This week at the Consumer Electronics Show there are hundreds of companies touting new gadgets that are “revolutionary” “innovative” “at the cutting edge” and “totally cool”.  I will leave the descriptions of all these to the mainstream media as they already excessively cover this convention.  Instead I will give you some view on the larger trends that are clear.

Connectivity

We are rapidly moving to total connectedness. Whether you are in the office, in the home, on the road, or anywhere in the world you can be connected to information, data and billions of people.    Bill Gates spoke of the fact that the home is soon going to be completely connected.  Computers, televisions, phones, everything in the home will be connected.  Ed Zander, Chairman of Motorola spoke about the home as being a hub of “seamless technology” and that mobile devices provide “seamless mobility” wherever we are in the world.  Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, CEO of Nokia speaks of “a world where everyone can be connected” and of “mobility, interconnectivity, community and convenience” 

Compare how much more connected you are now than you were 10 years ago. That is how much more you will be connected in 3-5 years than you are today.  How we use that connectivity is up to us and is the human variable in the equation.  Technology is providing us with connectivity that twenty years ago was only imagined in science fiction and in the minds of a few visionary futurists.

Availability

We are moving toward a world where practically every type of …

One of the trade offs we seem to have accepted during the past 20 years is a loss of privacy.  None of us say we approve of that, but we have embraced technology in such a way that a diminished sense of privacy has occurred.  The portability of storage and computing, as discussed on this blog in earlier posts, is a major reason.  The easier small storage devices and laptops are to carry, the higher probability of theft.

It was revealed the other day that a laptop, with personnel records for 382,000 Boeing employees was stolen.  This was the third time in 13 months that this has occurred with Boeing.  Of course Boeing is not the only company where this has happened.  Laptops are portable and easy to put into a briefcase or bag.  Someone goes up for another cup of coffee at Starbucks or leaves their desk to go to the bathroom and in a few seconds the laptop and all the data on it is stolen.  We all enjoy the fact that we can have a computer with us wherever we are.  The freedom to work wherever and whenever we want is a very empowering thing, something that didn’t exist 20 years ago.

In the 1960s and 1970s, computing equaled mainframe computing.  Companies and universities all had these large machines that were in air conditioned, controlled access environments.  Access was highly monitored, records were kept for all activities and people even dressed in white …

In both the first and second posts with this title I stated that while in many areas it might be difficult to see into the future, in the area of technology the future can be readily seen.  The speed of technological invention and innovation moves so quickly that we have barely assimilated a recent breakthrough when another shows up to knock us back on our heels again.  While these innovations do provide a glimpse of our future, they can be disorienting in that they show us that the Present that we are struggling to accept and assimilate will soon be outdated.

Last week the Nvidia Corporation made a major product announcement that has profound implications in the area of supercomputing, gaming and virtual reality.  Nvidia introduced its next generation processor that has a capability of three trillion mathematical operations per second. To put that in some historical perspective, the first mainframe computer, the ENIAC, built in 1946 performed 50,000 calculations per second.  Ten years later the IBM 704 mainframe performed at 400,000 per second. By 1982 the number has grown to 100 million for the most powerful mainframe computers in the world.  So this new processor just by itself, is 30,000 times faster that the most powerful mainframe of 25 years ago.  In addition this new processor will have 681 million transistors, more than twice as many the current fast processors on the market. I am not sure of my numbers here, but that probably means that each processor …

Just when you thought you had caught up with the ever increasing speed of technology, along comes another breakthrough to make you feel unnerved by the speed of change.  This week it was the stunning announcement of a breakthrough in chip technology that turned my head.  As I read the articles about this, the thought balloon over my head would have been a big “WOW!!” with multiple exclamation points had I been in a comic strip.

Researchers from Intel and the University of California, Santa Barbara announced they had been able to create a silicon based chip that can produce laser beams.  This means that it will be possible to use laser light rather than wires to send data between chips. For the first time, researchers were able to bond a silicon chip with a wafer that emits light when electricity is applied. To translate, this means that information will move 100 times faster at a fraction of the cost.  There has been recent discussion as to whether Moore’s law — that computing power doubles every 18 months and also drops by half in cost — which has driven the growth of computing over the past few decades was finally coming up against limitations of physics.  Well, this answers that question!

Lasers have been used to transmit vast amounts of data via fiber optic cables over long distances, but the speed of data transmission between chips in the computer has been much slower.  Now, with this breakthrough computer engineers will be able …

Steve Jobs made the expected announcement that Apple would market the iTV , the gadget that will link the Apple computer in the den to the television set in the living room. Most of the reporting on this announcement was around the coming wave of downloading movies onto the computer and then transferring them to the television set for viewing. The analogy was made to the music business and the iPod and iTunes, as in “Jobs has done it again”. All true.

Yes the early and partial disintermediation of the theatrical distribution system for movies has begun. Yes, Jobs is out in front as he was in downloadable music. Yes he started with one studio and others would follow after the holiday season. Yes the price for the iTV is affordable. This is all good, particularly because of the expected ‘ease of use’ of Apple products. To me however, this announcement was about something else: the breaking down of the barrier between the television experience and the computer experience. That is where the transformation will be.

Ten years ago was the beginning of all the talk about ‘convergence’. This generally meant the convergence of the television set and the personal computer. People spoke of it as an eventuality, and that it would happen soon. Efforts such as WebTV came along, but were too soon and didn’t have the fundamentals down as far as the television side of the equation was concerned. Even …