Category: 2020

predictions for the future I make or those I hear others making. Any forecasts that are in the 5 to 10 year horizon

Categories
2020 Augmented Reality

Viewing Small Parts of Big Data

2013 is only 32 hours "old." Can I view how my place on the planet has evolved in those hours? No.

I can't see how many people went skiing on the mountain at which I'm looking or what the temperature was (or is) as I walk along the edge of Lake Geneva. But the information is "there." The data to answer these questions are somewhere, already part of Big Data. Dawn of 2013 on Lake Geneva

It could be displayed on my laptop screen but I'm convinced it would be more valuable to see the same data on and in the world. It's getting easier with cloud-based tools to make small, select data sets available in AR view, but we are far from being surrounded in this data.

One of the issues stems from needing a human, a developer, to associate an action with every published data set. Click on the digital button to go to the coupon. Click on the flag to see the height of the mountain.

What if some data were just data? Could we, without associating an action to them, have data automatically made visible?

The high cost and effort still required to make "just data" about a user's context and surroundings accessible on the fly are major impediments to our being able to use the digital universe more fully. Overcoming these obstacles will require open interfaces, many of which could be defined by standards, upon which new services will be offered.

But there also must be deeper thought and research into how we are presented with data, what it looks like, and the dimensions of the data provided to us. What is the appropriate resolution? How do I adjust this?

These questions are not trivial. I'm disappointed that the new IDC study on Big Data in 2020 doesn't go into how we will visualize Big Data in the future. I hope a future study will examine how small a data set is still valuable to different tasks, different modes of a professional or consumer user. This research could help us better understand the Big Data opportunities as well as helping us better quantify the value of Augmented Reality.

Let's hope that we will see this topic raised by others (with the data to define it better) before the end of this young year!

Categories
2020 Social and Societal

Anticipatory Services (1)

It's March 18, 2012. I've entered the doors of a nice hotel in the outskirts of Austin, Texas. As I greet the agent and approach the reception desk I get my photo ID and my credit card out and lay them on the counter. After a moment of looking at a box on the counter, the agent at the desk replies to me that the fitness center and the swimming pool are on the ground floor. In response to this information (which I will not use), I ask how I can connect to the Internet service in the room and the procedure to follow to have something printed out.

I enter my room and, in anticipation of my arrival, the fan and air conditioner are turning full tilt. I immediately find the thermostat on the wall and turn off everything. The temperature is to my liking. I open the curtains to let in the natural light.

If I were an author, I would write a poem or a short story about a time in the future when all the people, places and things around me are able to detect who I am, what I'm saying, to whom and every gesture I make. The environment will be organized in a way that my every need will have been considered and the options are made available.

I will be able to choose how to be reached (since there won't be these antiquated devices such as telephones and computers any more). Though the inner workings will be invisible to my naked eye, the "alert" surfaces of my surroundings and the objects I carry with me will be the interfaces by which I receive suggestions and make my choices known. When I arrive at the restaurant for an evening cocktail, I'll be served a bowl of freshly made tortilla chips accompanied by dishes of guacamole and salsa.

For a small monthly or annual fee, my preferred provider of premium anticipatory services will be tracking and logging my every move and anticipating my future. When the experiences  I have exceed expectations, I will be happy to pay yet more!

I've recently learned, from an article written by Bruce Sterling in the April 2012 issue of the Smithsonian Magazine on the Origins of Futurism, of the HG Wells essays of 1902 on the topic of life in 2000. The "Anticipations," as the author entitled them, are available as part of the Guttenberg project. I am really looking forward to digesting these, in particular how he thought of the urban life we lead today.

I wonder if he also thought of anticipatory services.

I regret that my visibility into the near future confirms I will be unable to digest these works in the coming days. And that the next place I stay an agent will similarly greet me as a guest with expectations they seek, but will fail, to meet. When I am home, my expectations are lower and the astounding reliability of my world to deliver beyond what I need is much appreciated.

Categories
2020 Business Strategy

When the Title Fits, Wear It

A GigaOM blog post that Gene Becker tweeted about today reminded me that many of those who were "traditionally employed" in past years are setting up their web sites, starting their blogs, joining the ranks and giving the "independent" way of life a try. According to MBO Partners there are over 16 million freelancers, consultants and other independently employed people in America today. By 2020, the number is expected to quadruple to approximately 65 million.

Who are these people, I ask myself? The CEO of MBO Partners (quoted in the GigaOM blog) reports that seven out of ten of those interviewed in a survey believe they are "experts in their field" and have advanced skills and education. Unfortunately, this statement is not supported with hard data or a report.

