209 years from now, what will be in the history books about today?

Today is the anniversary of the opening of the 1st US auto manufacturer Duryea Motor Wagon Company back in 1895.

I wonder what someone is doing today that will be in the history books in 209 years.Of course there won’t be ‘books’ as we know them other than perhaps in museums.Just like kids today ask what those black vinyl things are in the sleeves on shelves or in boxes.

Sometimes we just take things for granted all our lives and suddenly they seem to be meaningless. I took a pile of books over to a family member yesterday, one of her favorite authors and whilst she likes the author “I only read on my Kindle now. I can lie back on the bed, even in the dark and it’s just so convenient.”

I can’t imagine we’ll have cell phones in 200 years. Of course we’ll communicate, but how will it take place? I struggle to imagine. It could be a watch, or glasses, but I doubt it. Perhaps an ear-ring or something fashionable. It probably won’t be an implant for security and other reasons, but I doubt if we saw what they use, they we would recognize what it was. Imagine showing an iPhone to a family a hundred years ago.

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Consumption 2.0 and Mobile Society

I’ve just read an article by Hugo Garcia of Futures Lab in Portugal in the latest issue of The Futurist. He was outlining how younger people today are more mobile, more focussed on consuming goods, services and experiences, rather than being attached to things and places. One area that he was strong on was the fact that people are now so mobile and keen to explore the world and their environments.

Location becomes far more important because you are continuing moving around as opposed to tied to a fixed location in the world. He said that one example is the trend towards not owning a home, perhaps ever. I always hear talk about how hard it is to get into property, I don’t think it has ever been easy. When we bought our first home (to give ourselves and our children some long term security) we bought in a cheap neighbourhood and at one stage were paying in excess on 20% interest. For a couple of years in the beginning, we went without pretty much anything, just to pay the interest. Today many don’t want to restrict their lifestyle, making it a choice, their choice is to live for today.

The ‘office’ is for many people today, especially knowledge workers, not somewhere we need to be a lot of the time and the cost of maintaining an office, commuting, car parking (you could almost rent a room for the cost of my Auckland City car park). We go to the office when we need to, for meetings, teamwork etc, but otherwise I can be much more productive from my home office.

Hugo talks about shared mobility. This is not a new concept, but certainly one that is coming back with a vengeance. Back in the 1960’s the Provos introduced white bikes that anyone could use. The idea was that you grabbed a bike, rode it to where you wanted to go and left it there for the next person to use. Their concept, same as today was to reduce pollution and traffic congestion and promote community engagement. They were certainly engaged as very quickly the bikes were stolen and repainted, but the idea was very good.

Today carpooling continues to grow, Zipcars, recently purchased by Avis, which is currently being debated as to whether it was an anticompetitive manoeuvre, is an example of car sharing, which in principle makes a lot of sense. People share ownership in boats, holiday homes and other items and many people are travelling around the world using the services of portals like Airbnb. There are loads of companies sprouting up like Whipcar, which lets you rent out your own vehicle when you don’t need it.

Globalisation is also an area that is changing rapidly. I remember reading history books about the great depression and how people moved from town to town looking for work. Mobility today is something far more international and international borders are being crossed continually by people in search of work, whether it is because they can’t find it at home, want a better life, or simply enjoy the itinerant lifestyle. Over a million Kiwis are working and living overseas, while British and other nationalities are moving to New Zealand to work on projects such as the reconstruction of  Christchurch.

Hugo points out there are pro’s and cons. “Unfortunately, some areas may become abandoned because they lack competitive advantages. The war for talent between countries will increase, but regions that offer good living conditions may gain an advantage.

I note again that knowledge workers, one of the biggest industry segments today can often work from anywhere and travel when required. I know many journalists and developers that live in small towns for the lifestyle, but can still perform on a global stage.

This mobile society opens up huge scope for innovation and disruption, particularly with location based services, applications for mobile use, which can support the new mobile lifestyle. Kiwi developers can and are developing applications used globally, despite those that say you can’t be successful unless you are in Silicon Valley, things are changing. The money may be there, but they don’t have a monopoly of good ideas.

If anyone knows about a mobile lifestyle its Kiwis, anywhere is a long way from New Zealand. We know how to travel, we absorb and learn and we love new technology. Where we need help is harnessing our smarts, to help our innovators and entrepreneurs to learn how to scale and think big. That’s a tough ask and I don’t think our Government is doing anywhere near enough to ensure that smart people are able to grow from small concepts to large global enterprises.

I was just asking myself how I suddenly got on my soap box, but then I’m not sure I ever get off it:)

The future of Personal Computing Part Two

This is a follow on from my blog last week about a day in my life of personal computing in 2013.

So I’ve had breakfast and I go to my PC to check email and messages. My wireless network at home now consists of a variety of devices and networks linked together. These include my Entertainment Server which links to various TV’s around the house, the Sky Dish, cable TV, media audio players and recorders, HD radio tuner as well as the Toshiba Fenininity Server which allows us to control and monitor the stove, dishwasher, washing machine and dryer, climate control, breadmaker and a host of other appliances not to mention the HVS climate control.

