February 2010
At the DMS Christmas Party at Newstead House in November 2009 I was asked to give a speech on the technologies that I thought would affect us most in 2010. I put forward that there were seven major drivers that we would see either come into effect, or increase their effect, on the real world i.e. not just for geeks in 2010.
Portability; a series of new small devices building on the successes of the iPhone and Google Android would be released. This month saw the release of Apple’s new iPad. A couple of months ago Amazon rereleased it Kindle and there is a Google Pad on its way and a whole series of other devices.
Connected; a whole series of connection technologies are now being used not just individually but in combination to provide near ubiquitous connectivity.
Instant; the public are no longer happy to wait until they get home to search for something, they won’t wait until they get to the store to buy something - they want everything here and now.
Bite-size; this refers to the short pieces of information that are quickly becoming the mainstay of how information is delivered. Services like Twitter now provide instant and brief updates on the world around us.
Convergence; the portable devices I talked about earlier have a range of capabilities built into them including touch screens, storage, GPS, accelerometers, microphones, cameras, speakers, compasses and more. All of these devices are being tied together by clever and innovative software that is making possible new types of solutions never before seen outside of Sci-Fi movies.
The Cloud; this refers to massive online data centres that are able to provide our computers and portable devices with instant information and results of a scale never before seen. Search engines and services such as YouTube, Google Earth and others are all examples of these.
Community; advertising is being replaced by friend’s recommendations and what were long-lost friends are being found again. We are able to keep in contact with people around the world as easily as we do our neighbours, some say even more so.
What prompted me to reiterate the points of this speech is the recently improving capabilities of what are referred to as Mobile Augmented Reality Devices. In short these are pieces of software that run on your iPhone, Google phone or other portable device and combine the camera, compass, GPS, display, connectivity, community input, cloud based services; everything I have talked about here into one world changing new experience. Imagine being able to hold your phone up and look around you; on the screen you see a picture of what the camera is looking at with information laid over the top of the buildings and businesses in view. Information such as details about the restaurants, homes for sale, historical information, transport timetables and more.
This sort of thing is so new and so groundbreaking that you’ve really got to see it in order to understand it. Take a minute to watch the video below and then think some. How will this change your life?
In the next few years I expect this capability will become standard on most mobile devices. Importantly it doesn’t need anything new, it will work on many of today’s current devices.
I said in my speech that for all the changes we have seen since the start of the new century they were going to pale into insignificance when compared to the changes we were about to experience. This is just one of the ways in which this will happen.
I can’t wait to see what’s next.
