Monthly Archives: March 2009

You can't predict the future…

 The writer Arthur C. Clarke said, “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”

As this list of failed technology predictions shows we get it wrong when imagining the future because the starting point for our predictions is invariably what we know and feel today. However, we also know that the future will be full of surprises as unexpected discoveries are latched onto and take things in completely unpredictable directions.

The launch of the UK version of Wired this week shows that presumably there is an interest and appetite in looking ahead and I think with all the doom and gloom around right now it’s important to be looking towards a better future.

cougar_aceI read the sample copy that came with the Times at the weekend and there are some interesting features in the first issue, including a timeline of potential developments over the next few decades. The article that will get me buying the first issue though (as I’m sure was the strategy of the Editor) is the true account of the Cougar Ace a massive carrier ship that was rescued in a complex salvage operation a few years back. Apparently Steven Spielberg has bought the rights to the story and just from reading the sample article I can see what a good film the story could make.

Getting more for your money…

Having been in the midst of the both the dotcom boom and bust, I get a sense that technology companies will generally fair better than most during this current downturn. And with the likes of Google prepared to invest some of its many billions to keep the venture capital flowing then hopefully the pace of innovation seen in recent years will keep momentum too.

The dotcom boom saw technology companies grow at staggering rates due, in a large part, to ‘irrational exuberance’ that fuelled an unrealistic bubble. There were undoubtedly inflated expectations of what the web and its associated developments could deliver in the short-term. However, there was a lot of substance in many of the ideas at that time but some serious over-estimations of how quickly they could be realised.

Technology companies felt an enormous amount of pain in the bust period, which started in earnest in 2001, and many were still hurting 4 years on. The company I was working for during most of this period shed a staggering 120,000 jobs in wave after wave of redundancies. Ironically that worked in favour of the Enterprise Content Management deployment I was involved in at the time as consolidation of the company’s thousands of web and intranet sites was well overdue and couldn’t be argued with in those economic circumstances – So there are often upsides even in the worst of circumstances.

The benefit and potential of web technologies has very much been proven in the years following the bust and right now I’m certainly seeing signs of organisations being more prepared to spend in this area to get more efficient and competitive. A number of digital agencies I’ve been speaking with recently are reporting a rush to digital and business growing rather than contracting.

cost_cuttingLooking further afield, the launch of Windows 7  will be interesting. Like many, I saw very little point in upgrading to Vista and have not used a business or home machine with Vista installed on it since its release at the beginning of 2007. So how is Microsoft going to make its latest OS more attractive, particularly at a time when both organisations and consumers are cutting spending?  One of the more recent announcements that seems to have attracted interest is that Windows 7 will enable you to remove Internet Explorer. I guess that just shows the strength of feeling about Microsoft monopolising the desktop environment and eagerness to have more choice. To be honest I haven’t even given IE8 a single thought with regard to my home pcs.

With the steady development of web based applications, like Zoho, and companies like Dell offering low cost pcs with Ubuntu  (the Open Source operating system) it’s looking easier and easier to live without Microsoft. Although when I look at the level of indoctrination of younger generations Microsoft has achieved with its shrewd product positioning in education then it looks like its domination of the desktop is assured for a number of years to come.

Having worked for a hosted services company, I am a ‘Software as a Service’  (SaaS) advocate and it’s clear that observers and commentators are heralding new waves of interest in cloud computing, web 2.0 and virtualisation as organisation come under greater pressure to cut costs.

Personally I still believe the biggest barrier to broader adoption of SaaS is the idea of someone else having responsibility for your data. However, when you look at the poor security and privacy processes and lack of business continuity planning in many organisations, both large and small, they’d be doing themselves a favour in adopting SaaS. Sometimes though, SaaS providers do themselves no favours in perpetuating unsubstantiated claims as illustrated here in the 80% myth.

Thinking small – very small…

I’ve heard it said that the revolutionary things will be using in 10 years time are in the labs today.

Thinking back to my time at Lucent at the start of this decade I was often intrigued by what its research division Bell Labs was doing in nanotechnology. I didn’t understand much of it but was intrigued all the same.

This was very early days for this branch of research but 10 years on we are starting to see more tangible real world examples of how materials created at a molecular level have a practical application in our day to day lives.

A few months back I met with a former project management colleague at Alcatel Lucent, who is currently working on 4G and Long Term Evolution projects, and he told me that all of the technology that used to fill several 2m tall racks in the early 3G base stations could now be fitted into a box around the size of a desktop PC. Besides potentially enabling orgainisations to run 3G networks within buildings, this very much illustrated the progress in molecular level electronics over the last decade.

watchphoneI also remember it being said back in 2001 that all the technology in mobile handsets at that time would be fitted into devices the size of wrist watches within 10 years.

