Friday, July 29, 2011

The Future of Technology



Here's some old cellphone commercials from the 1980s and 90s. Back in the day floppies were 1.4 mgs; external harddrives costing hundreds of dollars held 20 mgs; modem bandwidth was at 9600 until 1991.

Why this history of technology? As HCI professionals we must, at times, think of where we may be going. There is no better way to get a glimpse of the technology in 20 years than to look back at technology from twenty years ago. Let's keep in mind Moore's Law (that computing power doubles in power every 18mths while the price drops in half) while thinking of the possible and where will we be.

If you want to see a very accurate view of the internet from 1969 see:



Will we have apps that will know what food we have in the refrigerator and our cupboards and be able to come up with recipies with our existing food. For example type: I want something spicy, preferably Mexican or Indian; keep it low calorie; use items that will go bad; etc...

EDIT 12/31/2011:

This site 11 Predictions That Back To The Future Part II Got Right might inspire your thinking of what's yet to come.

Thursday, July 21, 2011

The Future of Google

“Our goal is to make sure that people can find what they’re looking for and get off the page as quickly as possible.”
SearchEngineLand interview with Marissa Mayer

This is an interesting concept.  Google's value at the moment is to bring users to the information that they're looking for; at that point the user is finished with Google and is off to review the search results. But, what are the users truly looking for? Are they looking for pages with that may-or-may-not contain the information they're looking for or are they looking for the answers to whatever question they had? If it's the later (and I suspect that Wolfram Alpha is on the right track - then I suspect that soon enough Google will be supplying answers to users and want users to stay on their site for all their needs.