The Future as I see IT ;-)
By; George Horton
Welcome to 2004, the future is now.
Advances in technology are coming at breakneck speed. Are you ready?
As I understand it, sometime in the next 12 months, over one billion people will be online in North America. Most of them using wireless technology.
Wireless services are changing the traditional wired world landscape. In 2002 the CWTA (Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association), Created standards for Text messaging. According to the CWTA, Canadians now send almost a million messages a day.
Here are some Wireless Facts from; The Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association (CWTA);
Wireless devices are the fastest growing consumer products in history.
Canadians currently use more than 15 million wireless devices on a daily basis.
Canadians place more than 6 million calls each year to 911 or emergency numbers from their mobile phones.
By 2005, 50 per cent of all calls in the world will be from a wireless device.
In fact, the demand for highly skilled wireless communications specialists is so great that Canadian post-secondary institutions are creating programs specifically geared to the wireless industry.
Fundamental changes are coming to data networking and telecommunications. An integrated network over broadband Internet is literally like reaching out and touching someone. To be able to see and pass things back and forth is going to surprise and delight. “At home” monitoring of patients or people at risk by doctors and family will become commonplace. Police, ambulance and fire services, delivery personal and society in general should benefit from being connected through wireless Internet.
We are already seeing the results of the broadband connected universe, in the combining of various types of entertainment. Products and services are being tailored to the fit the customer and becoming more interactive.
Companies need to prepare for the future because innovations and change will come much faster and the possibility of disruptions in business will become much more likely as businesses scramble to keep up. For example, just look at the music industry. It wasn’t prepared for the millions of people that downloaded songs from Napster and other similar Web sites for free, bypassing the record stores. The music industry didn’t know what to do. So they could only crush it, which is a temporary solution because this it isn’t going away. How do you suppose the movie industry is feeling now that the same thing is happening to them?
The social landscape is changing globally as well. The post 9/11 geopolitical environments are affecting the lifestyles and workstyles of millions of people. Much of what we have taken for granted for the last century like freedom of movement and right to access, is being restricted. From video surveillance, copyright of intellectual property, broadcasting rights, to script kiddies cyber-jacking our personal lives, our awareness of security and security related issues will increase dramatically. We will also see, because of low price, ease of use, and availability, wireless cameras at work, daycares, schools, streets, public events, and for sure in our homes.
Future trendz ;-)
In the near future, embedded intelligence will be everywhere, creating smart spaces. We will live in a broadband distributed smart environment. With smart sensing technology, chips embedded in every product, and every environment, including us, and they will be able to communicate with each other. For example, radio frequency or RF chips embedded in cars allow you to locate the car using GPS (Global Positioning System). RF chips could be placed into anything when they combine with nanotechnology, when these chips are manufactured at the nanoscale. (100,000 times smaller than the head of a pin), we are going to have a very different kind of environment.
For instance, corporations could gain a better understanding of how consumers are using their products. You may want to have an RF chip implanted in your child’s watch as an added security device. Sensing chips will be used to smell for toxic substances. When these nanochips are combined with the genome, Insurance companies could check up on you to make sure you are not abusing your body. Well let’s hope it doesn’t go that far.
What is here is the real-time economy. This new electronic age is not just location or context aware, but it is going to be more person aware. The next generation of the Internet will be global and evolutionary. Different kinds of Internets within Internets, and Networks within Networks. The broadband universe is here.
According to the Pew Internet Project, 88 percent of adults that now go online use a search engine to find information. Local Internet searches will explode in 2004. Out of the forecast of one billion people generating one trillion dollars by 2005, up to 90 percent will be accessing technology by a wireless device. We will have the first real electronic market spaces. Not just locally, but globally. The key words of this converging new environment are real-time, on-demand and interactive. Everything and everyone connected to everything and everyone else.
These are exiting times. Cultural changes are coming and no matter what you layer into that culture, you are either ready or not. Building a community that embraces innovation is, I think, the key to its survival.
The use of this emerging ability to communicate instantly with people, programs and machines, brings up many possibilities good and bad. But how we grow these technologies will depend on the culture we create. The use that our children and us make of this powerful communication platform will set the standards to go forward.
Our generation’s normal, is the next generation’s benchmark.
George Horton
Web Developer
“Connecting to people, not just machines.”