In fact, remember that CEO I mentioned a bit ago? His company is high technology as well, and it happens to be sitting in downtown OKC.  DocSoft is a search company that specializes in indexing streams of audio or video and offering closed captioning in real-time.

You take that to its next logical step and suddenly you have an agent that could be dropped into a widget on any web site. Give that agent access to your web cam and microphone and you could have your conversations indexed as you speak.  The agent hears that you are talking about a movie you saw in 1997, but you forget the name, so the agent opens a conversation with IMDB and sends that site bits of information from your conversation:

1997, actor name, storyline

Then IMDB replies with a list that meets the criteria your agent has sent, and the widget displays that list for you in a bubble on your screen.

That seems far-fetched doesn’t it?  It isn’t.  Ray Kurzweil is already demonstrating real-time translation between languages.  You can watch a video of this by following the link at the end of this article.  If we are there, then offering for an agent to run known programs, or simple scripts, is not that far behind.

Take Ubiquity for example. (Ubiquity is related to Enso, which I wrote about back in January, in that they are written by the same team, just at different companies.)  Ubiquity is not an application that you install on your computer, but rather an addon that you install into your web browser.  Ubiquity offers you an unending array of useful helpers that can make your Internet experience make more sense in many ways.  You find a term you wonder about… Simple… just highlight it and let Ubiquity define it or offer search results for it. But honestly, that isn’t why Ubiquity makes me happy.  What really makes me happy about Ubiquity is that someone could take it and write a real agent on it.

For instance, if I wanted Ubiquity to check my emails for me and then send a text to my phone when someone special emails me, it could do that.  If I wanted Ubiquity to monitor blogs I select for keywords, and then build a page to display those on a chronological basis, it could do that.  (I think.)

Anyway, all of this is to say that technology is rapidly approaching something we can’t even imagine.  I cannot wait.

Interesting Links:

• Ray Kurzweil video on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVup7Xd4aAs
• Ubiquity by Mozilla http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/

Matt Williamson
twitter: twitter.com/mattwilliamson
email: matt@technologystory.com

Equipping an everyday item with either the intelligence to ‘know’ about itself and communicate with the Internet, or giving it the ability to be named, and known, by the Internet, will have ramifications that cut across our society.  From the mundane examples of your chair notifying the maintenance staff that it needs servicing, or perhaps your lost book lets you know that you left it in the conference room; to the extreme example of your sunglasses feeding you a constant stream of news from around the world.  The network connected copier-scanner-printer in your corporate mail room already tells the staff when it is running low of paper and ink, but one day soon the bundles of paper might let you know that there are only ten of them left, and now you need to reorder.

As the idea of the Internet expands to include light bulbs, kitchen appliances, and doors; we will see a shift in what we consider the computer to be as well.  Today I can buy a Chumby (see the cute little guy in the picture to the left) and put it on my nightstand.  It’s an alarm clock, an Internet radio, a box with widgets flowing in over the Internet.  I can check my Twitter account, my Facebook notifications and catch up on the latest news, weather and stock prices; and all before I roll out of bed in the morning.  In the near future, this might all be embedded in your bathroom mirrors.  So while you shave or put on your make up, you will read your blogs and watch a web cam pointing at a peaceful lake setting.

No longer will we think in terms of ‘getting on the Internet’, but rather the Internet will surround us at all times.  Our cars will be connected via WiMax networks so that the continual stream of information follows us from home, to the office, and back again.  The Cloud that we talk about will grow to include items and places, not just far off remote computing environments.

The Internet Of Things Cuts the Cord

Last week, Intel demonstrated a wireless power system to recharge batteries utilizing a magnetic field, this alone could enable electronic devices to remain connected to the Internet at all times.  If you can remove the tether from the iPhone, from the Blackberry, from any device; they could be online at all times.  Simply putting your phone, camera or laptop near a charging station will one day fill your battery to full.  More than that though, we will see retailers offering charging stations on counter tops and tables as well.  So you get a mocha and charge your iPhone while you enjoy it.

