Recently in Science & Technology Category

New briefs are available to subscribers to Social Technologies' Technology Foresight project:

Future Options in Energy Technologies
Innovation Indicators
Europe's decisions about energy will be shaped by concerns around security of energy supply, the sustainability of the energy supply, and cost competitiveness of new energy technology. This report provides forecasts around the commercialization of new energy-producing technologies, and supporting indicators of innovation probability within the EU.

Five Technologies that Will Change How We Interact with World 0
To reach forecasted levels of World 0 expansion, advances in new methods of accessing and interacting with virtual worlds are needed. Five technologies will change how users interact with virtual worlds and reduce current barriers to adoption: touch interfaces, brain-computer interfaces, location-aware technologies, vital-sign sensing, and mobile devices.

Future of Work: Location-Aware Technology
The Rise of the Smart Workplace
The world of work is changing as "knowledge work"--i.e., value generated by the creation or application of knowledge--increases its role and scope at various points along the enterprise value chain. Next-generation location-aware technologies (LAT) are one area of development that will significantly shape the future of work. This brief will explore the driving forces, obstacles, and implications of LAT-driven innovation for knowledge work along the value chain.

Self-Assembling Metal and Elastic Circuitry
Interdisciplinary Approaches Yield New Breakthroughs
Scientists at Cornell University have created a new process for shaping metal on the molecular level, whilst scientists at the University of Tokyo have created a flexible conductive material. These techniques could lead to advances in fuel cell technology, computing, wearable electronics, and other areas.

How could someone set up a data center, but never pay a cent for the electricity all those servers are going to use during in the life of the facility (or for the land to build the operation, for that matter)?

Google seems to have an idea.

According to this Geek.com article, Google recently filed a for patent for floating data centers powered by Pelamis machines. As you can see from the video below, Pelamis machines float on the surface of the ocean and turn energy from the waves into electricity. No land is required and there are no utility costs.

This overview of the technology notes other advantages mentioned in the patent, such as the ability to cool the servers with the sea water, scalability (just add more servers and Pelamis machines), and the ability to deploy these floating data centers quickly to areas that need them (to a coastal city to support military operations or to aid in natural disaster recovery).

With the increased focus on greener computing and the rising cost of energy, this seems like an that just might have legs.

The Wall Street Journal ran an interesting article recently about the potential benefits of virtual medicine. In it, a family practice physician opines on the time, money, and--in some instances--feelings that could be saved if patients could have virtual exams (substituting emails, online questionnaires and teleconferencing for the time-honored in-person exam).

While I think it will be very interesting to see how and when remote working and medicine will interact, in this instance, I wonder whether the real/virtual shift will (at least in the short or medium term) be widely beneficial or even desirable.

As futurists, we deal with a lot of hype. Reports of "revolutionary" technologies come out every day, and although we are optimists at heart, we have to take a cynic's view most of the time in order to avoid getting lost in the hype. The gap between a new technology's potential and its eventual commercial application is not only wide, it's long: It can take years (and sometimes decades) for a promised technology to move from its initial hype to mainstream, realistic applications.

Gartner continuously tracks this hype cycle for different technologies in a multitude of sectors. Here is one of their latest, a hype cycle of 2008's emerging technologies:

As you can see, they break down the hype curve into five sections: Technology Trigger, Peak of Inflated Expectations, Trough of Disillusionment, Slope of Enlightenment, and Plateau of Productivity.

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)

1) New Buying Habits
iTunes is to eBay as Ellen is to Maury Povich.

2) Poor Man's TiVo
Forget to set the DVR? Click on YouTube, the world’s largest, virtual broadcast network, for American Idol caterwauling or Jon Stewart’s latest.

3) Infinitives We've Come to Love

To Skype, to RSS, to podcast, to blog, to Flickr, to GPS...

4) The E-Generation Gap
You “talk” to your teenager on each other's MySpace pages. “Private data” is only what you show 800 “friends.”

5) Attack Mode
We don’t just get spammed anymore – say hello to pharming, phishing, and vishing (voice-over-IP phishing).

6) Suddenly, Those Spring Break 2003 Photos Aren’t So Fun
Employers and recruiters use Google and popular social networking site searches as part of due diligence on prospective employees.

7) OMG!
Emoticons and IM shorthand have entered the popular vernacular, even popping up in high school English compositions.

8) Thingamajigs, Doohickeys on the Way
Wikis, widgets, applets, mashups, and dashboards have transformed desktops and GUIs.

