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Posts from the ‘Future’ Category

8
Jul
Macintosh Plus iPad stand

The Future of Mac OS X, iOS and iDevices

It seems fairly obvious that Apple is betting the future of computing on multi-touch interfaces built around a two-tiered architecture of browser-based HTML5 web apps and local apps more closely tied to the operating system – iOS. Google are also taking a similar path, albeit with a more web-centric approach. I’ve been thinking about this recently and want to talk a little about where I see it all going. Read moreRead more

19
Mar
Kowloon Walled City

Future Living Inspired by Past Extremes

I’ve long been fascinated by the density of housing which can be found in many parts of Asia, and in particular Hong Kong where high-rise living has been taken to the extremes of both human and technological limits. I find it remarkable how people are able to adapt to their particular circumstances, be they due to space or resource constrains, and still retain their sanity (mostly). Read moreRead more

26
Jan
Shanghai Maglev Train

Riding Shanghai Maglev

I was in Shanghai last weekend for the tail end of a business trip to Wuxi and finally got a chance to ride the experimental high-speed Maglev train from the downtown Longyang Road station to Pudong International Airport. Read moreRead more

20
Jan
The Wheel of Humankind

The First Global Revolution?

I came across this fascinating diagram in a 1991 report titled ‘The First Global Revolution‘ from the Club of Rome which is a globalist think tank that deals with a variety of international issues. Read moreRead more

7
Oct

The Art of Living Comfortably

When I moved to China from London I took a large pay cut and left the majority of my worldly possessions behind me. It was of course my own decision but a year later I’m not missing any of it. Surprise surprise, wealth and material possessions make little or no impact on your happiness. This got me thinking about the way most of us live our lives, and in particular after watching the “Story of Stuff” which tells provides some chilling truths about the underside of our production and consumption patterns.

China Pollution

You might be surprised to learn that 99% of what we produce every day is thrown out within 6 months where it usually ends up in landfill, and in the past three decades, one-third of the planet’s natural resources base have been consumed. With China and India rapidly developing, turning new generations into mass consumers it’s clear that our current way of life is unsustainable.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in Shenzhen where people from around China come to get rich and spend their new found wealth on luxury clothes, cars and all manner of vice in sparkling high-end shopping malls bigger than it’s comfortable to imagine. While to get rich may be glorious for those whose parents grew up in very different circumstances it’s also destroying the world at an alarming rate and creating lifestyles which are going to be difficult to change. Most of the blame for this can be placed squarely on the doorstop of the US whose greed is unsurpassed and sadly still the envy of many.

Chinese Protest

"We don't like pollution, we need to survive"

For me I feel that a middle route is needed whereby we make efficient use of the resources we have left while developing new safe/renewable  technologies to drive the future and to clean up the mess previous generations have left. This is going to require more modest lifestyles and a mind-shift in the way we behave and consume which is going to be hard for some to swallow but change doesn’t have to reduce quality of life. In fact I think quite the opposite could be true if we all made some simple choices:

  • Buy less but buy good quality which will last longer and hence reduce the amount of waste produced. Buying cheap only perpetuates the cycle of replacement and poor conditions for factory workers.
  • Recycle as much as you can and remember that your junk is another person’s treasure (i.e. you can sell or give stuff away).
  • If you live in a city walk or take public transport. You’ll be getting fit while saving money and the environment.
  • Wherever possible  buy locally grown food and cook at home. It’s healthier and often cheaper than eating out or buying a ready meal.
  • Work from home where possible. It reduces the pressure on public services, increases productivity and personal happiness.
  • When purchasing electronics consider its energy efficiency, potential to be upgraded (as opposed to replaced) and recyclability.
  • Avoid the temptations of special offers which only encourage more consumption and in reality save you little.

Whilst this thinking isn’t particularly revolutionary I don’t think we’re very good at articulating it so I’m going to coin a new word for this type of lifestyle: Comfotalism; defined as the middle path between consumerism, minimalism and environmentalism. This boils down to basically living a life more in balance with our natural environment without the need for composting toilets or any other hairy eco-warrior behavior! Free of the need to always buy bigger and better I truly believe people would be happier and less stressed – after all, for what other reason are you currently working yourself to death?

How would you fix the environment?

10
Sep

Going to Lift Asia 09

Lift Asia 09 Poster

I’m very excited to be returning to South Korea tomorrow for the fourth time in three years. As well as catching up with friends in Seoul I’ll be attending the Lift Asia 09 conference next week which focuses on new opportunities and challenges that are arising from areas such as social networks, online games, robots, and communicating objects on the theme of ”Serious Fun!“. It can be loosely compared as a European version of TED.


Photo by Don Lee

Even better is that it’s being held on the beautiful Jeju island which is a short way off the south coast (not far from Busan) and only a 1 hour flight from Seoul. The conference lasts for two days but I’ll be there for 4 which should be plenty of time to enjoy some of the natural scenery and the fast unfiltered internet (no GFW here).

I’ll try to post sporadically while I’m away (on Twitter at the very least) and will hopefully come back with a good photo and story or two! Feel free to drop me a line if you’re in the same vicinity.

