From the Chemistry Dept of the University of Wisconsin (warning – PDF document) comes this interesting quote. It turns out that this quote appears all over the place online, but it’s remarkable.
The use of vegetable oils for engine fuels may seem insignificant today. But such oils may become in the course of time as important as the petroleum and coal tar products of the present time.
Rudolph Diesel, 1912
Apparently New Zealand is now the first country in the world to have a Google Earth layer dedicated to tourism. Someone at NZ Tourism is thinking ahead of the game.
Thanks Tim for the pointer.
From New Scientist magazine (March 10 2007) comes an interesting little article which bears more thought. It points out that demand for flat screen TVs and cellphones is creating shortages in metals you’re never heard of.
Bismuth and indium may sound like potentially disgusting medical conditions (“I’m sorry son, that’s the worst case of bismuth I’ve ever seen…”), but they’re both rare and uncommon metals.
So uncommon that some people are saying that they might run out in 3-5 years. According to the analyst quoted in the article, it’s going to start a while new industry : mining electronic waste to try and recover trace metals.
Very Kim Stanley Robinson….
Occasionally a new paradigm comes along which totally challenges the way your view your interactions with a computer. Jeff Han achieved this at the TED conference last year, and now, along comes a new development from Microsoft Research.
Someone has given it the name ‘surface computing’ but that doesn’t really do it justice. You have to watch this video to understand it.
Highly recommended.
(via the Guardian Online)
Over at Jugaad Niti Bhan picks up on the BusinessWeek discussion and posts an insightful look at the backlash against innovation.
She makes the connection between the Gartner Hype Cycle – which, in itself, is very insightful – and the trend for media reporting about innovation. Niti makes the point that after all the hype about innovation, it is now falling into the ‘trough of disillusionment*’
She adds that now – in theory – innovation should start moving onto the Plateau of Productivity.
Recommended reading.
As an aside Niti also has a lovely quote about innovation cultures and the value of the ‘skunkworks’ type approach.
Kanter also advises managers to make sure there are no culture clashes between internal teams working on a company’s traditional products and its new, innovative experiments.
* I happen to like the Hype Cycle. Whether you love it or hate it, you just have to give credit to the creators for the names they use. I mean look at the terms : the ‘Trough of Disillusionment” almost needs a Jaws-like soundtrack to go with it. You could also use it in the next Lord of the Rings movie : “I’m buggered if I’m coming with you Frodo – it’s gonna take more than a magic ring to get me to cross the Trough of Disillusionment”…
Will the future of computing be simple, small and distributed? Flexible electronics might bring that vision to a reality. Consider this quote from a recent New Scientist article, which in turn quotes Hermann Hauser of Amadeus Capital Partners, investor in Cambridge company Plastic Logic. :
People often think of electronic circuits doing very complex things, but very simple plastic ones, in which each device is reporting wirelessly where it is and what it is, over simple mesh networks, will be of very great benefit.
On my last trip I needed to spend a day in Auckland. Although a New Zealander, I have not spent much time in Auckland working out driving routes as I’ve always relied on taxis. However this time I had a whole day of meetings all over town, and taxi fares were going to mount up fast.
I decided to get a rental car with a GPS unit. It worked out to be a fraction of the cost of the combined taxi fares and guided me perfectly to the first four meetings.
However even as a technophile I found it to be very science fiction. The device would tell me – in a perfectly legible and very human voice – exactly when to turn, and how far away the turn was. When people asked me which route I took to their office, I honestly had no idea. That, in itself, I found unsettling.
It reminded me of the Arthur C Clarke quote :
Any sufficiently advanced technology
is indistinguishable from magic.
But then things went horribly wrong. For my last – and most important meeting – the device could not find the address. Nor could it find the address of streets close by (I stashed a paper street map as a backup). A twenty minute journey morphed into a forty five minute nightmare as I struggled to navigate motorways with a street map on my lap, pulling off when I needed to re-check directions.
It was a graphic demonstration of the state of cutting edge technology, especially when the cutting edge is so sharp it causes bleeding.
From an outside observers view GPS is a mature technology adopted by manufacturers globally.
From a users point of view GPS navigation devices can instantly transform themselves from the magic navigator into the most useless thing they ever laid eyes upon.
In this respect it is similar to many technologies that are still being adopted by the majority of users, but which analysts and observers view as ‘old’.
I too viewed GPS as an old technology – until I used it in anger.
I was listening to a podcast by Marc Andreessen (Co-Founder of Netscape) in which he discusses the history of programming.
It’s a bit of a geek out, but he makes some interesting points :
1. Programming tools are no longer made for machines, they’re made for programmers. this makes them really easy to learn how to use.
2. Servers are now a commodity, and the number of servers sold has increased incredibly over the last five years
3. Bandwidth prices are still plummeting
4. Open source tools mean that the barriers to entry have disappeared (from a cost point of view) when it comes to building web applications
What does this mean?
In a world where many businesses are now becoming digitalised to some extent, and almost everyone is trying to interact in a cheaper and smarter way with their customers (usually online in some shape or form), the next disruption to your business might not be from your competitor.
It might come from a self-taught kid in Brazil who has unintentionally designed something which is going to kill your business.
Think of the barriers which were around when Andreessen formed Netscape. Or when Shawn Fanning wrote the code for Naptser.
Now think of how many of those barriers has gone. And then think about your business.
As a sort of out-of-office notification, I’m in London at the moment and have been for the last few days. I’m working with Innovaro on a fascinating project for a large multi-national. The focus is on building scenarios of how the world is going to look in the next twenty years given the impact of a range of new and emerging technologies.
From the BBC today comes news of a new type of projector developed in Germany. The big thing about this projector is that it’s not big at all. It’s under 16mm wide and 9mm deep.
While that’s news in itself, the most interesting thing about this article is the closing comment :
Other laser-based video projectors have been created, but have been limited to the size of a matchbox.
It’s an indication of the pace of change when people refer to a highly advanced and extremely complicated piece of technology as ‘limited’ to the size of a matchbox.