The iPhone 3G has officially been released into the wild, and it's time for the most avid Apple fan here at S)T to pick apart what makes it so darned interesting and why it makes people wait in line for hours just to get one (guilty as charged).

Last year's iPhone hype was all about the hardware. The iPhone combined everything great about the iPod with a quality mobile phone complete with the best touchscreen the world has ever known.

This time around, hardware is less important (though the 3G and GPS have raised the bar). A lot of the hype is focused on software, namely the App Store, a new service that makes it simple for iPhone owners to find software that takes advantage of the hi-speed Internet access of 3G and the location-based information from the GPS. For example, Loopt has an application that combines online social networking with GPS info, so it's easier to find where one's friends are hanging out or where the cool events are happening.

With the launch of the App Store, Apple has taken a very difficult process--finding quality software for mobile phones--and made it much simpler. The App Store has already sold $55,000 worth of software within its first day.

The App Store's success seems to be driven by the innovative software developers who are contributing to the project. Apple recognized they needed to make it possible for developers to create their own applications for the iPhone, and instead of leaving that innovation to hackers, they've managed to create a successful platform that will likely continue to fuel consumer interest in mobile Internet services and, even more importantly, the mobile phone as a computing platform.

Apple has really hit another home run by giving up control over iPhone software development. And I, as a new iPhone owner, am quite thankful.

Image: velorowdy (Flickr.com)

"Technology has changed the way families stay in touch, profoundly influencing not only how often we communicate, but also what we share with each other," writes Miami Herald reporter Ana Veciana-Suarez  in a May 24 article.

"But does more mean better?" she asks.

Some she interviewed said yes, such as Pam Haldeman, a professor of sociology at Mount St. Mary's College in Los Angeles. "I didn't always feel this way, but now I think it's great," Haldeman said. "It certainly has increased interaction between family members, and we can reach far and wide to people who would've been lost to us a generation ago. It's a win-win situation."

Veciana-Suarez got a different reaction from Social Technologies futurist Kevin Osborn:

Kevin Osborn, author of several parenting books and a futurist for the research and consulting firm Social Technologies isn't as enthusiastic. While cellphones, webcams and computers allow us to correspond from faraway places and at unusual times, the information exchanged tends to be simplistic.

''Because we communicate more often it doesn't mean it's more meaningful communication,'' he says. ``Technology is great for people separated by long distances, but that same technology is used to avoid communication with people in the same room. Now you have Dad watching TV, Mom on the cellphone, Sister IMing on the computer and Brother playing video games -- all in the same house.''

Read the entire article.

Image: moriza (flickr)

Is your company ready for the nanotech boom? For an article entitled "Small Wonders" that appears in the May issue of Entrepreneur magazine, reporter Andrea Cooper talked to Social Technologies' Peter von Stackelberg about a brief he wrote on the future of nanomaterials.

In her article, Cooper writes:

Social Technologies, a global research and consulting firm, asked experts worldwide to predict the most important scientific and technological breakthroughs with significant commercial value through the year 2025. Nanomaterials was named one of the top 12 areas. The 2007 report, which defined nanotechnology as the creation of particles, fibers, films, coatings and other materials between 1 and 100 nanometers in size, said major accomplishments in nanotech will dramatically change "the materials and processes used to produce many of our consumer and industrial products."

Additional fields spotlighted in the Social Technologies report include construction (imagine a self-cleaning floor with an anti-microbial nanocoating); leisure goods (your tennis racket may already be reinforced with carbon nanotubes to make it stiffer and lighter); and consumer products (nanoparticles in sunscreen is one controversial application).

Read the entire article.

Image: TheAlieness GiselaGiardino (flickr)

SILICON VALLEY -- Arriving in the heart of Silicon Valley to deliver a presentation that says infotech’s most dynamic years are behind it is a little daunting.

The drive from San Francisco Airport to NASA’s Ames Research Center – site of this year’s CONTACT 2008 Conference – takes you straight down Highway 101, where some icons of the computer and Internet world are still scattered among the BMW and Lexus dealerships, strip malls, and industrial parks lining the freeway.

