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.

Fast 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.