Technique NEWER than AJAX?

I was about to start learning AJAX, but then, a week ago, I was talking with a friend of mine that lives in Mexico and is a programmer at a financial institution. He was telling me that they use AJAX for some Web programming. He also told me that there is something NEWER and BETTER than AJAX and he told me the name of the technique. So then I thought about studying that new technique instead of AJAX.

The problem is that I do not remember its name and I can’t contact my friend at this time. Does anybody knows about this?