In my opinion, only clients (i.e., those who hire consultants) are in a position to decide if a consultant is an expert worthy of their fee. Are these people who MBO Partners interviewed successful? To be a successful consultant requires a lot of focus on clients while, at the same time, being vigilant, reading the tea leaves, to detect emerging trends and to explore new directions.

After 21 years working as an independent, it's a topic about which I am qualified to have opinions.

The most important qualifications of an independent in any field are to be passionate about a domain, to pay attention to detail, to be discrete about what is said (and what is omitted) and, for a consultant, to have a strong desire for the client to succeed. The last of these, to prioritize the client's success, is an essential component of a consultant's character that carries risk. Often clients can describe what they need and, together, the goal can be reached, the product shipped, the service proven valuable. But sometimes the client fails for reasons outside a consultant's control, regardless of the consultant's contribution to a company or project. Sometimes the client succeeds but doesn't recognize or feel the need to acknowledge the role of the consultant. Few of the other consultants who I've helped get started and with whom I've worked can live with these and other risks of being independent. 

Having grown accustomed to managing risk (and balancing other aspects of professional independence that I won't go into here), the title of "consultant" no longer reflects how I feel, who I am. To me, the title of "Spime Wrangler" captures better the element of uncertainty with which I am comfortable and the strong desire to pursue the unknown, to tackle or wrestle with the Spimes.

How many of those who decide to hang out their shingle between now and 2020 will share the sense of adventure that makes me leap out of bed each morning? I hope that those who do, whoever they are, will assume the title of Spime Wrangler as well.

Categories
2020 Internet of Things Social and Societal

My Refrigerator

It's convenient to store your white wine and perishables outside when your refrigerator is small. On our balcony, there are no predators to come and take our food. And the temperature outside remains a relatively stable level of cool. In Western Switzerland we are experiencing a cold snap and I brought in items I had been keeping outside so that they wouldn't freeze. I put them in the refrigerator but it was not easy finding room.

[side note: I'll never forget the remark made by an American I once visited shortly after she arrived in country. She asked me "What is it with these Barbie-size appliances?" In many parts of the world, Barbie-size appliances are all you need when you can easily and frequently stop at retail stores. We don't drive a pick-em-up-truck to the grocery store. We walk there, buy what we need and carry it home.]

When I need to stock up, I ask everyone in my family to pick up a few items, or I use the on-line shopping service, LeShop. It's time consuming to go through the catalog but it is convenient to have the products delivered to your door for approximately 4% of the purchase price. (LeShop charges 7.90 CHF to deliver a 200 CHF order).

Taking a break while perusing LeShop's catalog, I read this article in the New York Times about smart appliances of the future. "Is this the next step in the evolution of my Barbie-size appliance?", I asked myself.

I would find it terrifically useful if my next refrigerator not only kept an inventory of its (small but tightly packed cold box) contents, but also connected tightly (or even loosely) with my LeShop order.

What if I could select a recipe the night before, ask my refrigerator (including my balcony shelves) and pantry if there was any ingredient missing, and then have whatever I was missing brought to me? Almost as easy as going to a restaurant and ordering from a menu!

A fridge that synchronizes with my store would be very useful to me but maybe not everyone. Society may not want this time-saving feature. Some may like to shop for food. Before there were roads leading to every door, people questioned the benefit of the automobile. Until everyone had one in their home, office and pocket (or pocketbook) people questioned the utility of the telephone. Why have a camera in a telephone when you have both separately? Many other innovations have become essential components of daily life.

In a recent post RCR Wireless writer Marshall Kirkpatrick took this whole question of machines talking to one another further. He identified a topic that resembled my posts about new technology adoption and use of AR technology among kids and teens. Kirkpatrick points out how quickly technology has evolved since our parents and grandparents were born (television, Internet, etc) and asks:

How do we talk to children about such a radically new relationship with technology that will characterize the world they’ll work and play in as adults? Machine-to-Machine connectivity is not as easy to grasp as the prospect of people communicating with new devices.

And he brought in an illustration from an article co-authored by Dominique Guinard, one of the young Swiss IoT entrepreneurs. Please click on the illustration to enlarge! Under the illustration are Kirkpatrick's translations to English of all the things these connected devices are saying to the teen pictured on the right.

 

 

 

 

 

Freezer: I was thinking about defrosting today.

Clock: Aren’t you supposed to have left the house already by this time?

Faucet: I dripped all night! You should call the plumber.

Toaster: Do not give me too big a toast toast, this time, eh?

Cooking utensils: I remind you that you have not eaten any greens for three days.

Washing machine: And my clothes? who's going to hang them out to dry?

