Even if I consider myself an early technology adopter, I’m not like that kind of person who’s already replaced his library with the virtual one of aNobii, and I must confess I’m still struggling to move from paper books to something “soulless”. But there’s no doubt that with the advent of social networks and cute devices such as the iPad and its competitors it’s profoundly changing the way we read and experience books. Probably in the future we’ll no longer ask “what book are you reading?” but rather “what book are you interacting with?” or “what book are you sharing with your community?”. Reading, in a digital context, is going to shift from a private dimension to a matter of which kind of emotional and social experiences might be created by interacting with the story and connecting readers one to another.
To get an idea, look at the video below where IDEO presents its vision through three interesting concepts about how the book could become in the digital age: Nelson, a way to discover writings based on the impact they’ve had on readers; Coupland, a useful tool for keeping you up to date with what is going on in a particular field; and Alice, an interactive reading experience that makes readers engaged in the storytelling process.

Today I stumbled onto a blog that made me think on the need to look at the global picture .. always.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/energy/25794/?nlid=3551

I have been following the evolution of solar panels for the last few years and I came to appreciate the ingenuity of researchers in finding better and better ways to increase the efficiency of the panels (it is still lower, pricewise, than fossil fuels). Reading this blog today I discovered that one of the issue with present  rigid solar panel is their fragility which, in turns, requires an accurate packaging. This makes transportation expensive and produces quite a bit of CO2 (both the packaging and the transport). So it is good to say that a solar panel generates savings in CO2 when operational with respect to fossil fuels but if we look at the overall picture then we discover that as a matter of fact CO2 is still created.

Flexible solar panels are easier to package and install

The blog presents a new type of solar cells, flexible ones, that would be easier to package. You can take a look at the link above.

What is remarcable in our Society is the tremendous level of interconnections among the various parts. By looking at one in isolation we can often miss some aspects that would make all the difference. In nature connectivity, as it happens in ecosystems, is a property of the whole, it is not a separate aspect. This is someting we should take into consideration as we look at new biz.

I was at a panel on road-mapping the future of Digital Society in Brussel at ICT2010,

http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/events/ict/2010/

and I had the pleasure of listening to a fantastic presentation given by Henry Markram, a neuroscientist from the Ecole Politechnique of Lausanne, making parallels between the (our) brain and ICT.

One of the point that was raised is that by 2020 we could have computers with the power to simulate a  brain (in 2005 we had the power to simulate a single neuron, today we can simulate hundred millions  neurons). With 2007 technology that 2020 computer would require 3GW of power to work. IBM, Cray and SGI are working to develop computation technologies that can achieve that processing power at just 20 MW. That is impressive, a decrease of 150 times in energy consumption. But according to the presentation I heard our brain only needs some 30W to crunch information. That is 100 million less times energy than today’s technology and almost a million less energy than those promised by technologies we are studying today.

An interesting observation made by Henry in the presentation is that the evolution of ICT is leading to performances similar to the brain  following an almost linear progression. However, if we can manage to really mimic the brain that would lead to a revolutionary progress. In particular there are some characteristics of the brain workings that are not present in today’s ICT, although they are getting more an more desirable and important, such as resilience (a brain can lose up to 50% of its neurons and you hardly notice it), imaginery (the brain sees what it is processing and therefore can make smart decision on what and how to process), storage (the brain stores fragment and reuses what it has already stored, thus both saves and makes information much more robust), processing (the brain computation is a state change and as such it remembers and builds on all previous computation, it learns).

What would you think if you saw Valentino Rossi racing while wearing the weight equivalent of an aluminum pot on his head instead of his regular helmet? This could be less further away than you might think.

Using my cell phone to reserve a hotel room is now standard practice. Why coundn’t I also get the key to my room on the cell phone the same way I get the boarding pass for my flight on it? Well my question, I found out just now, is being answered by the Holiday Inns Chain that has announced a trial that began early September in Houston and Chicago.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/smartphones_begin_to_replace_hotel_keycards.php

It is just another little step in increasing the ways we can use our cell phone. And, of course, what I am really looking forward is to have an app on my phone tracking all what I am doing with it, so that I can use that information as reminder or to get better services.

I was surfing the net when I came across a really nice video about the Coca-Cola Village, a summer activity for teenagers located in Israel. Well, this year the theme park became more social than ever! Each guest received an ID bracelet, which contained his Facebook user name and password, capable to transmit an RFID signal. Through these bracelets guests “liked” the various attractions in the village as if they were on Facebook, updating their status in real-time. How? By simply placing the bracelet to the readable RFID device next to every Coca Cola Village facility, a chip capable of collecting the users’ data and sending them directly back to Facebook. Moreover, to create a complete sharing experience, just by “touching” the official photographer you had your pictures tagged and uploaded on Facebook. Publicis E-dologic, the firm behind this event, nicknamed this pretty awesome solution “The like machine”. Aside from the obvious security problems that such a technology implies, I imagine it integrated into the supermarket shelves, with the possibility of extending the “likes it” on the products we want to buy by placing our phone beside them… And I do not think it will take a long time for this to happen.

Our homes will be more and more populated by sensors. We have them today in the air conditioning and heating controllers, in anti-intrusion devices, in light detection and so on. The same, of course, will happen to any building.
So far these sensors are part of devices that are connected to the mains for power but in the future, as their number will increase, there will be the issue of powering them and the first step is to find ways to decrease their power consumption. Sensors need most of the power to transmit detected data and the farther away they have to transmit the more power is consumed.

