News of the future - Andreas Bossard

Apple released an iPhone App with which you can remote control iTunes on your Mac or Apple TV.

There is even a nifty feature that allows friends to request songs when they are at a party at your house (iTunes DJ).

They were a bit early though with the release date. I predicted September 2008, but it came out June 2008.

The SAP Future Retail Center researches usage scenarios with RFID tags. I had the chance to visit it thanks to the Alumni Wirtschaftsinformatik of the University of Zurich.

The technology is already used in closed systems, e.g. during the supply chain on palettes. But there are still some technical issues that prevent RFID tags from being used on every product in retail stores:

• A lot of the demonstrations did not work at all.
• When scanning a shopping cart, the scanner only recognized 98% of all products.
• RFID tags are still too expensive.
• There are scanning-problems when the shopping cart contains certain materials. For example:
• water (orange juice etc.)
• metal (also Tetra Paks)


• The market for RFID tags is still fragmented. Most vendors only sell scanners, or tags, but just a few vendors sell everything.

Conclusion
Having in mind that RFID retail stores are a hot topic for years, it was astonishing to see that the prototypes are more a proof-of-concept than really ready for the market.

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/