Categories
2020 Research & Development

Abundance, the book

For me the word "abundance" is associated with a positive, peaceful state of mind. In essence, it's the opposite of viewing the world from a place of need, fear or greed. And it's a fantastic title for a blog, a movie, a company, or a book. Wish I had thought of it!

In the forthcoming book Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, the authors, Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, suggest that our future will be shaped by four emerging forces:

  • the exponential technologies,
  • the DIY innovator,
  • the Technophilanthropist, and
  • the Rising Billion.

The terms aren't defined on the portal and the first chapter doesn't introduce them either, but the marketing of the book is beautifully well aligned with the title in the sense that it makes the potential reader feel the abundance they (those who are promoting the book) have to share with the rest of the world.

Those who pre-order the book are promised a bundle of benefits. Customers who place an order before February 13, 2012 on the book's portal will receive:

  • access to Singularity University’s private graduate training video library (covering AI, robotics, computing systems, neuroscience, synthetic biology, nanotechnology, energy, and innovation);
  • a $1200 gift certificate toward attendance at SU’s 7-day Executive Program at the NASA Ames Campus in 2012;
  • free online access to view Transcendent Man, a documentary film chronicling the life and controversial ideas of Ray Kurzweil; and
  • an invitation to a meeting with the book’s authors via webcast.

That's a lot for $24. I pre-ordered my copy before I wrote this post.


Categories
2020 Augmented Reality Social and Societal

Travel in 2020

Many of the use scenarios for Augmented Reality involve a person arriving in a new environment and wishing there was an instant guide, providing customized, in-depth assistance on demand. This precise use case is one of three described in the Open Mobile Alliance draft requirements document for Mobile Augmented Reality.

To complete the scenario, our technology-savvy traveler is going to need a few complementary products and services. The details were sketchy until I read this new study commissioned by Amadeus, a leading travel technology partner and transaction processor for the global travel and tourism industry, and published by The Futures Company.

The report, entitled "From Chaos to Collaboration" details a set of discrete 'enabling' technologies and innovations. For those in a hurry, probably traveling, the companies have conveniently issued the key findings in bullet format (below) and published an infographic (Click on this low resolution version to see the full size version).

Key findings

  1. The next generation of experience: Travel is increasingly about depth rather than breadth of experience. Technologies such as augmented reality, gamification mechanisms and smart mobile devices will transform the travel experience
  2. Automatic transit: Chips, biometrics, long range fingerprinting and near field communications (NFC) can be deployed in a more integrated way to fast-forward how people move around
  3. Payment with memory:  All data on payments made before and during a trip will be integrated, acting as a digital memory of expenditure leading to more personalised services delivering higher value and more profitable relationships
  4. Intelligent recommendation: As technologies make it easier for people to tag and review all aspects of travel experiences, the prospect of personal travel guides and mobile tour representatives will give travellers the tools they need to enrich their experience
  5. Taking the stress out of travel: Intelligent luggage tags and tickets will give greater reassurance whilst m-Health (mobile-Health) applications will allow travellers to manage and monitor their health and wellbeing as if they were at home
  6. The business tourist: Continued emphasis on the wellbeing at work may see the rise of the business tourist which will demand speed and efficiency as well as a home-away-from-home

An AR services developer could spend the rest of this year researching and developing their partner ecosystem for travel-related experiences. From this report alone one could define a fantastic channel strategy and several exciting business models. I wish other use cases for new technology were as well documented and thought out as this!

Categories
2020 3D Information Augmented Reality Social and Societal

Reality TV in 3D

I haven't regularly watched television in nearly 8 years. There isn't a television in my home or my office and when I'm near a television, it doesn't occur to me to turn it on. I am seriously out of touch with what this industry has to offer but my life doesn't lack content. It is just filled with media that I'm choosing to watch or to listen to, when there's time and interest. And, I don't use a terminal that has "channels" in the old fashion broadcast television style. 

I'm certainly not alone in making media choices on a daily or hourly basis via a device other than a TV set. In fact, the whole Web 2.0 and social media movement has provided entertainment "on demand" and just-in-time informational outlets for huge segments of society. And some televisions are already Internet-connected terminals capable of much more than only showing broadcast content.

Many consumers in 2020 will be buying and regularly using devices first introduced this year at the International Consumer Electronics Show. According to an IEEE Spectrum article on the upcoming CES, television is going to be prominently featured among the 2012 edition's announcements. Television sizes and resolutions continue to grow. But this year, as in the past two years, the theme is 3D TV. Manufacturers of displays and televisions are steadily improving what they provide for those who want to watch 3D content. The problem, some believe, isn't the idea that we need 3D, or that there is a shortage of 3D content. It's the glasses. We need solutions that don't require glasses. Stream TV's glasses-free Ultra-D 3D technology is among the popular tech topics for the past three weeks.