Gone, however, are the gung ho days of the past, when even the cab drivers had an Internet concept they were ready to pitch at the slightest sign of interest. A dozen years ago, the very air seemed to be charged with excitement over how the world was being changed by what was happening here. Five years ago, in the wake of the dot-com crash, there seemed to be a lingering hope that the glory days would return.

Not any more…at least not among those I spoke with.

Click to read more ...

Seven years ago, discussing about the towering cityscapes of the movie Blade Runner, I wrote:

It is not clear what the future of the mega-skyscraper is, in reality. Americans and Europeans may be mostly done with it, and more interested in creating urban landscapes people actually want to live in and around. But there is still a desire to build landmarks and symbolize progress and power in the developing world – witness Malaysia's Petronas towers, the world's tallest buildings. It is there that more extravagances will go up, sometimes amidst squalor.

So I was interested to read this passage in the New York Times last week, about the Japanese architect about to complete another of the world's tallest buildings, in Shanghai:

At a time when urban planners in the West frown on hulking high-rises as forbidding, Mr. Mori presents a new Asian urban sensibility, where architecture reflects soaring economic ambition, leading to mighty projects that dwarf the individual. “Asia is different from the United States and Europe,” Mr. Mori said in an interview in his Roppongi Hills office. “We dream of more vertical cities."

And this belief in the techno-future extends beyond architecture: I happened on an article about flying cars yesterday, and it noted that "interest, and investors, mostly comes from outside the United States -- namely Dubai, a wealthy Middle Eastern country known for its modern skyline."

This is a profound cultural shift -- and it will shape responses to myriad issues in the future, from biotechnology to global warming.

Image courtesy Montrasio International (Flickr)

At our November Futures Consortium meeting on discontinuities, Barry Lynn, senior fellow at the New America Foundation, spoke about the dangers to the world economy posed by today's globalized, single source, just-in-time manufacturing system. Lynn stated in his presentation that “because globalization is so bound up, catastrophe is inevitable … a globalized system with no redundancies is at greater risk to be unsettled by negative discontinuities.”

A perfect example of this phenomenon came this week. Because of a March 3rd fire at the second-largest laptop battery manufacturer in South Korea, HP and Dell are reporting shortages of replacement batteries, and prices for existing batteries are starting to climb. Asustek, Taiwan’s second-largest computer maker, said the shortage would likely affect 40% of its orders in the second quarter of the year. The Korean battery factory won’t be back online for another 2-3 months.

A global battery constraint will not cripple the computer industry, but it serves as a reminder of how our entangled, globalized economy is vulnerable to random events—discontinuities—and how important it is, as Lynn stated, to build resiliency and redundancy into our economic system.

Link via Engadget.

The final day of the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference included two presentations that really stood out to me.

Joel Selanikio discussed the potential for Africa to be a major source of mobile phone software innovation, in sectors ranging from health to financial services. He argued that many of these innovations could make their way back to the United States and other developed countries: because mobile banking initiatives are a low priority in the US, but are a necessity in Africa, these systems can be beta tested and refined in African markets before becoming major product offerings in World 1.

Though interesting, his talk focused too much on applications that could "reverse leapfrog" back into World 1. Instead, I would have liked him to explore the implications of Africa's developing a core competency in software development aimed at bottom-of-the-pyramid consumers worldwide. African programmers could profit greatly by developing products for Worlds 2 and 3 instead of focusing on retrofitting these solutions for PC-dominated World 1 nations.

W. James Au, author of the blog "New World Notes," gave a presentation entitled "Why Won't Second Life Just Go Away Already? Understanding Web 2.0's Most Misunderstood Phenomenon." He reviewed Second Life's growth amidst its on-again/off-again relationship with the media, which tends to oscillate between finding the virtual world exciting and declaring it useless. My favorite takeaway from the session was Au's assertion that Second Life's steep learning curve for users is actually a boon, in that it guarantees a high level of user knowledge and sophistication.

Image: We Make Money Not Art (Flickr)

The National Academies started a project in summer 2007 entitled America's Energy Future: Technology Opportunities, Risks, and Tradeoffs. As part of this 18-month long effort there will be a public meeting to engage industry as well as the policy and research communities in discussions about America's energy future here in Washington, DC on March 13-14th. Click here for event's website.

