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 …

A couple of months ago I made a post with this same  title.  I opened that post with the following language:

“Across the full spectrum of human endeavor, it is often hard to see what the future might be. Trend lines can be seen, and directions understood, but specific pictures of the future can be vague.  However, our future shows up most clearly in the area of technology.  Technology lets us see new potential.  It shows us new tools that may or may not become universally useful but provides us with possibilities to expect.”

Since I have an attraction to the ‘new’ and I consume a lot of media I often read about things that are interesting, but when combined with another news or product story point to a clear trend or possibility.  As I wrote in a recent post, part of being a futurist is pattern recognition and connecting the dots. Therefore I realized that, from time to time here at www.evolutionshift.com I will have posts like this one, hence the numbers.

We all know that in the past decade, the price for computer hard drive storage has dropped precipitously.  Then came flash drives that, in the past couple of years have also dropped dramatically in price.  You can now buy a flash drive with 1 gig of memory for less that the price of 256 MB two years ago.  The other dynamic is the miniaturization of memory.   Memory that fits in one’s shirt pocket

 There was a recent mention …

The first post I made here was about the significance of the MIT Media Lab and the fact that its founder, Nicholas Negroponte was taking a leave of absence to launch the noble effort of supplying $100 laptops to children in the Third World.  In the six months since that post, the $100 laptop has moved toward becoming a reality.  It has also started to affect the computer marketplace in beneficial ways.

Last month the prototype of the $100 laptop had its public unveiling at a computing conference. It is about the size of a hardback book, has an orange plastic shell with two pop up ‘rabbit ears’ that enhance wireless reception and a small, clear LCD display.  It also will come in three other bright colors and has the ability to be powered by a crank.  Other technical specifications include having dual displays, one in color and one in black and white that is sunlight readable. It will use Linux software, it has a 500MHz processor, 128 of DRAM and a 500MB of Flash memory.  It does not have a hard drive, but it does come with three USB ports.

The first stage of the effort has been to find ways to assemble a useable laptop at a low cost.  Finding less expensive ways to produce create and find innovative technology and stripping down software to its fundamentals has been the goal, and it seems as though this phase is drawing to a close.  The next phases will be …