News of the future - Andreas Bossard

Check out this future vision by Microsoft. Some inventions seem superfluous like the touchscreen-windows in the taxi. But still some interesting scenarios. Especially the big desktop screen is interesting.



What do you think? What seems superfluous and what looks like a helpful invention?

Just read a book by the consulting company Detecon which contains 45 articles about how life in the year 2032 could look like. Inspiring stuff. Here some food for thought:

Energy

Household appliances will run when the electricity is the cheapest. The "Smart Grid" will them when the electricity is the cheapest. The heating will only be activated just before inhabitants return home.

Cars

Cars will always be connected to the internet and supply the driver with current information he needs, based on his current context. E.g. when someone picks up a business partners from the airport, when their plane will land.

Health

Electronic around-the-clock observation of elderly and sick people will become medical standard. E.g. through a shirt which measures heart rate etc.

Finance

Social Banking will compete with normal banks, when it comes to lending money. E.g. imagine how you lend money from people you know. They will trust you since you are part of their network.

Life & Habitation

Family and friends meet more often in the virtual world and not that much in the real world. Also through the virtual presence, people won't need to leave their home to work.


Interested in more future scenarios?
They will send you the book for free, but only in German.

This presentation on slideshare contains an interesting compilation of different statements of how mobile phone usage will change Africa until the year 2020. Here some points that caught my interest:

mLearning will help to provide more knowledge across the African continent than before

Mobile phones will become the dominant mode of payment for goods and services

Healthcare practitioners will be able to send pictures of visual symptoms to the nearest bigger center for help/support when the cases in question are too complicated to be treated locally. --> Easier Access to healthcare

Revenue realised from data services will overtake revenue realised from voice services.

With the expected expansion of Africa’s role with mobiles, the continent would be the center of innovation when it comes to mobile phones

Africa has overtaken Europe and the Americans in number of mobile phone subscriptions in the last year and is now 2nd behind Asia. With this in mind, it's surely a good idea to keep watching the African continent to get new ideas for mobile innovation.

Here the full presentation:




Thanks to Christoph Hess for pointing me towards this interesting presentation.

If you have ever read a book on an electronic device, you will surely have wondered how books will look in the future.
Kevin Kelly wrote an interesting blog article, that takes a look into the future of books.

Here some quotes from the article:

The current custodians of ebooks -- Amazon, Google and the publishers -- have agreed to cripple the liquidity of ebooks by preventing readers from cut-and-pasting text easily, or to copy large sections of a book, or to otherwise seriously manipulate the text. But eventually the text of ebooks will be liberated, and the true nature of books will blossom. We will find out that books never really wanted to be telephone directories, or hardware catalogs, or gargantuan lists. These are jobs that websites are much superior at -- all that updating and searching -- tasks that paper is not suited for. What books have always wanted was to be annotated, marked up, underlined, dog-eared, summarized, cross-referenced, hyperlinked, shared, and talked-to. Being digital allows them to do all that and more.

Indeed dense hyperlinking among books would make every book a networked event.

In the long run (next 10-20 years) we won't pay for individual books any more than we'll pay for individual songs or movies. All will be streamed in paid subscription services; you'll just "borrow" what you want. That defuses the current anxiety to produce a container for ebooks that can be owned. Ebooks won't be owned. They'll be accessed.

Read his full blog post here: What Books Will Become by Kevin Kelly

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Find the full short story by Matthias Müller Prove here:
https://blogs.oracle.com/mprove/entry/it2020

Interesting stuff Matthias!