They are providing a video webcast for those who'd like to peek in on some of the sessions. The agenda includes lots of interesting stuff like...

March 13th 

• The Geopolitical Context of America’s Energy Future - James R. Schlesinger, Chairman, The MITRE Corporation and Senior Advisor, Lehman Brothers
  
• World Energy Outlook - Fatih Birol, Chief Economist, International Energy Agency (confirmed), Moderator: Robert W. Fri, Senior Fellow Emeritus, Resources for the Future (confirmed)

March 14th:  

• Google’s RechargeIT Program for Commercial Deployment of Plug-in Hybrid Vehicles - Dan W. Reicher, Director for Climate Change and Energy Initiatives, Google.org (confirmed)
• Winning the Oil End Game - Amory Lovins, CEO, Rocky Mountain Institute, and Principal Investigator, Winning the Oil End Game

Browse to the National Academies website on March 13-14 for a link to the webcast.

Image: Mingo Hagen (Flickr)

Wednesday's sessions at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference were just as exciting as Tuesday's. The sessions today focused more on technology in emerging markets, digital rights, and biology. The day began again with a cool game from Megaphone and then continued in an excellent series of sessions:

•  Quinn Norton channeled Walt Whitman to explore the implications of "body hacking" in a talk entitled "I Sing the Body Electric." She discussed topics ranging from recreational use of the drug Provigil to the cultural impact and history of the world's most popular smart drug: caffeine. Norton also critiqued the ethical issues surrounding steroids in the context of Tommy John surgery.
• In the afternoon, a group called Regional provided photos and examples of how digital technologies are producing change (and also being used to restrict freedoms) in Cuba. They painted a remarkable picture of how World 1 typically takes its version of the Internet for granted by showing the restrictive, "intranet" nature of Cuban cyberculture. The New York Times is running an article covering many of the same subjects discussed in Regional's session on Wednesday, for those wanting more information.
• Larry Lessig gave the evening keynote on Wednesday night. Lessig is a lawyer who was instrumental in the creation of the Creative Commons license and is now shifting his focus away from copyright to reform in the American political arena through his Change Congress project. He discussed the impact that technologists can have on effecting social change in the political landscape on many fronts, which could pave the way for a confrontation that some at the conference called "the [Silicon] Valley vs. the Beltway." It will be interesting to track whether his call to arms creates more political accountability technologies like the Sunlight Foundation, Maplight.org, and OpenCongress.
  

There were several other interesting talks on Wednesday:

Click to read more ...

I'm in San Diego this week at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. I'll be providing daily updates for ChangeWaves covering the various sessions I'm attending. Here's a recap of some of the stand out sessions and ideas from today:

• Megaphone, a startup specializing in interactive digital signage, started off the morning with an interactive game that people played while waiting for the first series of talks to begin. About 20 people called in to a phone number, then moved a character around on the interactive sign using the 2, 4, 6, and 8 buttons as up, down, left and right arrows. Players could then shoot other players by pressing 5 while moving in the direction of their opponent.
• Saul Griffith was the first presenter of the morning, and his talk was entitled "Energy Literacy." He covered the statistical background of climate change and explored various steps governments and individuals need to take to address the issue. He offered a meticulous analysis of his personal energy consumption relative to global energy consumption through the lens of the "best case scenario" presented by the IPCC and Stern reports.
• Eric Rodenbeck of Stamen Design gave an intriguing presentation on data visualization as a medium. He showed various data visualization projects like the Oakland Crimespotting maps and MySociety travel time maps. Rodenbeck focused on showing how we can use data visualization to interact with information--in ways previously too difficult for widespread adoption--for both analysis and entertainment.

Click to read more ...

One of the hazards of being a futurist is being peppered regularly with the “flying car” question. Variations on this question are “where’s my ray gun?” and “when are we going to have Star Trek-style matter transporters?”

The simple answer is “when someone invents it,” but of course the answer is more complicated than that. There are thousands of things that need to happen before the toys of the future become the tools of today. Undoubtedly, the most important is vision -- the set of ideas that will guide the development of a new technology.

