Pat’s Point of View

There are some cool technologies that will soon change our daily lives. You hear a lot about “Web 2.0″ these days, talking about the new features of the web; blogging, folksonomies, tagging, sharing etc, but it will be even more exciting when these things break away online and merge into our daily lives. I shall call it Everyday 2.0!

We’re talking about stuff like RFID to make your things aware of and interactive with their surroundings. Your music and movie collections will know about all the discs you own, and where they are in your house. Your robotic cookware will talk to the stove and make sure your food doesn’t burn. Your smart medication will tell you if you’ve forgotten to take your pills today.

And there’re lots more things to be done with RFID. Just Google it.

Want more? I recently read this bit by Jakob Nielsen…

One of the products announced at the Consumer Electronics Show was the SkyScout from Celestron. You point it at the night sky, and it tells you the name of the constellation you are looking at. Very similar to a product Tog and I invented ten years ago: the identification system for zoo animals - you look through it at a habitat enclosure and the device highlights where the animals are hiding and annotates each animal with its species and other pertinent information.

The zoo gadget was too far from Sun Microsystems’ product strategy, so it was never built. Worse, the patent wasn’t filed, which the company surely regrets now, since the claims could have been broad enough to cover this new product and assure a nice licensing stream. In the future, we will see a large number of products that know where they are and what they are being pointed at. One likely development is to build this knowledge into cameras. For example, your camera would know that you are in Paris and shooting the Eiffel Tower, thus automatically tagging the photo with the relevant keywords, making retrieval easier.

That’s cool! Having struggled to shoot, catalogue, organise and share my own photos from a mere 5 years of digital photography (including mobile phones…yes I’m a nerd) I would love anything that removes a few steps and makes the whole process easier!

Now just whack a WiFi transceiver into the camera, hook it up to your XMLRPC and there you go; photo-blogging (with accurate and effortless metadata) using one portable device. I haven’t been this excited since bluetooth :)

Now if I could just get iPhoto to publish a decent web album!

P

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