Author and all-around smart guy has just put up a great post about the future of smartphones and the mobile internet. What he says shouldn’t surprise anyone; the mobile telcos will eventually be reduced to dumb pipes, including voice apps, and eventually Google will move in and push prices to the floor while spreading access far and wide. Of course Canadians will have to wait another decade or so after Stross’s posited date of 2019, given that our mobile telephony space is at best pathetic and at worst hopelessly corrupt.
Personally, I think we’ll see an accelerated move towards online video and longer-form content in the next year. Of course I have a dog in this fight, but the writing is on the wall for broadcast, just like it was for print and radio.
All indications point to “maybe.” But The Beast from Cupertino recently purchased a huge data center, and the possibility of Apple moving into the streaming video space would be a perfect fit for not only their rumored tablet device but also for the TV in your living room. Everyone hates the cable companies, and if Apple could do an end run around them, they could repeat their successful reshaping of the music industry Throw in saving print through the tablet and the ability for anyone to broadcast from anywhere and you’ve got a media revolution. Maybe.
Shai Agassi has an audacious plan for implementing electric vehicles on a massive scale, and he may just pull it off. Below I’ve posted a video from Agassi about how important it is for the world to use technology and entrepreneurship to kickstart a revamp of our industries in order to keep us from a climate crisis.
I know some people deny the existence of the climate crisis, but to my mind this is a change that should happen regardless. We will run out of oil in this century, and we’ve been coasting on 19th century technology for a long time. Even if the climate maintains stability or heats up without our help, at the very least we’ve updated and innovated our infrastructure, created many new jobs and will likely make many new discoveries along the way. There’s no good reason not to do this, other than keeping established players wealthy. And those established players stand to gain as well, as long as they get in front of the problem and push their resources towards a solution.
Rogers, one of the rarified members of Canada’s cable and wireless oligopoly, has rolled out Rogers on Demand Online, a rather tepid answer to Hulu, the American service that allows U.S internet users to watch television shows on their computers and mobile devices (international users can’t access the service).
But where Hulu offers tons of choices, Rogers on Demand Online has precious little to watch, and what’s there isn’t worth seeing in the first place. If that were the worst of it, Rogers offering would be just another Canadian also-ran digital service, but RODO increases the suck by region-locking almost everything if you aren’t in an area serviced by Rogers cable. As a Rogers Wireless subscriber, I can get onto the site, but since the Rogers hegemon goes from Ontario eastward, I can watch very few of the available shows. That’s right, Rogers region-locks people IN CANADA.
Much as I love living in Canada (socialized medicine, gay marriage being A-OK and opting out of the Iraq war being but three highlights) we’re utterly pathetic when it comes to digital media. I was able to attend the Banff TV Fest this year as part of my scribe duties for Techvibes, and if I ever had any doubt that the TV industry in Canada is headed straight down the toilet, three days of listening to TV execs being utterly clueless about the internet sealed the deal. Here’s hoping Canadians, who have oodles of talent and technical skill, stop chasing the futility of a place in old media, pick up some camcorders, and route around broadcasting straight to the internet.
Back in the mid-60’s Alvin Toffler wrote a book called Future Shock all about how change is accelerating so fast that it’s creating anxiety, strife and conflict and that maybe we should just slow down.
As a kid in the 70’s I was shown the film below by concerned social studies teachers who were terrified down to their hippie bones by the evil that was “COMPUTERS.” At the time I thought all the stuff they described in the movie was cool as hell, and I haven’t changed my opinion more than 30-odd years later. The more change the better, I sez, and make it snappy.
Besides the film’s near-panic about technological developments we now find quaint, it also features Orson Welles in an airport, smoking a cigar on a movator. Really, what more do you need in visual entertainment?
Despite the perennial cries of “people don’t want to read books on their phones,” that’s precisely what’s happening according to an article in the New York Times. Everyone has their smartphone with them at all times, making it easy to read on the go and tote a library of titles in your pocket. I’ve read at least 3 or 4 books on my iPhone, and plan to keep doing so until Apple comes out with something better, like their mythical tablet device.
I was recently in Japan, and did indeed see plenty of homeless people, most notably attending a rally put on in Ueno park by Christian missionaries and sleeping in the early morning on the stairs at Shinjuku station. I never went into an internet cafe, but if I had I imagine I would have run into the cyber-homeless detailed in this report.
Fast Company has come out with a well-written but flawed story about how little genetic research has done to improve our health. Which would be fine and dandy, were it true or if the writer of the article, David Freedman, had the slightest bit of foresight. Freedman delineates how many promises were made once the human genome was decoded, and how far we’ve come in the 10 years since that event. And to be fair, there hasn’t been a huge leap in progress…yet. But biotech is roughly at the place computing was in 1980. Today we carry around the equivalent of a Cray supercomputer in our pocket, use cameras that recognize faces, shoot HD video onto tiny cards and network with people around the world. We have made some progress, with recent gene therapy breakthroughs ending color blindness in monkeys and restoring immune systems. We’re on the bottom end of a big curve with genetics and biotech, and I think ten years from now people will look back at this article and scoff, if they even remember it all.
Ian Goldin, one of the many smart people to speak at the always excellent TED conference, lays down the challenges facing us in the next 30 years. The takeaway? The coming decades are full of amazing technologies, but if we don’t find new ways to co-operate, we’re all screwed.
