That’s the title of my Slaw post for today.   It reads as follows.

The quality of Canadian internet access continues to decline in comparison to that of other countries.  See, for example, previous Slaw posts here and here.   This while high speed access is more increasingly considered crucial for the economy,  competitiveness and innovation – even to the extent that many feel that the internet is a fundamental human right.  

The Canadian government talked about a digital strategy in its recent throne speech, but so far we don’t know what that translates to.

Contrast that with what is happening in the US.   The US FCC just announced an aggressive plan to upgrade internet access and speed.  The FCC says “Like electricity a century ago, broadband is a foundation for economic growth, job creation, global competitiveness and a better way of life.”

And Google plans to build trial locations to bring fiber to the home in at least 1 US city with speeds of 1 gigabit per second.  (That’s over 200 times faster than we get at home now.)   Google draws parallels to the space race.

University of Waterloo president David Johnston is quoted in a CBC article saying:   

Microsoft has released further details about Windows 7 Phone – mostly from the developer side – at the Mix10 conference.   It continues to get a positive reception from the tech press.   For more detail take a look at various posts such as these on Engadget and Wired Gadget Lab.

So I have 2 questions.  

These phones will be available before the end of the year (assuming Canadian cell cos debut them at the same time).  By then I’ll only be 15 months into a 3 year contract on my phone.  So will there be any deals to be had for an early upgrade, or is my choice either pay a huge penalty (not happening) or wait another year and a half?   3 year terms are nasty.

This OS seems like a natural for an iPad competitor.  Windows 7 based versions are coming – how about a Windows Phone 7 based one?

This is a term I’ve never heard before.  In the context of the alleged problems with Toyota electronic throttles, an engineer uses the term  “electronic disobedience”  to describe a glitch or interference that causes electronics to do unwanted or unintended things.  Such as sudden acceleration.

For the London Free Press – January 11, 2010

Read this on Canoe

The velocity of change will continue to increase over the next 10 years, expert predicts

Bill Gates once said we overestimate the change that will occur in two years, and underestimate the change that will occur in the next 10. 

As digital technology continues to evolve and the proportion of digital natives (those who grew up with it) vs. digital immigrants (those who have adapted to digital technology) increases, we will see dramatic changes. 

To start this new decade, I asked futurist Jim Carroll where we might be 10 years from now. 

Since he’s sometimes a bit ahead of his time, Jim referred to an article he wrote a few years ago (www.jimcarroll.com/weblog/archives/000798.html) as a place to start: 

Laptop computers: “What laptop? Your desk will be monitored by a 3-D virtual sensor that traces the action of your fingers. You won’t be typing onto a keyboard anymore, since there isn’t one. Instead, a holographic keyboard will be projected onto your desktop.” 

That’s not as farfetched as it sounds. Within the next year, we will be able to buy Microsoft’s Natal gesture-recognition system for the Xbox. And the sixth-sense wearable computer has been demonstrated that uses no keyboard, and no screen. 

The landline telephone: “It’s likely to be ‘so yesterday.’ An office with virtual 3-D long-distance video chat will be normal. The entire industry will have defragmented and disappeared, as technological change drives many of the current business models into absolute obsolescence.” 

The telephone is already becoming a personal device, rather than a household device. Many digital natives don’t even bother with a landline. And the cost for computer-to-computer video phone calls, using tools like Skype, is basically zero. 

Eyedrops: “The trend towards hyperconnectivity will impact medical products in a big way. The packaging in which the eyedrops are purchased will ‘connect’ to the global data grid that surrounds us, automatically pulling up a short interactive video on whatever screen that happens to be handy, with instructions on use and precautions. In effect, the role of product packaging will have been transformed from being that of a ‘container of product’ to an intelligent tool that will help us with use of the product.” 

Hyperconnectivity will change things in ways we can’t now imagine. Advances in sensors and circuitry will make it cheap and easy to connect everything to the Internet. It will only take some creative thinkers to figure out how we can use that for useful, practical purposes. 

Window shades: “Think ‘smart-glass.’ Our need for window shades will soon be eclipsed by intelligent glass that will automatically adjust its opacity and transparency for various conditions. Whether it’s bright sunlight, a need to better manage heating and cooling costs, or to provide for greater privacy, it’s likely that we’ll see rapid changes with this basic component of the home and office.” 

