I am just back from the CompTIA member conference in Johannesburg, and a good event it was too. As always on these monster flights, I read books, magazines, papers, anything I can learn something new. I believe technology will become the next utility, to the point where you can’t see it and this is a great step in that direction. Light Touch, developed in Cambridge, can turn any flat surface into a 10-inch touchscreen. As this evolves, has connectivity and is integrated into portable devices, will it be goodbye monitor, keyboard and laptop bag forever? I hope so.
Tags: Gadgets
TV debate
Twitter is adding a new dimension to television. Watching TV whilst tweeting is like listening to live commentary. It also turns a solitary pastime like watching TV into a communcal one, and you get to have your say. It is time Twitter was incorporated into plasma TVs for same-screen action and TV audiences for political debates include the Twitter brigade.
Is email passé?
I wonder how long it will take before email is passé. Our youngsters today are less inclined to send email because it is too long a process, and instant messaging is fast and with-it! I hear some unversities have stopped distributing email accounts to their students, and instead are giving out eReaders, iPads and Tablet computers – that’s the kind of place I would like to study.
Things
Attended a few good events recently; presented at the British Telecom apprentice managers event in Gatwick, Brokerbin’s UK partner meeting in Manchester and the ElementK Learning Practitioners seminar in St Paul’s. Some excellent new contacts through those, and enjoyed them all. By far, this was the best thing I heard: “The best things in life aren’t things.”
Did You Know?
A study by Gartner revealed that in the next 3 years, more than 50 million IP addresses will come from automobiles. One day, there will only be one network, one global wireless network which everybody, and every device, will be permanently connected to; and we may not need gadgets, as our skin, our clothing and our glasses carry enough technology to keep us in touch.
Small but mighty
Spent a few days in Tokyo last week, in a hotel overlooking the Tokyo Dome, home of the Yomiuri Giants baseball team. Aside from shocking jetlag, I discovered the next generation of pocket-sized computers, the mini netbook. These are pocket-sized, have a 5-inch screen, 10-hour battery and boot-up time of 3-seconds (sounds very close to a mobile phone). The Fujitsu U series of their Loox notebook is one such example. These should help address the first fall in sales in 20 months of the first round of netbooks, often seen in Starbucks coffee shops.
Taking your tablet
I was early in saying that Netbooks would be a Christmas bestseller in 2008, and I make another bold statement in saying that the tablet (sample idea above) will be all the rage, especially if Apple announce one at the end of this month. A single device that does everything you could possible want online, and where you pay for access to music, movies and memory space in the cloud, is where we are heading. PDAs outsold laptops last year, and this one-device-for-all technology will be the next big thing, or at least one of them. 3D-TV for my home, not convinced, don’t like the glasses.
Quality of printing
Read a great story in Wired UK about a guy who printed nearly US$7,000,000 in fake currency using home printers from his local computer store. Just goes to show how good the technology is in these machines. I wonder how many print cartridges he used. Don’t go getting ideas in your new year’s resolution list…