26
Aug

10 Things You Couldn’t Do 25 Years Ago

Retro Old TV
Photo by gothopotam

A couple of weeks ago I turned 25 which was a fairly unremarkable event but did get me thinking about how technology and the internet in particular has changed our lives over the past quarter of a century. Many things we take for granted today were unthinkable 25 years ago and have fundamentally changed the way we live our lives. I put together a quick list of 10 things I couldn’t do 25 years ago but now rely on daily…

  1. Communicate with people on the other side of the world in real time from virtually anywhere
  2. Write something and make it available to billions of people for free without any technical knowledge
  3. Search billions of pages of information and find almost anything in less than a second
  4. Watch world events unfold in real time independent of traditional media organisations
  5. Stream & download music, tv, and films over the internet from anywhere free of schedule limitations
  6. View products, compare prices, make purchases and buy tickets without leaving your chair
  7. Surf the web, make calls, send emails, listen to music, watch movies, record photos & videos, know where you are and a million more functions all using a single devise which can fit in your pocket
  8. Start a business without relying on the traditional costly overheads of office space and infrastructure
  9. Translate text between languages at a touch of a button with passable results
  10. Store massive amounts of information in a very small space (remember encyclopedias?!)

1984 Poster
Illustration by Luiza P

Doing similar things 25 years ago (or even 5 in some cases) was slow, laborious and labor intensive. Today information moves at the speed of light and as the masses gained access to simple tools for dissemination we’re producing more than ever before in our history. With over 1 trillion pages and 1.6 billion users we are living in an age of hyper-connectivity where people are only as far apart as the devices with which they connect to the internet. If the industrial revolution brought us cars and bridges then the information revolution has brought the democratization of knowledge to the masses (arguably at the expense of privacy). How far we have come in such a short space of time…

What would be on your list?

20
Jul

Augmented Reality is Here

Sekai Camera Evolution

If you like cool technology that looks like it could have come from the future then this is for you. Augmented Reality (AR) uses the combination of real-world and computer-generated data to blend computer graphic objects into real-time footage. The best way to understand this is to take a look at a few examples:

New York Nearest Subway

The acrossair iPhone app overlays directions to the nearest subway station on live video using GPS and compass data to guide you. Forget boring 2D tube maps but just be careful you don’t trip down the escalator while using this! There’s also a version availiable for the London Underground.

AR Business Card

This ingenious concept shows how a business card has been designed with a symbol printed on one side which can be tracked by a camera to spatically overlay a video message (or just about anything else). Make magazine has an article which shows how you can do something like this yourself. If it was combined with QR codes (visual hyperlinks) the applications could be even more interesting (update: looks like someone has already done it).

Sekai Camera

Sekai Camera

The Sekai Camera iPhone app from Tonchidot in Japan, which first wowed the audience at the TechCrunch50 conference, takes AR to a new level with functionality that allows you to tag and view contextual information about anything in the world through the live camera window. In essense it combines virtual worlds with the real world using the iPhone as a viewer. It’s usage is almost endless and ranges from being able to see product information, to restaurant reviews, directions and notes from your friends but basically anything you can think of.

The video above is worth watching alone for the hillarious presenter answering questions at the end. “Remember look up! Not look down. Please don’t forget imagination!“. I can’t wait to play with this once it’s availiable.

Much of the innovation we’re seeing can be attributed to the combination of a number of key technologies packaged in todays smartphones: video cameras, GPS, digital compass’, accelerometers, touchscreens, and 3G/wifi/bluetooth. One thing which will have to improve is battery life if this becomes popular as currently you’d be out of juice in a couple of hours or less.

AR Translation (idea)

I’d love to see an application where you could point your camera at some text in a foreign language and it would do OCR then auto-translate it into your language. I’ve created a basic mock-up above. There would probably be quite a bit of heavy lifting involved in getting the character recognition working but could be extremely useful. Anyone interested in a collaboration to make this a reality?

Augmented Reality is opening an exciting new world of possibilities which people are only just beginning to realise and explore. The list of current and future applications on Wikipedia are enough to inspire anyone and once the viewing tech is built into your specs we’re only one step away from having a working holodeck (see concept video below)!

This is going to be big (if we don’t all die from information overload first).

3
Mar

Shenzhen Land Reclamation

Today I was looking for my apartment on Google Maps (like you do) since hearing that they recently did a massive imagery update and noticed something curious about the the images for Shenzhen at different magnifications:

12x Zoom:

13x Zoom:

You’ll notice that the images have some striking differences, especially in the highlighted areas which show massive land reclamation (the creation of new land where there was once water) and the addition of a bridge linking Shenzhen Bay to Hong Kong. Clearly the higher magnification imagery is newer but what’s more interesting is the massive rate at which the land mass is being expanded.

This sort of environmental engineering has a huge impact on the social, economic, and physical environment with one of the most visible casualties being a  mangrove forest in Shenzhen Bay which is vanishing rapidly due to excessive land reclamation, pollution and property development since the 1980′s. Over 147 hectares have already been lost, around 50% of the total thus drastically decreasing the biodiversity are the area (report). A state funded project begun last year to try and save the remaining forest.

Ironically China already has plenty of land but not in the right places and cities like Shenzhen, Hong Kong and Macau are all building outwards while real estate remains hugely expensive (propped up by corruption). Even more ironically the sea level here is rising three to five centimeters annually meaning that much of the peninsula may be submerged in 60 to 100 years!