All these predictions are realistic given recent and expected advances. The velocity of change will continue to increase. 

One truly safe prediction is that 10 years from now, we will routinely do things that seem like science fiction today, or perhaps that science fiction has not yet imagined.

That’s the title of my Slaw post for today.   It reads as follows:

2010 will see some interesting and useful developments in the tablet / e-book reader space.  The concept of a thin, light, portable device with a decent screen size (i.e. a letter sized piece of paper) and long battery life to read things on – such as newspapers, magazines, books, the web – is quite compelling.

There are a few products on the market already – such as the Kindle.  In my view the tipping point to widespread adoption will be colour screens that can render glossy magazine resolution, the ability to get web content via wifi rather than just over a cell network, and a low enough price point.  At least that’s what I’m holding out for.

To some extent this is vapourware -  but there is a lot of activity and potential competition in this space.  Consider:

Several Slaw articles have mentioned the Kindle and e-book readers like the Sony reader.

Another entrant announced within the last few days is the  JooJoo, formerly known as the  Crunchpad.  This one is rather controversial.   The  story behind it (feuding developers) is as interesting as the product itself.

Of course there is the much anticipated Apple tablet - which many predict will appear some time in 2010.

Microsoft has shown a concept called the Courier.

And top that off with a publishers consortium that is working on digital publishing standards.

That’s the title of my Slaw post for today.  It reads as follows:

Advances in technology and reduction in costs are moving us towards a day when everything can be connected – including things like appliances, light switches, and even humans.  That connectivity will be for both reporting status and for control.

Jim Carroll has an interesting post on this topic called Reinventing the future with transformative technology! that’s worth a read. 

I also heard a presentation on a similar topic a couple of weeks ago at the Canadian IT Law Association conference by Ron Dembo of Zerofootprint  .  He talked about energy monitoring in homes and commercial buildings, and sharing that information as an incentive to reduce energy consumption.

This pervasive connectivity will no doubt affect us in ways we can’t now imagine – and will force us to rethink many things.  And it will lead to some interesting legal issues as well – such as how privacy fits in – and who “owns” all that information.

Technology advances have often challenged existing laws – which can get in the way of progress, or be inadequate to address new issues.

A book has just been published (which I have not read) entitled The Laws of Disruption that   ”explores, ten years into the Internet revolution, what has happened to social, political, and legal systems that now lag dangerously far behind.”

Laws have always lagged behind technology advances – that’s just a natural result.  But technology advances are happened much faster than ever before.   See, for example, the stats in this popular Socialnomics video.

Consider issues that arise from such things as pervasive public surveillance, Google street, access to huge amounts of information on anything and anyone, communication tools like twitter, skype, and Google voice, cloud computing, cheap terabyte drives, mobile computing, crowdsourcing, music and video sharing.   These advances, and others, challenge not only laws (such as privacy, ownership, copyright) – but business models (such as how to make money selling music when it is no longer a scarce commodity), how we govern ourselves, how we interact with each other (consider what being a “friend” now means), how we learn, and who we trust.

The challenge is to keep the current rules (legal and other) in mind when dealing with anything new – but at the same time not being blindly tied to those rules so tightly that we fail to understand the implications and issues in the context of what is different.   As I’ve commented before, precedent is context, not an operating manual.

Businessweek has an article entitled 12 Words You Can Never Say in the Office  that tells why using these terms will make you seem out of date.

That’s the title of my Slaw post for today.

It reads as follows:

Bill Gates has been quoted as saying: “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.”

To put that in perspective, lets compare some specs. The space shuttles will soon be retired – they were first launched in 1981 – almost 30 years ago.

In 1981 an example of a computer available then was a PDP11. It cost US$110,000, had 192 KB of memory, 5MB disk packs, and the footprint of a large desk.

Today, we buy cellphones for around $200 or so that weigh a few ounces and fit into our pockets that have 500MB (that’s about 2000 times more if my math is correct) of internal memory. You can add perhaps another 16GB (that’s about 20000 times more than the disk pack if my math is correct) of memory by sliding in a microSD card the size of a fingernail. And they include cameras, GPS, touch screens, Intenet access, several radios (voice, data, GPS, Wifi, Bluetooth).

Its hard to imagine what we will have within the next decade or 2.