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.

I 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.

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.

The developments that shaped the last two decades in technology and beyond – namely the arrival of the web in the 90s and the rise of Google in the ‘noughties’ – began life in the previous decades. The upcoming celebration of the 20th anniversary of Tim Berners Lee’s proposal for the web (13th March 1989) illustrates the existence of the idea before the immense impact it had in the following decade and, likewise, Google’s incorporation as a company in late 1998 before its introduction of Adwords in 2000 and subsequent massive growth.

So, as we head towards the end of this decade is the technology and/or organisation that will define the ‘tens’ (or whatever else they may become known as) already in its infancy ready to burst forward or is it something that is already in wide use that takes on greater significance.

My first bet is very much on ‘the mobile web’ as really starting to define the next decade.

In contrast to the growth of the web and Google, this one has been a relatively long time in coming and there are still some barriers in place to ubiquitous adoption. But the pieces are now slotting into place – from relatively seamless mobile access via 3G and wifi to inspiring mobile devices like the iphone.

As I know well from my time at NTL Broadcast and Lucent, the infrastructure to build out networks capable of delivering the mobile web as an engaging experience was never going to happen overnight and it wasn’t anything as comparatively simple as finding faster ways to push data along the copper cables that the majority of our homes had anyway.

The network operators have had staggering costs to recoup – not least from the enormous licencing cost for 3rd Generation networks – so none of them was going to rush to offer low or no cost mobile web access.

Likewise, unless you are used to paying high monthly contract charges to mobile operators, I would suggest that consumers themselves aren’t going to rush to pay a lot extra to access web content on the go unless it is obviously compelling and useful and until recently the limitations of devices themselves have been a big barrier to adoption.

I was interested the other day for instance to read some of the reaction to Google’s recently launched UK Streetview. There were respondents on one blog describing how they were using it on mobile phones to help them navigate places unfamiliar to them and it was clear that being able to see landmarks and surroundings from eye level perspective as opposed to a 10,000 foot view is a compelling experience.

But up until the arrival of a truly responsive and navigatable mobile interface like the iphone, coupled with high speed mobile data access I can’t have imagined mobile phone users making such comments.

Right now, I’m personally not prepared to pay more than 30p per day to access the mobile web. This is the PAYG Sim based deal I am getting from Virgin Media/Mobile on an sim-free 3G phone (translates to £9/month for 750MB). This is a low cost way and controllable way to access many types of sites and content but as soon as you venture into any higher bandwidth service – flickr, youtube, internet radio etc then the daily cap of 25 MB is swallowed up rapidly and you can very quickly find you’re paying a whole monthly contract equivalent for less than an hour’s online entertainment. I know that other network providers are offering higher data limits on rolling monthly contracts but I personally don’t want to either pay for something that I don’t then use or get into a scenario of cancelling and restarting contracts.

It was low or no cost unlimited web access that saw the wired web become a ubiquitous resource and demonstrated to people how useful the web could be – even at dial-up speeds. We were hooked and the operators were subsequently able to recoup the losses on this with the arrival of broadband and our willingness to pay more for a better web experience. Virgin Media knows this as it had massive experience in opening up wired web access under the NTL brand but I’m not sure the main mobile network operators are really learning lessons from history here and are still trying to earn revenue from misguided ‘walled gardens of content’ and access charges that are actually holding them back now from potentially much bigger future revenue opportunities.

I think this will change quickly now and the age of the true mobile web and all the innovation it will bring will be upon us at last.

Those born between 1980 and 2000 now tend to be described as Millennials following a survey in which thousands of them chose this in preference to terms such as Generation Y.

My eldest daughter falls into this category and it is both interesting and daunting to see her embrace communication and web technologies. She is already extremely computer literate and not fazed by the processes of creating and communicating web based content via social networks.

In my professional life I am seeing clear generational divides. The Millennials take to the content management system and processes I have been introducing into the organisation like ducks to water and want to do more and more. The Generation Xer’s are a different matter and find the idea of being empowered to publish content on the web as a daunting prospect and struggle to adapt to the technology without plenty of hand holding.

 As the web became part of job role early in my career I guess I am closer to the Millennials in terms of experiences with the web than with a typical Generation Xer – however I’m sure my daughter would disagree.

When I was taking a surf down memory lane recently I came across the Alcatel-Lucent Lab. This is an interesting resource that researches a range of technology topics with a broad cross section of younger Millennials.

Some recent research that caught my eye was a study into the iPhone user experience amongst teenagers. Unsurprisingly it shows that there is a lot right about the user interface but also that the on-screen keyboard makes texting difficult as it provides no touch indication of input. As the article observes, and as I have witnessed in the past with my nephew, many teenagers can text without looking at the screen just by their familiarisation with a keypad layout and the number of clicks to the required letter. These are skills obviously learnt in many a boring lesson or lecture 🙂