Is there any question that youtube is now a major broadcasting company? How long before CBS, NBC and ABC pale in comparison? As readwriteweb put it:
YouTube used to be known for its weirdos and amateurs, and while they're still abundant on the site, maybe more popular than ever, YouTube is becoming something other than a social network. It's now a mass medium.
YouTube, mature as it seems to be after 6 years, is still growing at a 50% rate with 3,000,000 views per day. Where will it be in 5 years?
Adobe is pushing CSS Regions hard. It's a wonderful extension of HTML: allowing text to automatically flow through different containers (even non-rectangular containers). Years ago this was on my wish list along with higher resolution screens, flex-screens, voice interface with devices and Star Trek type search engines.
Slowly but surely the future is coming to be. Here's a video of what soon (hopefully) will be reality
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...
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.
If you don't know what the singularity is - and you have some time - read the following article by Ray Kurzweil, The Law of Accelerating Returns. It's one of my favorite articles and informs much of my thinking of the future of technology.
Processing speed is growing exponentially. While the first few doubles may not be noticed, or seem exciting to outside observers, it can soon grow to game-changing proportions.
Year
Name
Transistors
1971
4004
2,300
1972
8008
2,500
1974
8080
4,500
1978
8086
29,000
1982
286
134,000
1985
386
275,000
1989
486
1,200,000
1993
Pentium
3,100,000
1997
Pentium II
7,500,000
1999
Pentium III
9,500,000
2000
Pentium 4
42,000,000
2002
Itanium 2
220,000,000
2004
Itanium 2
592,000,000
I got the above table from Intel, published in 2005. Six years later the Core i7 (Sandy Bridge E) has 2270 million transistors (2,270,000,000).
Where will we be in 20 years? Assuming computing power (equivalent but not equal to transistors) continues to double every 18 months we will go through 13 more doubles, 2.27 billion will become 4.5 billion in 18 months and become 9000 billion in 20 years. Imagine that if you can.
Twenty years ago we had clunky "portable phones" with huge batteries, today we carry around TVs in our pocket. Tomorrow will it carry all our books, medical records, photos? Of course. We need to imagine what new things could be there. Could it be a portable "pensieve?" A place to store and review memories?
QR Code usage is ramping up very slowly. Why is that? It's a wonderful idea. Use your phone as a scanner and get more information about a product, or include it into an existing app. For instance you can scan your food and an app could help you come up with something to cook for that night; another app could help can keep track of your clothes. Let an app know what your favorite beer is (it could tell that from your purchases and web queries) and as you pass a bar you could get a notice that this very bar has Six-Point Righteous Rye on tap and a great selection of Avery beers.
Why has it not taken off? Because right now selecting a QR Code provides limited utility to the end user. This will change shortly - in 5 years or so - when there are apps galore for the end user. Of course then QR Codes will be invisible, with dozens, if not hundreds hidden in EVERY graphic.
We can see the inevitable problems: as QR Codes become "pushed" on consumers there will be new calls for privacy; new data piracy problems. We will solve these problems as well.
EDIT 12/2/2011:
Starbucks Cup Magic launches for iPhone and Android devices in the US next week and allows users to point their iPhone at specially designed Christmas cups and see all sorts of fancy dancing things and enter competition.
The app works by pointing your phone’s camera at the company’s red holiday season coffee cups and 47 additional objects, such as bags of coffee, on display at Starbucks retail locations. Doing so will produce animations involving five characters — an ice skater, a squirrel, a boy and a dog sledding and a fox — on your screen. You can also interact with the characters. For instance, if you tap the boy on the sled he does a somersault. Those who activate all five characters can qualify to win an as-yet-unnamed prize.
LifeHacker has an interesting article regarding the most commonly used pin numbers.
iPhone developer Daniel Amitay anonymously recorded and analyzed passcodes of users of his Big Brother Camera Security iPhone app, resulting in an interesting list of the ten most common passcodes, which, in order of popularity, include 1234, 0000, 2580, 1111, 5555, 5683 (spells LOVE), 0852, 2222, 1212, 1998. LifeHacker
These 10 numbers were accounted for approximately 15% of all the passwords, 1 in 7 of the total. Of course people are slightly less concerned about their password security for their camera app than they are regarding their finances but the moral of the story is that one must be careful in the way one creates password algorighms.
I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone. -Bjarne Stroustrup (developed C++)
Efficiency stems more from good design than from good coding. - Robert L. Glass
More computing sins are committed in the name of [execution] efficiency (often without achieving it) than for any other single reason, including blind stupidity. - W.A.Wulf
Focusing too heavily on optimization techniques often results in code that is difficult or impossible to understand and maintain. - Eric M. Burke
If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas. - George Bernard Shaw
In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable. - Dwight D. Eisenhower
The wonderful thing about standards is that we have so many of them to choose from.