I also have the latest Kindle which lets all of us read our personalised news. It aggregates the top stories from mother Herald as well as other papers and magazines of interest so we all get the version we want. Scared the hell out of me the other day when I opened my wife’s logon by accident and all I saw was stories about TV and filmstars and their failed marriages and getting their 23rd adopted child out of Afghanistan which is the new Darfur. But then that is the beauty of it that we all get MeNews and not what someone else wants us to read.

I’m still into social networking in a big way, but have a number of portals that manage and aggregate each of my networks. I check my Music Portal which manages all the sites where I showcase my music. Now I can load my new songs, video’s, blogs and gig calendar onto one site and it updates the 127 sites I feature on in one hit, according to each sites unique specification.

So it’s time to go. I leave the house and activate the alarm which sends a signal to my iPhone to say the system is now armed and hop in the car. I drop the iPhone onto the little tray beside my seat and as I put the key into the ignition and my seat and steering wheel adjust itself to my preferred positions, my phone announces itself to the Wireless CANBUS so that it has access to the entertainment system.

I tell my integrated GPS navigation unit to take me to ‘the office’ select the podcast I want to listen to from those that are just audio as I don’t want to get pinged by the distraction laws and get on the road. As I near the top of Chartwell Drive, my podcast pauses (I used to hate missing stuff when the old system just muted the sound) and the nav tells me that there is a serious traffic incident on High Rd that it has picked up on TMC and would I like to route around it. I say yes, and it seemlessly takes me on down Diana drive and I arrive at work right on time.

As I wait at a set of lights I check the Buddy feature on my GPS and see an image of my wife’s car crawling along Bush Rd on her way to work. Her unit beeps to alert her that I have checked her location and she sends me a smart message back by tapping on the SMS keyboard on her nav unit which uses Bluetooth to send the message via her phone. Her car and system is a bit older than mine. 2009.

When I get to work my phone opens the carpark grill and after I have parked the car, it unlocks the door into the building and then into my office. I fire up my  Touchbook which has just been upgraded to Vista (“WE” like to be cautious about our computer network and go to the machine in the kitchen for a perfectly fluffy flat white.

As I have done forever, I start my day with email. My touchscreen notebook is now running Windows Vista Touch and although Microsoft has announced their new OS I will be using this one for another couple of years until our IT Department is comfortable that it is reasonably robust, especially given that it took 3 years to get most of the kinks out of Vista and for a while they went back to offering Windows XP again as an option in the 2nd half of 2009.

One thing that we have now universally adopted is Unified Communications. All my voicemail whether it comes from my landline, mobile or email is now waiting for me in my Inbox and with my iPhone or my notebook.

My days haven’t changed much. Probably the only major difference is that I do now use video on a lot of my phone calls so I can see the person I am talking to. This has saved me a lot of wasted travel time given the disaster that is Auckland’s roads today. They have started building the Auckland Harbour Tunnel, but it will be a couple more years before it opens for buses and T3 (cars with at least 3 peple in them) let alone ordinary traffic. So many meetings have been replaced by necessity with vidphone calls. Of course I can also do this on my iPhone 6, but unless I’m doing it over the Wireless LAN (and we still don’t have one in the office) the costs are prohibitive.

At lunch time I quite often walk to the Subway for some exercise and of course their food has the Heart Tick. On my way, I check out their menu on my iPhone and wonder if the food will look as good as the picture. I specify exactly what time I will get there. On the way back I get the phone to play me some Utterz messages from friends while I’m walking.

On the way home I drive past a bar and get a Speights Mates message saying there is a Happy Hour Running and sending me an eCoupon to get 2 for one in the next half hour and prompting me to hit the forward button to send the same coupon to any of my personal Speight’s Mates who are within a 2km vicinity to come and join me for an after work beer. I love location based marketing and decide it is only right to support people who have invested in this technology given that I helped to develop it. Isn’t that called the fruits of your labour? Yes. I know hops aren’t strictly fruit.

Before dinner, I go to my home studio and record a lead track on my Gibson LP Guitar onto my 8 track TASCAM for my latest song, nothing has changed there really, call me old fashioned. I still have my music on loads of web sites and while I’ve sold some songs, I haven’t scored a number one hit yet.

I bought the new Internet TV Aggregation Server last year and replaced my MySky. Now that I have cable for internet as well as TV, I can cherry pick and watch exactly what I want when I want and am no longer subject to the whims of SKy TV. Yes, I still subscribe to Sky Sports Channel because they have exclusive rights for many events that NZ teams compete in such as All Blacks Rugby and do support NZ sport better than anything else, especially the biased commentators, although I wuldn’t have a problem if Murray Mexted got some new material, but the rest is pretty much free. I don’t have to watch ads although many programs have very overt displays of product i the story.

