SNS in the News - April 17, 2004

The Seattle Times - Personal Technology asked Friday Harbor-based pundit and futurist Mark Anderson, whose Strategic News Service electronic newsletter will turn 10 next year, for his observations on leading past trends and coming ones.

Breakthroughs of the past 10 years:

  • The cheap PC
  • The Web as the international communications network
  • Global cellphone networks
  • SMS (short-message system) messaging, via phone or satellite
  • e-Commerce
  • Broadband by wire
  • 3G cellular networks and 3G devices
  • Wi-Fi and fixed wireless broadband
  • One-to-one computing in (selected) schools
  • Breakthroughs I expect during the next decade
  • Continuous speech, untrained voice recognition
  • One-to-one computing in virtually all U.S. schools (with a little help from Project Inkwell)
  • Omnipresent sensors
  • Ubiquitous computing
  • Ubiquitous broadband
  • Fragmentation of content delivery (old networks out, new networks in)
  • Credit-card-sized computers: no plugs, no wires, as powerful as desktops
  • National ID cards based on biometrics, replacing passports
  • Spherical memory: a holographic crystal "golf ball" with more than a petabyte (1 million gigabytes) of capacity


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