“As GM goes, so goes America.” – Let’s all hope that famous maxim doesn’t apply now.
Yesterday General Motors stock closed below $6 for the first time since the 1950s. Then last night, the financial woes worsened as most foreign stock markets plunged between 4% and 9%. Now this morning we’re all left wondering, “Just how bad will this get? Are we nearing the worst of this crisis?”
Here’s a CNN summary of the action:
Some economists are optimistic that we’re nearing the bottom, but many others are bracing for another Great Depression.
Augmented reality will become a widespread reality once
projectors, visual recognition system and computers processors get
cheap enough and companies develop compelling software for it.
Here’s a very cool and comprehensive vision of what that future
might look like:
Futurist David Houle of EvolutionShift is confident
space-based solar power can answer our rising energy needs, while
fueling a nascent private space industry during its critical early
stages.
In his latest YouTube video futurist Patrick Dixon says paper use is
up because it “has this extraordinary capacity to deliver bandwidth
to human beings” due to higher resolution as compared to digital
screens.
“The sheer physicality of books makes them supremely readable.
It’s a very high definition source for the eye,” says Dixon, adding
that books are “very convenient. You can read through [them]
incredibly quickly. You can flip pages around.”
As to how long will paper continue to dominate communication,
Dixon forecasts that the industry “will continue for a very long
time despite all the advances that are being talked about for the
next 10 years.”
If you’re a big Transformers fan, as am I,
then you’re going to dig this video of a new robot that can drive
on wheels one moment, then reconfigure to walk on eight legs the
next:
Seeing this functional version of a bot that can change its form
leads me to believe that multi-function, multi-shape robots are
likely to be the future. I mean, why not cram as many features as
you can into a single robot? We’re already doing that with every
other device ever made.
A new study from ABI
Research forecasts the number of viewers who access video via
the Web to nearly quadruple in the next few years, reaching at
least one billion in 2013. ““
“The rapid expansion of broadband video creates opportunities
across a number of market sectors,” comments senior analyst Cesar
Bachelet. “A wide variety of actors aim to gain a share of this
fast-growing market: not only content owners such as the BBC and NBC
Universal, and Internet portals such as AOL and
Yahoo!, but also
a range of new entrants including user-generated content sites such
as YouTube and
Dailymotion, broadband video
sites such as CinemaNow and Lovefilm, and Internet TV
providers such as Apple, and Zattoo
Sparked by increasing broadband penetration and rising
connection speeds available to a growing percentage of the world’s
population, online video is growing as quickly as the supporting
infrastructure can be built. (cont.)
Here’s a cool vision created by tennis equipment manufacturer
Lacoste of the sport as it
may look 75 years from now:
My hunch is that if tennis does evolve in such a direction that
robotic exoskeletons and augmented
reality will make this vision possible sometime before
2030.
How long would it take for this guy to deliver your pizza?
This rocket man is a trained pilot and engineer, so it doesn’t
look like us laymen will be flying with these wings any time soon,
but I can see a lot of benefits such as first medical response,
amazing camera work, high-speed delivery and of course military
applications. However, I am optimistic that going tandem will be a
near term option.
Wondering when national currencies, intimacy, natural childbirth
and Rocky films will go the way of the dodo? Here’s a fun timeline
of extinction events for the 1950-2050 range by futurist and
Future
Trends Book author Richard Watson:
“What if you could take data elements from multiple websites and
mash them together into a single, integrated view?”
Intel’s new Mash Maker, a suped-up take
on Yahoo
Pipes, now allows us web surfers to take pieces of sites and to
assemble them into a single super-site. It’s kind of like
RSS, but instead of modules of
standardized text feeds you can clip most of the visual and
interactive portions of sites that you find useful. Like Pipes, the
data flowing through these micro interfaces can be threaded
together to make for more efficient browsing, seaching, sorting
experiences. For example, you can use Mash Maker to easily connect
your Facebook friends’ profiles with a google map, creating a image
of where they’re all located on a map that’s located on the same
page as the profiles.
Overall, Intel’s new product represents the next stage in
user-friendly web mashing and is a big step up from the less
accessible Yahoo Pipes. It’s most powerful feature may well prove
it’s ability to suggest pre-made mashups as you browse. If it can
attain critical mass, this may be the the first web masher to gain
incredible market share – it looks as though it’s got a shot.
Otherwise, we’ll just have to wait for an improved version or a
slicker, more dummy proof product from Company X to truly transform
our web browsing experience. Either way, big changes in the way we
browse are coming sooner or later, but definitely within 2 years,
or so I’m betting.
“
For example, you can use Mash Maker to easily connect
your Facebook friends’ profiles with a google map, creating a image
of where they’re all located on a map that’s located on the same
page as the profiles.