Nano-technology is making its way into our lives in many ways now to the extent that health organisations and trade unions are calling for tougher guidelines to prevent workers and consumers from being damaged by nano-particles.

The development of super strong materials and material types that could never have been conceivable before is well underway. Personally I’m looking forward to the self cleaning windows, cars and bathrooms as the useful output from such molecular level manipulation of materials. But beyond the many and varied ways in which the materials with which we build our world can and no doubt will be changed in amazing ways, the most significant output of nano-technology could well be quantum computing on an industrial scale.

There is a growing feeling amongst leading scientists that small scale quantum computers are just a few years away and some are even that confident to say they imagine quantum computers being on people’s desktops within 20 years.

When you look at the difference between today’s traditional computers and a quantum computer it is awesomely immense and to even consider having desktop computers that powerful in a 20 year timeframe is potentially world changing.

Typical personal computers calculate 64 bits of data at a time. A 64- qubit quantum computer would be about 18 billion billion times faster.

This type of capability will make the ‘power of Google’ that we worship today akin to a tortoise racing the space shuttle. Information creation and searching will be changed beyond measure and with quantum computing driving ‘the cloud’ every single one of use could have the computing power of the whole of Silicon Valley at our fingertips.

From fantasy to reality…

I watched Quantum of Solace the other night and it reminded me of when I was a boy and watching Bond films in the 70s. I particularly remember one of the Sean Connery films where a tracking device was fitted to a car and then monitored on a screen in the dashboard of Bond’s car. Although many of Bond’s gadgets and scenarios, then and now were pure fantasy, I distinctly remember thinking when I first saw this that it was all completely unfeasible and I couldn’t get my head around how it could ever possibly happen.

tracker1Fast forward to 1993 and I was actually promoting the work NTL’s Radio Communications Division had done with Tracker to create one of the world’s first stolen vehicle recovery services  – even that company’s logo reflected the scene in the Bond film. Another 15 years on, advances in digital radio communications, GPS, 3G, in-car sat nav, the iPhone and even Google Streetview makes this scenario completely commonplace and far more complex than anything envisaged in that Bond scene.

So, back to the latest film, which like its predecessor has a more gritty reality about it than many of the earlier films and has very few of the classic gadgets Bond has become associated with. There was a very stark contrast in this film between the dirty reality ‘on the ground’ and the high tech world of the spymasters.

It was in that high tech world that the visionary stuff was happening. There were echoes of Minority Report with touch sensitive information display glass and plenty of ‘surface computing’ concepts on show.

With all the current publicity around ‘surface computing’ primarily from Microsoft, it is certainly imaginable that such interactive touch driven displays will become commonplace within ten years. Obviously ‘touch screen’ technology has been around as far back as the 1960s but what we are talking about here is a deeper real time user interface into applications which is more akin to how we manipulate items in the real world. A real world example is Smart Table which claims to be so intuitive that kids can use it straight away.

The essence of the Bond sequences though weren’t just about touch display of information – the subtleties included deep application integration, voice activation and seamless integration with mobile networks.

While Microsoft is grabbing headlines with the demonstrable front end display stuff you have business computing heavyweights like IBM working quietly in the background on the backend innovation that could make the Bond scenarios reality and make the likes of Microsoft and Google sit up and take notice.

Project Blue Spruce looks potentially very significant to the evolution of computing over the next decade. In essence it is an initiative to create a platform that enables all applications to run in a browser. Beyond this it is about extending business collaboration to multi-user, real time scenarios (not unlike the Bond scenes) all based in a browser environment, driven by cloud computing.

Summit not so Funny for Money…

It was fantastic to see this year’s UK Comic Relief effort raise more money than ever. Is this an example of people actually wanting to give more when they have less? A shift in society away from the greed and selfishness so typified by the global financial crisis?

Anyway, I watched the celebrity ascent of Mount Kilimanjaro (titled Summit Funny for Money) with great interest and admired the obvious effort those participating had gone to to catch our attention and extract some cash from us for a worthy cause, a lot of which didn’t look much like fun to me.

tour-d-afrique-whole-mapIt also reminded me of a massive charity driven venture a former colleague of mine is currently enduring which is also in Africa and for the benefit of African charities. Spookily enough, he is currently in Tanzania and probably not that far from Mount Kilimanjaro as I type this. However, his efforts are as part of the ‘Tour D’Afrique – otherwise known as one of the toughest cycle races in the world that takes the participants from Cairo in Eygpt to Cape Town in South Africa over the course of 5 months.

Whenever possible, Simon has blogged about his experiences so far and it makes for fascinating and awe inspiring reading.

The biggest contrast for me is the staggering amounts of money the celebrities managed to raise for their tough but relatively short challenge. You can see Simon’s donation page here and if you are similarly inspired by the sheer determination and dedication he is putting into this challenge then I’d urge you to donate some cash to help spur him on for the second half of his venture.