For those of you who love technology (all kinds), I have to plug yet again the MIT Technology Review. It is such a great magazine to just get a sense of the amazing, truly amazing, innovations taking place which extends to the innovation that sits in the labs at universities which may never me commercialized to the degree that the everyday person will know about it. In the days where Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed and Apple get all the press, there is more phenomenal pioneering taking place that in certain cases dwarfs in comparison the potential impact to user, customers and individuals. And some of the content, well let’s just say it is too many years past the time I should have majored in EE, Chem E or in cases Computer Engineering to fully appreciate what they are talking about (double the battery life, sure, sounds good!)
The March/April issue of the Tech Review is a special issue covering Emerging Technologies 2008. Here are some of my favorites:
- Offline Applications – Kevin Lynch from Adobe. I discussed this in a prior post, Are you not connected?, back when Kevin did a keynote at the Web 2.0 Expo. The concept is picking up more steam and there are more players like Microsoft Silverlight. (video)
- Wireless Power – When you read something in a magazine that speaks realistically about something that is like science fiction, well, you just want to read it.
Wireless power is something for years I’ve rhetorically stated why couldn’t they figure it out and get rid of all the cords. (video)
- Probabilistic Chips – Lowering the overall power utilized by chips by introducing the correct amount of error rate into the calculations the chip is processing. Introducing error where precision is not necessary. Huge impacts to battery life, mobility applications in particular. (video)
- Modeling Surprise – Looking at past occurrences where there was a surprise event in something unexpected. And then using prior events in history as a predictive modeling technique for things that “may” surprise us in the future. (video)
There is plenty more in the magazine, I just want to point out some highlights that jumped out at me.
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