Category: Emerging Technologies

Who doesn’t love lists? Especially, one which says “Eight Technologies that will Change the World“. The 8, according to Business 2.0, are (hold your breath): Biointeractive Materials, Biofuel Production Plants, Bionics, Cognitronics, Genotyping, Combinatorial Science, Molecular Manufacturing, Quantum Nucleonics.

Vow! Quite a mouthful (phraseful). 8 new phrases to learn there. But then, we are talking “changing the world”.

Game Makers Explore New Services for Home Video Sets — A New York Times article on gaming consoles as Trojan horses: “Just as the personal computer has pushed its way into dozens of industries, a chameleonic video-game player could infiltrate the cable and satellite television industries, play CD’s and DVD’s and even take over some of the functions of an Internet-connected PC.”

In our case, I’d like to think of the Thick Server as the Trojan Horse for the Enterprise.

The conference took place last week. Some excellent presentations and lots of food for thought. Three good places to find out more:

– the O’Reilly page on the conference
– Aaron’s links to weblogs, among others
– Technetcast’s MP3 files of the keynotes

A peek into the ideas that Google is toying with at Google Labs. Says News.com, “At launch, these experiments include a glossary, a voice-search application, keyboard shortcuts for navigating through search results, and a tool for creating sets of Web sites or other items derived from a smaller set of like items.”

On a related but separate note, there are three good links for knowing more about how Google works (its PageRank technology):
– a simple explanation of PageRank
– the original paper by Google’s founders
– a PageRank calculator

It would be interesting to apply some of the PageRank ideas to Blogs, especially the BlogRoll and the BlogPosts, to come out with clusters — the neighbourhoods among bloggers and blog posts which probably exist but are difficult to see from the “street level”.

Writes Greg Papadopoulos (News.com) on the Network of Things, discussing the 3 waves of the Internet:

The first wave was a network of computers that swelled to encompass hundreds of millions of systems, all connected, all continually exchanging data.

The second wave, the one we’re riding now, could be described as a network of things that embed computers. It’s made up of wireless phones, two-way pagers and other handsets, game players, teller machines, and automobiles. In short, billions of potential connections.

The third wave is on the way, and even as we create it, we need to prepare ourselves; it’s shaping up to be a regular tsunami. I call it a network of things. Trillions of things. Things you’d hardly think of as computers. So-called sub-IP (Internet Protocol) devices such as light bulbs, environmental sensors and radio-frequency identification tags.

WSJ.com – Technology’s New Pioneers: A special report (subs. needed). Writes WSJ, “Innovators are creating our vision of the future. From shaping law in the digital age to designing cars, they are taking concepts only once dreamed of and making them into reality.”

Among the people covered:

The Robot Maker (Helen Greiner, founder of iRobot, is leading an effort to bring robots into the consumer market), The World Builder (Philip Rosedale, founder of Linden Labs, is creating an open-ended alternative to online games), The Wireless Pioneer (Robert Fontana, founder of Multispectral Solutions, is hoping ultrawideband technology can reshape all sorts of industries), The Instant Messager (Jeremie Miller is the leader of a world-wide software-development project that has created a new form of instant messaging called Jabber), The Brainstormer (Jacob Goldenberg, a business professor at Hebrew University, has devised a template system that provides a framework for new and innovative ideas that can be applied to various problems), The Nanotechnician (Charles Lieber and his team of “nanoelectronic” researchers are leading an effort to create working electronic devices by manipulating matter at its most basic dimensions).

A must-read for all of us who dream of creating the future.