Recently, as part of the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition on design entitled "Design and the Elastic Mind," the concept team at Nokia submitted their vision for how mobile communications, computing, and advances in nanotechnology would merge to create the infotech device of the future, which they dubbed "Morph." The wizards of Espoo, Finland have imagined an elegant and creative device that explores the intersection of form and function and how both of these requirements play on each other. It can be stretched, collapsed or reformed to whatever shape is needed, is self-cleaning, and runs on solar energy. Sound cool? It is. If you have five minutes, you can see a video of the Morph in action here.

Click to read more ...

On February 15th, the National Academy of Engineering unveiled its Grand Challenges for Engineering. Over a year in the making, the list was crafted by an international committee with members like Ray Kurzweil, William Perry, and Craig Venter. The group came up with the following list of challenges:

• Make solar energy economical
• Provide energy from fusion
• Develop carbon sequestration methods
• Manage the nitrogen cycle
• Provide access to clean water
• Restore and improve urban infrastructure
• Advance health informatics
• Engineer better medicines
• Reverse-engineer the brain
• Prevent nuclear terror
  
• Secure cyberspace
• Enhance virtual reality
• Advance personalized learning
• Engineer the tools of scientific discovery

Click to read more ...

While waiting on a Metro train platform last week, I noticed that my fellow riders had all assumed a similar pose: "The Blackberry Hunch" (see the picture below: arms up to your stomach or chest clutching the Blackberry, head down and focused on the tiny screen).

Could all three of these people really have that much email to check? It's possible, but it's also possible that they suffer from "Blackberry Addiction."  We just don't know, because there isn't a lot of research on how we interact with these and other potentially habit-forming devices.

To shed some light on the subject, researchers at Northampton University launched an online survey to start collecting data on "addiction to technology and work." They believe that Blackberries (and similar devices) could one day be subject to the same warnings, regulation, and restriction as cigarettes:

"Companies offer technologies like PDAs and Blackberies and just expect people to learn how to use them. They don't consider the possible negative sides. New technology gives a feeling of having more control, but it may be only a feeling. We don't want to be in a situation in a few years similar to that with fast food or tobacco today. We need to pay attention to how people react to potentially habit-forming technologies and respond with appropriate education and policies."

[via textually.org]

Image: Social Technologies 

"Location, location, location," is increasingly becoming the mantra around new media services, and 2008 seems poised to be a year of growth for hyperlocal content delivery and other location-based services.

Google recently unveiled a new feature on its Google News page--Google News Local, allowing readers to get news occurring only in their local area. Google is moving into this space at a time when GPS is making people more aware of their surroundings and driving innovations in localized content in the form of location-based services like mobile ads for local businesses. Google's local news service joins dominant localized news site Topix.net and newcomer EveryBlock in this content area, and many Internet users will benefit from having better access to news in their area.

Google isn't the only major company taking advantage of hyperlocalized content.

Click to read more ...

Ladies, how would you feel if your admirer sent coupons to your mobile phone as a sign of his affection for you?

Apparently, South Koreans don't mind at all. SK Telecom's "Gifti-con" service lets users send coupons to each other's phones in the form of messages with bar codes that can be scanned at the point of sale. The service has seen year-over-year growth of 700% since its launch in 2006, with 300,000 users sending over $1 million worth of coupons to each other per month. Such an exchange can be quite romantic (or creepy, depending on how you look at it), according to this article:

Kim Mi-ran, a 20-year-old co-ed, smiles at a text message that she has just received on her mobile phone. It says, "Enjoy an Ice Caramel Macchiato coffee at Starbucks." It was from a male student whom she had met socially, but seldom talks to her.

"I like this way of letting her know my interest in her," grins the male student who sent the gift coupon by phone.

"I would be a little too nervous to call her and say 'hi," he adds.

The SK Telecom representative quoted in the article claims that the service was created to nurture human relationships, and I think it's great that services like this let people go beyond merely communicating to actually doing something nice for one another. Shy males are more willing to show their feelings through these gifts since they are discreet and practically effortless. The representative even provides the example of people buying more intimate gifts, such as underwear, for their lovers since the service shields them from embarrassment.

Cynics may say that this is another example of technology eroding face-to-face interaction. Personally, I'm hoping that things work out for Kim Mi-ran and her gift-coupon texting admirer.

[via textually.org] 

Image: yisris (Flickr)