Perhaps one of the reasons that people are enamored with 3D is that it mimics reality, the real world. If we are looking for realism, perhaps we also want realistic content. Reality TV has grown and is not showing signs of going away. Unfortunately, from what I've seen of it, Reality TV doesn't have much to do with real Reality.

Reality TV in 3D is getting closer to what might be possible using one of the other hot segments on display at CES this year: eyewear for hands-free Augmented Reality.

Who says glasses are the problem? I and several billion other people wear glasses daily. At least a dozen companies, including Vuzix, the most well-known name in the segment, will show their latest eyewear at CES. While it will show off a lightweight dual-screen model, Vuzix has already disclosed that the next optical see-through displays they will release in 2012 will be monocles, not as shown in this illustration.

In addition to using such appliances to display digital content over the real world (AR), extending them with a couple of cameras (particularly dual cameras for stereoscopic capture) could give us Reality TV in 3 dimensions with a first person point of view. Imagine that you could tune into the life of a famous person or an animal, seeing the world from their eyes. Could this be reminiscent of the feeling we get from following prolific people on Facebook or bloggers ("life bloggers")? Only, in the scenario I'm proposing, text and photos would be replaced with a live stereo video and audio feed. Will this redefine what people consider to be entertaining or boring?

Will this be television in 2020 or just an ordinary pair of glasses?

Categories
2020 Internet of Things

The Singularity

Ray Kurzweil is one of the pundits I like to follow when I want to look into the distant future. I first became aware of his work in mid-2001 when I skimmed the Age of Spiritual Machines and then, for reasons that escape me, it just rest on my bookshelf amongst the many other thought-provoking works. It wasn't until I discovered the heavy volume for which he is better known today that I took in the magnitude of Kurzweil's vision: that technological advancement will be central to unlocking the enduring mysteries of brain function.

I got the hard copy and read the Singularity is Near in mid-2006, as soon as it came out. It was an excellent sequel, of sorts, to an extremely well-written work by Washington Post writer Joel Garreau, Radical Evolution. I highly recommend that anyone who wants to examine the future begin with Garreau's work because it offers a greater variety of perspectives than Kurzweil.

In late 2008, the Singularity University was born. It's great that there is a working think tank with "real world" laboratory examining the scenarios he (and now others) propose. Ever since the establishment of the Singularity U, it seems that Kurzweil's "properties" have gained a lot of momentum. But they are not without detractors.

This blog post entitled "The Singularity is Far" on the Kurzweil site caught my attention because it so directly questions some of the Singularity theory's basic premises about the human brain and future technologies. And it is featured on the Kurzweil site! While a neuroscientist's view seems one to which we should listen on the topic of brain enhancing technologies, and he raises many excellent points in his essay, I find the nanobots scenario very attractive, regardless of when it may finally be possible!

It would be fantastic to have the opportunity to study or attend some sessions at the Singularity U. I'd really like to learn how they address obstacles, to apply their techniques to the projects on which I work. Ideally, such an investment would be something from which I would benefit long before we have nanobots flowing in our bloodstreams!

Categories
2020 Social and Societal

Back to the Future

It's difficult to get the right mixture of technology, philosophy, sociology and history into a 10 minute talk about the future. It takes a lot of preparation and the results vary with the audience to whom you are speaking.

Gerd Leonhard, a futurist who lives in Basel but works around the world, is a master at pulling together concepts from a wide variety of sources and using examples that are meaningful to his audience. I've just watched the first episode of GerdTube about Free and Freemium. This topic is particular appropriate for him to be speaking about in a free video series because Gerd seems to be an expert at giving away his knowlwedge (via Twitter– he has 19,000+ followers, via Facebook, G+ and lots of other channels, including, via YouTube). At the same time, Gerd exudes a sense of being highly successful from a consulting point of view.

I look forward to watching more episodes of GerdTube!

In her presentation (available on YouTube here) at the Future Internet week in Budapest Hungary, Lara Srivastava, also balanced these forces remarkably well, identifying the key issues for the future as well as the opportunities for the Internet of Things, without neglecting the past. It's difficult to say where, precisely, we are in the evolution that, for Srivastava and others, began six years ago but still has a long ways to go before becoming mainstream.  One of her predictions is that we must envisage a day when the public can edit and publish directly into and with the Internet of Things, as we do with our social media on the Web today. That, she predicts will lead to chaos. But chaos is not all bad. Random genetic recombinations are at the very heart evolution, in fact. So celebrate chaos? That requires balance, lots of it!