9) That Huge $ucking $ound
Venture capital has flooded the market, fueling both clever and dubious entrepreneurs on a level not seen since the first Internet bubble of 2000. Now if some .com could somehow reverse oil’s big run-up…

10) Who Am I Today?
Create an avatar to get a Second Life. Use anonymity to flame opponents or razz friends. Online identities are a lot more fluid than they are in the real world.

Image: Social Technologies

"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)

An IDC report released this year predicts that the amount of digital data we are creating will soon outpace our capacity to store it. One contributing factor: exponential growth in online video. AT&T's VP of Legal Affairs, Jim Cicconi, notes that:

...video makes up 30% of net traffic now and in two years will hit 80%. Add in the move to high definition video which is seven to 10 times more bandwidth hungry....and you get a recipe for failure.

AT&T, whose telecom infrastructure makes up part of the Internet's backbone, is worried about future growth in online video. In a 2008 report, Internet hardware maker Cisco projects the amount of IP traffic will likely grow 46% annually through 2011. However, not everyone is concerned:

Professor Andrew Odlyzko, one of the few academics who studies net traffic growth, said predictions about the collapse of the net have been made with alarming regularity. "It's an idea that crops up very frequently," he said, "but I do not think we need to be worried."

Image: greencandy8888 (Flickr)

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No, your Chevy won't be able to hover like George Jetson's car in the next two decades, but a number of projects are in the works that could make daily flights a part of our more people's travel routines.

Personal aviation--the idea that everyone could own and operate their own personal flying vehicle as a daily means of transportation--is not a new concept. Sci-fi writers have proposed it for decades, and S)T touched on the concept briefly last year in a brief on mobility discontinuities for our Global Lifestyles project (subscribers only). Now, the concept is getting some new attention. For example:

Boeing's research group is designing a hybrid aimed at traveling up to 300 miles at a time. It will use precision navigation systems that would allow the average 'driver cum pilot' to fly without special training thanks to a computerised 'flight instructor' built into the cockpit.

Click to Read More ...

A brief on the Future of Advanced Manufacturing by Social Technologies' analyst Matthew Sollenberger was published in the March issue of The Machinist, an Indian publication.

In it, Sollenberger provides a technology overview and describes state-of-the-art technologies (including simulations and modeling, mass customization, and advanced robotics), the drivers of manufacturing innovation (sustainability, consumer sophistication, global competition), and the challenges ahead (bioengineering, integrative processes, and nanomaterials).

The material is part of a series of 12 reports by Social Technologies' Technology Foresight team, entitled "Top 12 Innovations to 2025."

Read Sollenberger's article here, and review the entire Top 12 Innovations series here. 

The March-April 2008 issue of "The New Economy" features an article entitled "Areas of Innovation: Biofuels" by Social Technologies' Mark Justman.

His article describes state-of-the art technologies (corn ethanol, biodiesel, and flex-fuel vehicles), challenges ahead (food vs. fuel concerns, logistics problems) and gamechangers in the biofuels arena.

Justman writes: 

High prices of oil have made the economies of biofuel production much more favourable, and have accelerated commercial efforts to find ways of producing biofuels. New technologies offer the potential to expand the range of biomass inputs to include a variety of waste streams, which could increase the total supply of biomass without impinging on prime agricultural lands.

 Read the entire article. 

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)

Social Technologies' Matthew Sollenberger was recently the guest on "The Better Process," a podcast by businessman Ken Rayment.

Following is an excerpt from their conversation:

Ken: What really attracted us to you was a press release we received based on your brief about advanced manufacturing to 2025. What do you see things are going to be looking like down the road here for manufacturing?

Matt: I think a lot of the trends that we're looking at right now and for the future, would be, say, rapid tooling, advanced robotics, the development of smart sensory networks, and seeing how the interaction of these will probably allow for a much more streamlined, localized, kind of distributed cell version of manufacturing.

Ken: Right. So, we've heard that distributed manufacturing is something everybody's going to have--maybe it'll even be something on their desktop that they can use to create products. What are the technologies do you see today that may help us grow into that reality?

Matt: Well, actually there are some nascent technologies that, if you wanted to and if you were interested in shelling out a couple thousand dollars, could actually give you kind of a limited sort of desktop manufacturing. You might call them 3-D printers...using something called solid freeform fabrication or SFF, these can effectively print simple products from a kind of a powdered feed stock...only right now you can't really do much with it. You might be able to make a plastic rubber duck or, more commercially viable, you could make titanium alloy parts for aircraft. But in the future, as we gain a little bit more sophistication with this technology and, for example, could incorporate multiple feed stocks and develop more sophisticated parts, this could lead to an actual sort of desktop or garage distributed type of manufacturing.

Listen to the entire podcast here.

Image: Darin Barry (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: