Sometimes it is Easy to See the Future – Number 2
September 12th, 2006
A couple of months ago I made a post with this same title. I opened that post with the following language:
“Across the full spectrum of human endeavor, it is often hard to see what the future might be. Trend lines can be seen, and directions understood, but specific pictures of the future can be vague. However, our future shows up most clearly in the area of technology. Technology lets us see new potential. It shows us new tools that may or may not become universally useful but provides us with possibilities to expect.â€
Since I have an attraction to the ‘new’ and I consume a lot of media I often read about things that are interesting, but when combined with another news or product story point to a clear trend or possibility. As I wrote in a recent post, part of being a futurist is pattern recognition and connecting the dots. Therefore I realized that, from time to time here at www.evolutionshift.com I will have posts like this one, hence the numbers.
We all know that in the past decade, the price for computer hard drive storage has dropped precipitously. Then came flash drives that, in the past couple of years have also dropped dramatically in price. You can now buy a flash drive with 1 gig of memory for less that the price of 256 MB two years ago. The other dynamic is the miniaturization of memory. Memory that fits in one’s shirt pocket
There was a recent mention in the press about a new line of Sony USB drives that take this to the next stage. Called the Micro Vault Tiny U.S.B. drives, they are approximately an inch long, half an inch wide with the thickness of a quarter. They utilize a compression technology called Virtual Expander that allows up to three times as much data as usual to be put on the device. The storage range is from 256megabytes to 4 gigabytes. Just think about that for a minute. More storage in a flash drive the size of a quarter than was in the average laptop 10 years ago.
I write a lot and I don’t always want to be lugging around a laptop, even an ultra-light one, so flash drives have been a wonderful thing. I always carry one with the contents of this blog, posts I am working on, the book I am writing, everything on the flash drive. Most places I go there is a computer available. So, if I have downtime at a client, or am staying with a friend or am making a quick trip without a laptop and am staying at a hotel, I can always plug in the flash drive and continue to work.
Another recent development has been the increasing storage capacity and miniaturization of external hard drives. You can now buy one with 60 gigabytes that is the size of a small paperback book. This of course makes it easy to back up files, but it also means that you can have stripped down computers at work and at home, or in your second home and just carry a small hard drive back and forth. The other new combination is with the stripped down laptops coming on the market in the years ahead that I wrote about in the post about One Laptop Per Child. Buy a $200 laptop, a $50 flash drive and a $75 external hard drive and you have cheap and very portable computing. Combine that with another coming development and by adding a video camera you can be broadcasting live from anywhere.
That new development is the Sprint Nextel commitment to a 4G wireless network. Basically this will combine broadband internet access with wireless communications. Using a technology called WiMax this development will allow for such things as mobile video conferencing, live video feeds without the cost of satellite time, and connecting to practically anything live, on-line, and do it with a device in your hand. Amazing!
Think about some progressions. Video conferencing started out in the 1980s when communications companies set up studios in different cities that had uplink capability. In every city the employees went to that location for a scheduled, expensive interaction, usually one way with top management. The next step was having downlinks into each corporate office so employees didn’t need to leave the office. The next step was the imbedded camera in a lap top, which connected to the Internet, allowed basic video conferencing, as long as you were plugged in and at your desk. Now, with 4G you can be video conferencing with anyone from anywhere, at anytime. Talk about disintermediation! Think about the current poster child for disintermediation in the world of video: YouTube. It could have what it now has, which is videos made in the past along with a section of live streams from around the world. Hey it’s that Evolution Shift futurist guy live from the beach or that real estate TV mogul live from Albuquerque. Live streaming from anywhere to everywhere. Everyone is a network. One to many and one to one telecasting. All the possibilities of broadband combined with mobility and freedom from place.
Sprint’s partners in the 4G effort are Motorola for equipment, Samsung for network infrastructure and Intel for chips. I mention this because the 3G effort to date has been underwhelming and could lead to one being under whelmed by this new effort.. However, this combination of four companies that are at the top of their respective markets is one that will not stand down from this wonderful vision.
So put your memory in your shirt pocket, your wireless device with video camera in your shorts pocket and head for the beach, mountaintop or backyard for a live interactive day at the office with your colleagues. Not a bad solution to the near future when gas is $7 a gallon making commuting pricy and business travel is too expensive to undertake on a frequent basis.
September 12th, 2006 at 6:51 pm
The local college is running advertisements for an external hard drive that holds one terra-byte of information for only a few hundred dollars if I remember correctly. For the analog thinkers out there, that’s 1,000 gigabytes.
I know I said something along the same lines about 10 years ago, but I’ll say it again just for old times sake:
“When on earth am I going to need a one terrabyte hard drive?”
