Ten years ago the word convergence was most often used when predicting the convergence of the television set and the computer. Granted there were things like PDAs that synched up to a computer, but the PDA could go into the pocket and the computer could not.  As we all know, it was the cell phone where convergence first showed up, combining phone, camera and PDA.  Then music was added as was connectivity to the Internet.

In the last year the excitement was the convergence in the home between the computer and the television.  This was accelerated because of the penetration of broadband into 50% (now) of US households and the advent of sites like YouTube.  Apple, with iTV and now a number of companies at the CES show are providing ways to connect these two primary institutions of the American home.

The other exciting convergence during this past year has been video viewing on phones, iPods, MP3 players and all forms of wireless devices.  This has brought about the interesting dichotomy of watching video on a two inch screen while out of the home and then watching video on a brand new 42” or larger flat screen television in the living room.  One thing to note is that at this CES show several companies are displaying ever larger flat screens, with several producing ones with 108” diagonal screens.

There are two new and interesting developments coming out of this CES convention.  As mentioned in the prior post, there are an increasing number …

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 …