If you just step back and watch how fast technology is changing our lives, and how fast that technology is advancing itself, you will come to this realization: that the shape of things to come is drastically different than we can even imagine; and our imagination is good.   In 1999 I was using Java, an open programming language developed by Sun,  to do a lot of web development.  Even back then Sun was pushing a technology to enable devices to communicate with each other across the network.  That was almost a decade ago, and since then we have seen a huge advancement in these technologies.  Now our devices are smaller, faster, require less power and are more durable.  They are living in our products and contain code that allows them to upgrade themselves when needed.  How cool is this stuff?

Links:

• International Conference for Industry and Academia – http://www.the-internet-of-things.org/
• Wikipedia Internet of Things entry – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_Things
• MIT Experimentally Demonstrates Wireless Power – http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/wireless-0607.html
• WiPower – http://www.wipower.com/
• Intel cuts electric cords with wireless power system – http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5jn6duu12s7ujb6ByZ1wuv389gooQ
• Kevin Kelly and the Next 5000 Days of the Internet @ TED – http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/kevin_kelly_on_the_next_5_000_days_of_the_web.html

Matt
matt at technologystory dot com

p.s.

Did anyone happen to see the movie Terminator? 

WordPress.com is utilizing the Amazon S3 offering for online access-as-you-need-it storage, something Scott and I think is one of the waves of the future: cloud-based infrastructure.

Second Life Wants You to Build

Linden Labs has made developing your online presence a more robust experience. As they say, “Second Life Grid is a platform that enables your organization to create a public or secure private space using the leading 3D online virtual world technology.” Wordy, but basically this means they are offering a tool set to help organizations and companies, build and deploy online representations of themselves within the Second Life universe.

Linden Labs, founded in 1999, launched Second Life in 2003 and wants you to know something about Second Life: it is a virtual world, not a game. To demonstrate this just look at a small list of those companies who are using Second Life for communications, training, market research and sales, to name a few reasons to jump in: Aididas, Dell, Pontiac, Reuters and Sun.

Getting started has been turned into a procedure any IT group can manage as a project, visit this page to find out more: link or view a PowerPoint slide show about Second Life here: PPT

Matt

Widgets have invaded Facebook in the name of Facebook apps and are sneaking into your subconscious thoughts ads for movies and television programming alike. The real power of widgets may be just around the corner though with portable, platform independent widgets that maintain the same look and feel whether on your iPhone, your desktop or your favorite web site.

To the right you can see a few of the widgets I keep on all of my desktops, at home and in the office. I like the Yahoo! Widget platform a lot, and it is no surprise either, as it is the Konfabulator system I loved in the Linux world years ago. One widget that would go a long way is a widget that knows my widget use and keeps my desktops in sync. Regardless of which operating system I am working in, I would like to have my preferred widgets travel with me.

Google’s OpenSocial holds some promise for me on the standardization front, but they are really just Google Gadgets that are aware of the OpenSocial API. While there is merit there, I am waiting to see someone like Yahoo! Widgets or even IBM or Sun get into the swing of things with some development tools for the common developer.

Before real development can be accomplished by enterprise IT shops around the world, a unified widget engine is desperately needed. Writing once and allowing your message to be disseminated across the Internet, there is real power in that. Today we have a few standards out there already; Google, Yahoo!, Fox Interactive’s SpringWidgets, the NBC partner Clearspring and more – too many. The W3 has released a working draft of widget standards and I hope all of the players are trying to build to the minimum, I never mind over engineering, but so far this is the Wild West and the sheriff is in the bunk sleeping.

Enso is Wickedly Simple

I happened across this application today and was instantly satisfied. Enso Launcher, from Humanized, is a tool that you can install in minutes on your Windows XP or Vista operating system. (Yes, I am still on Windows, please don’t tell Scott.) Enso downloads in seconds and once installed you activate it by holding down the Caps Lock key for a few seconds. Enso shows up at the top of your screen in a translucent green modal display, shown below in the image.

I was happy to see I could highlight any word or phrase and almost instantly pumpo it into Google search. I played around a bit with some simple macros for converting text case form lower to upper and back again, I can’t tell you how many times I need that one. Enso is a sweet little calculator too. Just highlight and mathematical equation and let Enso give you an answer. Watch this demo here.