I finally got an 80″ TV, the largest my wife would let me buy, and that wasn’t easy. Sometimes we have multple screens running so that we can watch different things at once and have adapted to that. We tried the VR glasses from the new Nintendo, but they are very antisocial. Awesome for 3D movies tough! Home entertainment is now awesome. No more channels full of reruns of programs we have already seen umpteen times, I never have to sit through another show of Friends again! Now I can see exactly what I want when I want, subject to agreement in the house of course and we all have to compromise sometimes,

Along with cable came free international calling to anywhere in the world for a modest flat fee, so I don’t use Skype much anymore. Finally a little music from iLike at the end of the day. I kept my CD’s and vinyl as souvenirs, but for a flat fee of $10 a month to our ISP, the house can access and download unlimited music from almost all record companies in MPEG 9 which is great quality at 960kbit/s.

Not a lot has changed in 5 years, but life is certtainly a little easier than it used to be.

While this blog is starting to get a good following, I would love to get more readers and encouraging me to keep writing. If you feel that my blog is interesting I would be very grateful if you would vote for me in the category of best blog at the NetGuide Web Awards. Note that the form starts each site with www whereas my blog doesn’t and is of course https://luigicappel.wordpress.com.

Thanks so much for your support:)

The future of personal computing Part One

I was reading a story in a local magazine the other day, I forced myself because I’m interested, but at first glance it was not very insightful in my humble opinion. I get so tied up trying to make the future happen that sometimes I don’t sit back and think about it in more depth and I should.

There has been a lot of talk about the Semantic Web and about sharing data on the web with lots of applications and people, lots of talk about collaborating with other people and for sure that is happening. I use Friendfeed, I’m active on Facebook, sometimes Flickr, Buzznet, LinkedIn and loads more. Twitter is the only one I really use on my Blackberry, which doesn’t suit many of the social networking applications very well.

The problem I have with putting information on web sites such as Gmail and others is can I rely on it being there forever? I love the idea of being able to access everything anywhere anytime and A3 (cubed) is one of my mantras, but ignoring security I still have fears over losing access to my data, like when recently Mucaah.com, a web site in the Netherlands where I was building a fan base disappeared overnight.

But anyway, looking to the future, the big next thing for me is LBS or Location Based Services and on any device, any time. It is about interacting with your environment and your social network in real places in real time. Sure a lot of people including myself spend a lot of time at desktops, but I plan to do much more of my computing, especially social computing at a mobile level.

I have owned a myriad of devices and still have many of them including Palm’s, A Casio Zoomer, Symbol’s, iPaq’s, iMate as well as other Smartphones from a variety of brands. I worked hard to help bring these products into mainstream and not just as clever phones but as tools to enhance the way people react in this world. To that end in the beginning of this century I wrote Unleashing the Road Warrior, Master Your Palm and master Your Pocket PC. All of these were about maximising the potential of these devices and the communications to help you work and play smarter rather than harder, another personal mantra. I don’t mean you shouldn’t play hard, but that it shouldn’t be hard work.

Hopefully my next one, whether it’s a new Blackberry, iPhone, Xperia or something else, will have a GPS chip in it and a variety of applications that will enable my mobile world. I have some major activities in mind to help develop this area of computing and turn it into a reality.

So looking a few years into the future, what is my vision? I could write a book, but like my last ones they date very quickly, so this blog will have to do. The biggest impact of these technologies will be social, after all people do business with people, they have relationships with people and those relationships and networks have far more power when they are spatially enabled.

Over the last few years applications like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Buzznet, Flickr, Twitter and more have been the most popular development in computing or social computing at least and people are loving it, but whilst many of these applications are now able to be used in a mobile environment (for example I use Twitter on my phone), the don’t have a spatial component yet.

So lets have a brief look into the near future. In one of my previous blogs I described a typical day for me on the Internet. Now lets have a bit of a look at what that same day might look like in 2013.

I wake up to the sound of my current favourite song which is being played on my iPhone V6 which is in the dock of my alarm clock. Note this is the latest model, but they have been around since 2008. I get up and go into the bathroom, taking my iPhone with me and put it into my bathroom dock which has water resistant wiring so that it doesn’t corrode from the steam of my hot shower.

While I was asleep my iPhone connected to iTunes, not through Vodafone who are still greedy in their data prices but wirelessly to my wireless router which connects to my fibre-optic internet connection with its guaranteed minimum 100Mbps connection and updated all my favourite podcasts in a matter of 30 seconds.

It automatically starts playing the podcasts in order of preference while I shower and I catch up with the latest in tech news from Channelflip and Geekbrief.

As I have breakfast I plug my iPhone into the projector pod and catch up with the latest personalised news which is displayed on the dining room wall and catch up with the things I am interested in.

I’m going to stop here for now, because it’s obvious that this is going to be longer than I intended and if I don’t post it now it will never finish or will become a book. So RSS or bookmark this blog if this is of interest to you:)

While this blog is starting to get a good following, I would love to get more readers and encouraging me to keep writing. If you feel that my blog is interesting I would be very grateful if you would vote for me in the category of best blog at the NetGuide Web Awards. Note that the form starts each site with www whereas my blog doesn’t and is of course https://luigicappel.wordpress.com.

Thanks so much for your support:)