David Kirkpatrick of Fortune writes about the five biggest trends in technology: Standardization, Open Source, Wireless, 'Data Comes Alive' and Selling Software as a Service.

Writes David on the data-comes-alive theme:

'Data Comes Alive'
This was the theme of Esther Dyson's recent industry conference, and aptly summarizes a panoply of emerging new technologies that hold the promise of dramatically increasing what software can do. Among them: web services, which allow applications to seamlessly communicate with each other; the so-called "semantic web," a richer version of the web we use today that allows software to communicate more efficiently without human intervention; and a variety of new enterprise applications that will bring the benefits of automation to many intractably uncomputerized business processes.