OK, I’m waiting for my answer from Silicone Valley…
Another interesting topic on disintermediation is your comments on the WiMax network and 4G technology.
There are two companies that this technology will put out of business in a heartbeat.
Think about this:
Why in the world would you need satellite radio when you can stream the millions of online radio stations (not to mention video, i.e. television and movies) to your PDA anywhere you go?
-Grant
TheCornerOfficeBlog.com
September 12th, 2006 at 9:42 pm
The real question is what major shifts will these technologies advancements allow. If doubling of memory, harddrive capacity and processing speed simply allows one to use the next generation of Windows and do pretty much the same things I say “zippity friggin’ doodah”. However when a significant price decrease allows an entire new application, say the way dropping memory prices/sizes enable the iPod which then changed the way that a significant number of people consume music, then that is something.
David, you already travel, and no doubt lug a laptop everywhere you go as well as a digital camera and numerous other communications devices, so dropping prices and weights probably won’t do much to change your life other than add a little more comfort/convenience.
My question (for your part III) is who is going to be impacted in a big (monumental) way by the developments you’ve highlighted and which allow them to do things they couldn’t before and thus life changing or perhaps world changing?
September 13th, 2006 at 6:47 am
Grant-
I agree with you on your disintermediation comments. As for the one terrabyte question, the only thing I can see right now is that on one prtable device you could have all your photos, home movies, DVD collection of movies and movies downloaded. Two hour movies take up a lot of storage.
David
September 13th, 2006 at 6:53 am
Wesley-
Very good points and ultimately the right position to take. Technological innovations become opportunities, windows and tools, so how they are used and how they alter behavior is the key question. One key answer was discussed in my post about the One Laptop Per Child post:http://www.evolutionshift.com/blog/2006/08/31/100-laptop-one-laptop-per-child/ and the first post on “Sometimes it’s not hare…”:http://www.evolutionshift.com/blog/2006/07/05/sometimes-it-is-easy-to-see-the-future/
Thanks for the smart comment.
David
September 13th, 2006 at 10:17 am
That’s true, David. I hadn’t thought about the ability to store entire movies on a computer.
This type of storage space, along with a world-wide high speed wireless data streaming service could also eliminate the need for DVD’s and other current physical storage media (i.e. for playing movies, etc) as well.
-Grant
TheCornerOfficeBlog.com
September 13th, 2006 at 3:00 pm
Grant + Wesley – An artist / inventor in New York recently demo’d a 360 degree HD video camera that films at about 9GB / sec (I think) downstream. Obviously that creates absolutely massive amounts of data. But more than frivolously burn through harddrives, it has the potential to create a new medium – a film in which the audience is confronted with sensory stimuli in every direction, seamlessly, allowing them to choose their own narrative and viewing experience.
These new developments should not only be considered on the individual level. As the size of storage increases and affordable price points are birthed into the market, the communal value cannot be understated. For better or worse, it will soon be possible to offer that $100 laptop preconfigured with the entire (presumably western) ideological cannon in plain text. What kind of socio-cultural impact does it have to the global locales that are most likely to actively seek this kind of information? Will it enlighten mankind or further eradicate the historical richness of under-developed nations?
And as drive sizes become infinitely more dense and infinitesimally smaller, they, much like white dwarf stars, will consolidate the surrounding information networks down for larger media advancements and smoother operation. I’m already a huge fan of organizing information networks by secondary identifiers like color or size to convey important statistical points without having to do any reading or extra mental processing. NewsMap is a great example of this. Likewise for the toys at Ambient Devices. I imagine that the physical consolidation of data will allow for an expansion in the way we interact with it. Streaming stock tickers, which is already an abstraction of a data set, will become something even more abstract, but also eminently more engaging. Perhaps, they will become just a stream.
http://www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/newsmap.cfm
http://www.ambientdevices.com/cat/index.html
October 18th, 2006 at 10:22 am
David:
There is a big risk plugging your USB memory stick into someone else’s computer. You have no idea about the digital hygiene of the other computer. It may have keystroke loggers, viruses, trojans, etc. This can be very much like unprotected sex.
I am sensitive to this because I sold “fully managed” PCs for guest use at luxury hotels. At logoff, Our software digitally cleaned up every digital scrap that was brought onto the computer by the user while s/he was logged on. This was not trivial. Also, we were downloading patches frequently for the standard software that we loaded on the system.
I can remember checking the cache on a browser on someone else’s offering and finding a PowerPoint presentation.
Now that I have sold in this category, I watch all of this kind of news because I do not see enough attention paid to these kinds of problems.