Let's a have a tech talk for non-developers--those who love technology and play with widgets and sites but who don't have time or motivation to learn HTML and the rest of it. In short, people who enjoy technology but don't care that much how it works.
Virtual Reality and Social Networking for Kids
Second Life comes immediately to mind. Entropia Universe. MySpace. Ning, where you can create your own social network. Places for adults to play. What you may not know is that while these are big business, a big piece of the VR/SN action today is in children's sites.
Sites like Webkinz, Club Penguin, Neopets, Moshi Monsters, Stardoll, RuneScape (actually an MMORPG for kids, complete with a parents' guide to the game), and Pixie Hollow (coming soon). According to The New York Times, Club Penguin shows seven times the visitor traffic of Second Life.
Naturally, there's a backlash to all this stuck-in-front-of-a-computer- screen activity. And how long this VR/SN trend will last in kids' minds is anyone's guess. The children's market has one constant--sudden change. If this goes somewhere interesting in either direction, I might post about it again.
Speech Recognition Control
This trend is at least partly due to parents' awareness that their kids have read or sent text messages while behind the wheel of a car. Adults aren't far behind, fiddling with cell phones and GPS systems.
Now you can make cell phone calls, choose music on your car radio, and get directions on your GPS, all with nothing more than the beautiful sound of your own voice. Experts in this arena say that voice-recognition technology is about to take a big leap forward. Its popularity is expanding rapidly, and companies are scrambling to both keep up with demand and produce better technology and new products. Good for us consumers. Keep 'em out of trouble. Some examples include:
Voice recognition has been around for a long time in software, but people haven't taken advantage of it because the level of speech recognition isn't good enough to make it better to use than, say DVDs, phone conferences, virtual meetings, webinars, and so on.
I'm waiting for it to become affordable and reasonably effective, and then I'll be all over it in every gadget I can find. Why? Because it's fun to give an order and have it be promptly and efficiently obeyed. This almost never works in real life.
The Changing Face of Reading
Again, thanks to New York Times: About an equal number of people--27 percent--(1) read no books at all in the past year and (2) read 15 or more books. If we leave out those who don't read, people averaged 20 books a year. Eight percent read 51 or more books! (In the interest of full disclosure, I'm in that last group.)
I bring this up because Amazon, whatever you may think of it, is always coming out with new ideas. Not just retreads of old ideas or repackaging of existing products, but actual new stuff. Not everything they do works, but they keep churning out ideas in the form of new products and services. By now you've heard of the Kindle.
At first I blew it off. I've spent too many blissful hours in front of a computer screen to believe that the experience of reading a screen can be either un-harmful to the eyes or a source of actual enjoyment. I take it all back, however.
It's small enough to be carried around as you would do with a book, but better yet, you have access to lots of reading materials. When was the last time you could read all that from a single book you carried around with you? Amazon's newest info says the Kindle can immediately access 110,000 books, including 90 of the 112 current New York Times bestsellers.
When you get tired of books, you can read top newspapers from around the U.S. and the world, or peruse the Kindle's 250 top blogs on a variety of topics. It holds over 200 books at a time, it's lighter than a paperback, and it has a long battery life. (Cell phone and laptop companies, are you listening to this?)
Finally, you can email your JPG, GIF, BMP, and PNG documents to your Kindle to view as you're rushing around during your busy day. If you're as important as I am, you'll want to have your documents with you at all times. Viewing them on a microscropic cell phone screen is not acceptable. Did I remember to ask the cell phone companies if they were listening?
This may seem like a big push for the Kindle and I just don't care. It's not for everyone, but if you love books and your eyesight, this is where it's at.
How Do We Do Online Content?
I'll tell you up front that the company I'm going to use as a primary example came to my attention because a friend works there. In this age of the Internet, IM, and phone, I've never actually met this person, but I developed a lot of respect for his professional knowledge and vision.
With that out of the way: GumGum helps people to easily license and distribute online the content they've created. If you post creative content online but don't know how to monetize it (and don't want to deal with complicated tracking and follow-up), this is a resource you're going to want to look into.
Offline it's simpler to track content. Online content is difficult to track, and the idea of tracking down and billing everybody who grabs your content--it's ludicrous. As if they'd pay anyway. We are in a state of flux where Internet content creation, ownership, and usage are concerned, and GumGum fills a need in this hazy arena.
For fun, read the GumGum blog. On April 9 they noted that they came up fifth in Google searches for "photo licensing"--higher than Getty or Corbis--in spite of the fact that they've only been hot (officially functioning online) for about 60 days. These guys are doing the right thing at the right time with this service.
Second Wave of Cloud Computing
I'm not an expert on cloud computing. Fortunately it's not necessary to know how to write a program to benefit from cloud computing.
I've already mentioned here how much I enjoy Google Docs. Add to that Adobe AIR, a software development system that will power hundreds and thousands of applications that (like GD) bridge the Internet/PC divide; and Intel Netbook, a tiny laptop that, teamed with other tiny NetBooks, will create a sort of wireless mobile computer network.
Adobe AIR, for example, powers Buzzword, eBay Desktop, and many other applications by major companies.
A Benign Matrix is Coming
Read this article from FOX News. Even if you hate FOX, tech-lovers will still love this idea. Like the Internet in 1989, it comes to us from CERN, the coolest particle physics lab ever.
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