any time, any place, on any device, by any authorized user.”

This week, influential blogger Lian Yue started publishing a novel on Twitter, believed to be the first time a Chinese-language novel is released on the popular service.

The novel, entitled “2020,” revolves around a character named Mao Zhiyong, described as a pale, overweight middle-aged man, and it will be written in regular installments through the year 2020. In Wednesday’s chapter, the protagonist Mao became a father to twin boys and was promoted to head of the Communist Party propaganda department in the city where he lives.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Earlier this week, BoomTown pointed out how Cisco (CSCO) Chairman and CEO John Chambers was captured doing duck calls on the Flip digital video camera, made by the start-up his company bought in March for $590 million.

That was an adorable use of the consumer electronics device. But in the not-so-cute department, I submit this photo above.

Sitting next to her boss, Barbara Walters, an ABC producer used it to ghoulishly take shots of the kids of pop legend Michael Jackson memorial service on Monday.

Noted the TMZ celebrity news site:

“During last night’s ’20/20′ Michael Jackson special, Walters showcased footage shot by an ABC producer sitting next to her at the memorial. The video captures Katherine Jackson and Michael’s kids two rows in front of Barbara watching the service–despite the fact that tickets to the event clearly state ‘no camera/video/recording.’”

While readers of this blog know I am all for annoying execs with the Flip treatment, pointing and shooting at what is essentially a funeral service, given how much video was available already of those kids (already being sadly overexposed, but that’s another issue): Yuk.

Here is a link on the TMZ of the video in use by Walters.

[Photo courtesy of Getty Images.]