The Future Of Technology - Townsville
This is a summary of a ACS Education Across the Nation presentation presented by Kate Carruthers.
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Introduction
Technology is changing fast. Six months ago we thought twitter was related to a bird but now it’s the latest social media platform.
So what else is around the corner? How can businesses keep up to date with the latest? Kate Carruthers is an expert technologies forecaster and knows what is just around the corner by actively monitoring and tracking developments in web 2.0, enterprise 2.0, social media and on-line collaboration.
What is driving technology forward?
- Internet Interfaces
- Hardware
- Social Computing
- Ubiquitous Computing
Blends of the above or mash-ups is good.
Where factors influence technology advancement?
- Political
- Economics
- Social
- Environment
- Legal
Modern Dilemmas
How well do you want to be connected? This is not a generational issue.
Do you want a seperate business and personal online profile?
Communication Trends
Email Internet traffic flat.
Social Networking traffic increasing. The volume has recently surpassed email.
Adult site traffic decreasing.
Twitter is a instant messaging system based on 140 character maximum messages. Users can follow people or keywords or names they are interested in. Twitter has a many to many communication format. Users have influenced the design improvements of the interface. What it allows is a 1 hop person to person hyperconnectivity around the globe. Australian polititians are now sending Tweet messages.
An example of how Twitter can work in the real world was when a group of individuals agreed that some slogan of childrens clothing was inappropriate. The following of this view grew, it was published in the newspapers and the stores remove the product promptly.
A commercial influence of Twitter example is from company employees Tweeting about the company. This information can be read by Analysts which may influence share prices.
The examples show how brands do not have full control of their media representation any more.
| Old Communication | New Communication |
| TV | You Tube - online video on demand |
| Radio | Podcasts - radio like programs for download and playback any time |
| Newspapers | Blogs - online diary format mesaging with optional feedback commentary |
| Social Commentary | |
| Podcamp - unstructured conferences with discussions, demos, interaction. Can be live video streamed and external real time commenting possible. | |
| Download content when and where desired |
Social Trends
Social tribes - primary school group, high school group, university group, football group, Facebook group, Linked In group, Twitter group.Many loose connected ties to you. People are operating in a virtual village.
Facebook operates as a closed group. Twitter operates as a open group. Linked In is adding features to suit customers such as free job listing, file sharing, slide shows with resumes, personalised email updates etc.
Humans still operate the same online and off line.
Information Trends
The volume of information being handled by people is growing. This information and knowledge can be held in computers and telephones.There is a shift away from centralised corporate power.
Technology Trends
- RF ID tags are getting more affordable. These a passive tags that can identify items from a distance. This could include pallets, stock, shipping containers etc. A whole truck of pallets can be scanned in under 1 minute.
- Shoes with integrated circuits. These can use Bluetooth to communicate to e.g. iPods to store exercise history.
- GPS integrated circuit improvements. Global Positioning System devices now work better indoors for more possible uses.
- Remote health monitoring. Technology can be used to monitor persons health while at home. This saves costs from hospitals and or nusing homes. Whole houses can now be designed for person monitoring.
- Touch interfaces. Windows 7 includes touch interfaces. iPhone / iTouch uses touch interfaces. The hardware prices for this technology is falling.
- Brain cap thought actuation. This is a cap with electrical sensors that monitor brain activity to control real world items by thinking.
- Air gesture computing. 3D cameras can monitor a person's gestures to e.g. control computing interfaces. A practical example is surgeons viewing scans without touching a computer.
- Clothing with touch sensors and touch feedback. This sort of apparel allows touch and feedback across geographic seperated distances.
- Tangible User Interfaces. An example of this is a Siftable. It is a square block with screen, infrared, bluetooth, accelerometer. They are aware of thier surrounding and that can be associated with each other when moved next to each other. A siftable can show a letter, number, photo etc. This is a new tool for working with digital media and computers. http://tacolab.com
- Robots in other formats. Robotics can now be used for e.g. Automatic carpet and floor cleaning at a resonable price.
- Solid State Hard Drives. These drives offer very fast access times compared to mechanical drives. They can also access information in parallel across the solid state pages. Advantages include: less power, shock resistant, quicker computer startup, quicker database access and quicker application access.
- Batteries. There is a balance needed between technology size, processing power and battery capacity. Low power consumption processors such as Arm, Via Nano and Atom.
- Cloud Applications. Customer Relationship Management software can now use the Internet to work out use profiles as a dynamic mash up. This can be seen in Oracle's Siebel CRM. Saasu can provide online sales, purchasing, inventory, payroll, e-commerce, CRM, document and workflow management. Cloud Computing Overview