Category: Emerging Technologies

Tony Perkins summarises some key trends:

The IM Generation Is Leading Innovation
Consumer-Generated Media Explodes
The Software-as-a-Service Boom
Mashup Madness
The Online Advertising Boom Continues

The Economist writes:

Most of the power generated by mankind originates from the sun. It was sunlight that nurtured the early life that became today’s oil, gas and coal. It is the solar heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans that fuels wave power, wind farms and hydroelectric schemes. But using the sun’s energy directly to generate power is rare. Solar cells account for less than 1% of the world’s electricity production.
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Kwanghee Lee of Pusan National University, in South Korea, and Alan Heeger of the University of California, Santa Barbara, work on solar cells made of electrically conductive plastics. (Indeed, Dr Heeger won a Nobel prize for discovering that some plastics can be made to conduct electricity.) They found that by adding titanium oxide to such a cell and then baking it in an oven, they could increase the efficiency with which it converted solar energy into electricity.

Business Week writes:

In predicting the future of technology, the hardest part might not be envisioning what can be invented, but determining what will be needed. There’s an awful lot of amazing technology in the personal transporter, which is powered by computer-controlled electric motors that automatically keep the machine in balance in response to bumps in the road and the rider’s movements. Still, when it comes to clean, inexpensive, one-person transportation, for many people a bike does just fine. Disabled users swear by the Segway, and police departments have adopted it, but that doesn’t make the personal transporter the game changer Kamen imagined. Thousands have sold, but not nearly as many as Segway hoped for.
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“I look at the technology,” says Norrod, “and ask, ‘Where else can it be used?”‘ Norrod’s approach is what you can think of as “future agnostic.” In his view, Segway needn’t define a whole new urban ecology or replace the car. It can put its technology into anything that moves. That means unmanned vehicles with potential military or industrial uses, or multiperson vehicles that use Segway’s computers and electric engines to glide smoothly over obstacles. And Norrod thinks Segway’s efficient electric motors could be central to a new generation of hybrid cars (yes, cars). Segway has already built a four-wheeled, multiperson prototype. “If people want four wheels,” says Norrod, “I should give ’em four wheels.”

The Economist writes:

Dr Carlson is a researcher at the University of Washington, and some graphs of the growing efficiency of DNA synthesis that he drew a few years ago look suspiciously like the biological equivalent of Moore’s law. By the end of the decade their practical upshot will, if they continue to hold true, be the power to synthesise a string of DNA the size of a human genome in a day.

At the moment, what passes for genetic engineering is mere pottering. It means moving genes one at a time from species to species so that bacteria can produce human proteins that are useful as drugs, and crops can produce bacterial proteins that are useful as insecticides. True engineering would involve more radical redesigns. But the Carlson curve (Dr Carlson disavows the name, but that may not stop it from sticking) is making that possible.

WSJ writes:

Outdoor advertising, one of the oldest forms of advertising, is reinventing itself. The $23 billion industry is introducing digital technology to change ads faster, new ways of measuring viewers, and billboards that beam information to cellphones. As a result, outdoor advertising companies — which provide billboards, posters and video screens in public places — are now seeing bigger gains than many competitors.

Because outdoor advertising is much less expensive than TV spots, it still accounts for a smaller part of overall ad spending. But it has become the second-fastest growing form of advertising, behind the Internet, according to market-research and media-buying firms.

Tiim O’Reilly writes:

The other day, I was explaining to a reporter how I could be lumping in cellphones and the next generation of sensor networks into Web 2.0. “Well, Web 2.0 is really not just about the web. It’s really about the next generation of internet applications, and includes things like P2P file sharing and VoIP, which aren’t based on the web at all. And actually, now that I mention it, it’s really not even about the internet, narrowly defined as a class of TCP/IP-based networks. It’s really about the internet as it was originally conceived, as a ‘network of networks.'”
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The internet is not just about TCP/IP, though it is about the principles that made the TCP/IP based network win out over all the others, and become the lingua franca of interoperability that it is today. We’re pushing the boundaries of the old internet, as it comes to include the cellphone network, telematics networks, and other emerging forms of connectivity.

So let’s ask, where else can we apply the principles that we’re learning from the internet?

Information Week writes:

Researcher Gartner Inc. on Wednesday identified the technologies it believes will have the greatest impact on businesses over the next 10 years, naming such hot areas as social-network analysis, collective intelligence, location-aware applications and event-driven architectures.
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Under Applications Architecture, event-driven architecture, a form of distributed computing, was expected to reach mainstream adoption in five to 10 years. EDA involves the packaging of discrete functions into modular, encapsulated, shareable components, some of which are triggered by the arrival of one or more event objects, Gartner said. EDA is currently being used in financial trading, energy trading, supply chain, fraud detection, homeland security, telecommunications, customer contact center management, logistics and sensor networks, such as those based on radio-frequency identification, or RFID.

i-mode Business Strategy writes:

Mobile TV success is about building Interaction, Involvement, Integration, and through Content, Community and Communication (IM voice etc) Mobitvsmallthis requires device intelligence and the cellular feedback loop. Those 3I 3Cs are where the profit is and where the whole purpose of the mobile content industry is heading.

Your mobile (as we here at MoMo all know) is 3P – Personal, Personalisable, Private, and 3I – Intimate, Immediate and Integrated (meaning technically integrated and integrated into your life and lifestyle).

The combination of these mobile phone characteristics with digital broadcast and the content and entertainment world is simply an explosive combination, unheard of in the annuals of the world so far.

WSJ writes:

In the past four years, designers of a variety of products, including shoes and cellphones, have been buying specialized office printers costing $20,000 to $50,000 that can quickly produce a plastic model using computer-aided-design, or CAD, software.

Though they resemble typical office copiers on the outside, these are not ink-on-paper printers. Rapid prototyping machines were pioneered by 3D Systems Corp., of Valencia, Calif., nearly 20 years ago. They work by taking computer-aided-design data and using it to build a device layer by layer. Inside a 3D printer, either a print head shoots out plastic particles and glue, or an ultraviolet or laser beam passes over a liquid resin bath, hardening a layer of plastic, 3/100ths of an inch thick, in a computer-generated shape. Then the machine builds layer upon layer until the full model is completed, one to four hours later.

WSJ writes:

The car only became popular in America after Henry Ford figured out how to mass produce it. Computers didn’t invade every office and den until the chip industry learned how to churn out endless billions of the semiconductors that do all of a PC’s actual work.

Now, the world’s life-science researchers are taking a page from those two industrial playbooks and are trying to make biological production as efficient as most other sorts in modern economies. The economic impact of their efforts could be as significant as what occurred with cars and computers, and could include vastly less expensive gene-based drugs and vaccines, fuel sources and industrial materials.