News of the future - Andreas Bossard

Main points:

• the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content
• Challenge: how to rank real-time social media (e.g. from Twitter)?
• broadband will be way faster than today and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.

Read more at the NYTimes

The mobile application "Mint" makes it possible to pay with your mobile phone and keep track of your spendings.

For example at the grocery store you can pay with Mint. The amount to be paid is sent wirelessly to Mint and you can select your preferred credit card or bank account:


You enter your PIN-Code and you are done:


Afterwards MintBudgeteer calculates your new budget and shows you how much money you have left to buy stuff:



This scenario and the images are taken from a presentation by John Pettengill. He states that future mobile internet should not just be the internet on a smaller screen. The presentation is embedded below. The scenario starts at slide 60.

Youtube implemented the "deep link"-Feature which appeared in newsofthefuture in 2007. The predicted date was quite accurate (October 20th, it was introduced on October 30th) but the year was one year too early. It was introduced in 2008.

If you want to test the deep-link feature, try this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ULVQOneeZE#t=2m16s Unfortunately with several tries it only worked once for me.

In Viddler this still works better: http://www.viddler.com/explore/rocketboom/videos/1312/77.31/

The MIT Technology Review asked different people what the future of the web will look like. Besides "mobile" and "higher access speed" there were also some interesting converse thoughts.

Bjarne Stroustrup - Designer of the C++ programming language
The total end of privacy.

vs.

Mena Trott - Cofounder of Six Apart
I can easily see someone putting 75 percent of their day online. But it won't all be public. The ­majority will be for that person's eyes only; it will be more a record for that individual.


Leah Culver - Cofounder of Pownce
Open standards will always be the future of the Web.

vs.

Jonathan Zittrain - Professor of law
An abandonment of open standards and services (like the collective hallucination that is our distributed e-mail system) and a return to the gated communities


Richard Stallman - Founder of the Free Software Movement
I see a danger in the Web today: doing your computing on servers running software you can't change or study, and entrusting your data to U.S. companies

vs.

Marc Benioff - Founder of Salesforce.com
Companies such as Salesforce.com, Google, and Amazon are making it possible to create and run powerful business applications in the cloud, and that will change the economics of the software industry forever.

Reminds me of the blog entry about the BBC article.


Picture by courtesy of visual think map

Check out the current Carnival of the Mobilists at Wap Review which contains my blog post
February 23, 2010 - Comment text from books with your mobile phone