Starting with these premises researchers at the Washington University have devised a way to use the wiring in a building as an antenna that can capture and propagate the signal transmitted by sensors thus reducing the amount of power required. First experiments show that the battery in a sensor can increase its life time fivefolds. Rather than having to replace the battery every 2 years you can replace it every ten years.

The technology is called SNUPI (Sensors Nodes Utilizing Powerlines) and it is based on the principle of energy transfer via resonance. The sensors emits a low power signal using a frequency that resonates with the wiring in the building. This behaves as a giant antenna and amplifies the signal that is then detected by a detector plugged in somewhere in the building. Rather than blocking the signal the walls (with their embedded wires) increase the coverage so that a sensor that would normally be able to transmit over a few feet can send its signal across a large apartment.

The prototype is being shown at a conference in Copenhagen this month and uses just one milliwatt to work and just one tenth of this is used for transmitting the signal.

http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/26319/?nlid=3532&a=f

These researches are interesting since they bring us one step closer to interactive and aware ambient, something that will contribute to change the way we look at the world around us.

Storage capacity keeps increasing. We have reached 2-3 TB (that is 2-3,000 GB) in a single Hard Disk we can buy at any computer store, at a price that is around 200 euros. From experience we know, actually we expect that in a few years that storage capacity will be much cheaper and we can get for that amount of money much more capacity.

Yes, I do expect that. But I was really flabbergasted reading an article in the Journal of applied physics

http://jap.aip.org/resource/1/japiau/v108/i2/p023902_s1?isAuthorized=no

on “Field dependent ultrafast dynamicsand mechanisms of magnetization reversal”.

It is quite technical (as you would expect in that Journal, so you may want to read instead

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-09/aiop-ptt092010.php

which is an analyses of what this achievement from a team of researchers in China actually means.  For an easier to understand explanation of the magnetic reversal take a look at: www.tfm.phy.cam.ac.uk/…/mag_reversal.html from where I took the following schematics:

Schematics of the Cambridge ac Kerr magnetometer

In a nutshell: by using a special quantity of laser pulses these researchers have shown the possibility to store on a magneto-optical disc (5 inches) up to 6 Pbits, that is 600 TB (600,000 GB) at a very fast recording speed, some thirty times faster than present hard disk.

Now, the fast speed is good, and in a way impressive, but what is really mindboggling is the amount of data one can store on such a disc. You can easily store all of your life experiences, including whatever you saw, you heard, you said, you read or wrote!

Scientists expect to deliver this mammoth storage in the next few years. Now, this goes really beyond my imagination. I could have imagined such a storage by 2030, having it fifteen years before is amazing.

Nicholas Negroponte started to talk about the disappearance of paper books in the nineties (Being Digital) and has recently set a date for the demise of paper books; 2015.

The New York Times has leaked rumors on moving next year to a e-publishing version only. This sudden acceleration is the result of the success of Kindle and iPad and now of the variety of competing tablets appearing on the market.

Is the iPad leading to the destruction of paper books?

However, a blog published this week on Technology Review begs differently:

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/25783/?nlid=3535

It points out an interesting fact, showing how by playing with numbers one can create very different perceptions: Amazon stated they are now downloading more eBooks than dispatching paper books. That is a fact. However, Amazon has just the 19% of the book market (that is a big chunck, but not the whole) and they have 90% of the eBook market. This means that the eBook market to day is (back of my napkin calculation) that the eBook market is about 8% of the total market and that is in the USA. That percentage will drop further if we look at the world market.

So, we can say that today the eBook market is just starting. The question is how fast wil it grow. My personal take is that we are going to see a continuous growth but not an avalanche distroying the paper book market within this decade. Beyond that, may be. It is likely that in places like the USA most reading will take place through some sort of electronic screens by the end of this decade but the situation will be quite different in other countries, like Italy.

A factor that might play a role in shifting consumers habits can be the adoption of eBooks in schools. That is just starting. In Italy as Future Centre we are experimenting jointly with some schools this year, in cooperation with the Education Ministry. Moving from experiment to general adoption will not happen, I believe, before the second half of this decade, hence a culture of reading through e-screen may not be expected before the next decade.

We will see. Innovation may lead to disillusion in terms of mass market adoption but on the other hand there are cases, like the cell phone, where the market capsizes conservative prediction.

I am at a meeting with Nokia Siemens (NS) and the focus is on understanding how the future might look like.

NS pointed out that the dream of a single interface / device so powerful and flexible to be able to take care of any needs of any user is not going to happen. Rather, we are seeing a growth in variety of terminals and this is going to be a trend for the years to come.

Multiple screen environment is what industry and market demand are building. Devices will continue to be proposed meeting in principle all needs but in practice serving a specific need or environment.

This variety is going to fuel innovation and continuous increasing performance as each new one is going to set the bar for the existing ones.

On the customer side there will be a growing need to ensure portability over time from one device to the newer one, and also to move information across devices, benefitting from the specific capabilities of each.

The network will need to be flexible enough to accommodate any kind of request thus supporting any devices and this, paradoxically, makes the network more and more neutral and transparent.

However, a new opportunity space opens up in the creation of a virtual layer where information and services can become device/terminal independent.