Enso is sexy in a way that most people don’t immediately equate with sexiness: speed. Enso take a tiny bit of my processor and opens up a huge amount of data and functionality to me in ways that would have required a multiple mouse clicks just a few moments ago. Now when I want to research something I just need to highlight is and pound the caps lock key a moment, type ‘goo’ for Google and release the caps lock key.

There are a variety of Enso addons too:

• Enso Word, a universal spell checker, word counter, thesaurus and dictionary all in one
• Enso Map Anywhere lets you embed a Google Map into anything you can imagine
• Enso Translate Anywhere does what you think it does…

The team at Humanized have stated they are working on a release for both the Mac and Linux platforms, so take heart, Enso is coming to a MacBook Pro near you soon.

I wonder if this thing can blog too?

Matt

My second wish is the Microsoft and Apple both figure out a way to build useful third party software as a Service applications into the browser – or even the operating system. Think about how cool it would be if there was a drop down menu that put you one click from backing up your machine, sending a large file, running a CRM program, or the like.

Since software is quickly being delivered more and more over the Web, it would be nice if we did not have to go log into 10 separate websites to get the services. I want them on the drop down box in my desktop. Next, I would like some worldwide standards for syncing calendars, contacts and Web favorites. I am tired of fighting across all the applications and devices I use to get this done. It is simply not that hard to build a set of standards that would let us easily sync the basic databases we all need at this point.

While I am on the standards rant, I want to see standards for widgets/gadgets. Let’s pick one name, and a standard method for coding them so they will work across any platform and device. It is absurd that Google, Microsoft and Apple all use different frameworks for delivering these useful little Web applications. This one is really my pet peeve. I want to see free wireless provided at all public places, hotels, airports, restaurants, etc. There are a few intelligent locations that get this – the Phoenix airport for instance, Holiday Inn hotels, and Panera Bread. Look, if you are too cheap to just spend the few hundred dollars to help your customers have bandwidth, then figure out an advertiser sponsored model and pay for it that way. Geez, how naive can people be in thinking that this is a utility that should be paid for. Starbucks’ silly T-Mobile network comes to mind. Why do you think I will pay for a T-Mobile account to hit the net while you make my latte? Within a short time we are going to have Wi-Max anyway and it won’t matter.

The final wish for 2008 is a general statement. I wish people would invest more energy in learning how to run technology on their own. Technology is such a wonderful tool – there are obscene amounts of valuable things that can be done with it to improve peoples lives, careers and productivity. The problem is it takes time and energy to learn how to put the tools to work. I look around at my family and see some that will make the investment and get the rewards. I see others that like to use the tool, but want others to do all the thinking for them. I don’t wish for the whole world to become geek – I just want everyone to take two steps forward in 2008…

So, from Technology Story,

Have a Happy New Year

What lags behind at this moment is the business software for these mobile devices. Banks rolled out the first generations of mobile banking so we have a good sign there, but I am surprised that more companies have not modified their applications to run on the mobile devices. I am sure it is coming.

Another trend that began to blossom in 2007 is the widget/gadget deliver of software. I have a blog coming soon about widget phones because I am so intrigued with the people that are delivering IP telephony right from the desktop. Widgets started as just small applications that could be dropped on the desktop to check the weather, game scores, your stock portfolio, your laptop’s battery, and even the phases of the moon. Widgets are now growing into more sophisticated application platform that can save us from having to log into Websites and clicking through 3 screens in order to get needed functionality. This means that we will soon see banking widgets, healthcare widgets, and accounting widgets available as a whole new delivery method for software services. The bonus will be combining widgets with the mobile explosion above so that we can have a suite of widgets/gadgets that we prefer and can easily load them on a laptop, desktop, or PDA.  At that point, we will only be one click away from needed functionality on whatever device we happen to be in front of. If you have not joined the widget world yet, at least go to Google and setup a custom login page so you can see all the free widgets people have provided. Then imagine all of those available for drag and drop onto your desktop.

Stepping back even further, I always try to evaluate each year in context of other years. So was 2007 a year when more technology blossomed than other years? The trend has certainly been towards more growth since the lean years of 2001 and 2002. I think it is safe to say that we are in fire hose territory at this point. There is more useful technology coming at us than any one human being can digest. With that said, it is sure fun trying…