Fremont resident Rakesh Guliani likes to say that a Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner saved his marriage.
Messy floors had been causing friction, says the 41-year-old Guliani (pronounced Goo-liani). His wife, Kavita, 35, was particularly annoyed by the footprints he and their daughters, Ashna, 10, and Rhea, 6, tended to track through the house.
“I am soccer coach to both of them, and when we come in with our dirty cleats, I am more tolerant of that because I am tracking dirt, too,” says Guliani, vice president of the job-placement firm Park Computer Systems. He vacuumed several times a week but it never seemed enough to satisfy his wife, a technical writer for Google.
“I was sucking the thread out of the carpet,” says Guliani, who bought a Roomba last fall and programmed it to scour the carpets for dust, dirt and grime. Regular cleanings by the Roomba restored household harmony. “It never gets bored and it never complains,” he says.
The Guliani family is at the cutting edge of what may be the next technological revolution – the emergence of software and hardware capable of performing tasks once reserved for that race of toolmakers called Homo sapiens.
“Sometime in the next 30, 40, 50 years we will have human-level machine intelligence,” predicts Marshall Brain, a computer science teacher turned author and technology forecaster.
Category: Technology
Top 12 Areas for Technology Innovation through 2025
What will likely be the most important scientific and technological breakthroughs with significant commercial value and impacts on the lives of consumers out to 2025?
To begin to answer that question, S)T’s Technology Foresight program conducted a virtual, global focus group of experts in technology, innovation, and business strategy. The group included experts from the Association of Professional Futurists, Tekes, Duke University, Hasbro, Worldwatch, General Motors, Shell, Johnson Controls, and Oxford University, among others.
After consolidating input from the expert panel and analysis by Social Technologies’ futurists, what emerged was our list of top 12 areas for tech innovation through 2025:
Personalized medicine—With the initial mapping of the human genome, scientists are moving rapidly toward the following likely breakthroughs for gene-based products and services:
NY Taxis and GPS Receivers
Interesting video clip on GPS receivers and New York City Taxis. The conversations were fascinating. The TomTom 910 GPS receiver was quite useful this summer (just replaced by the 920). The iPHone
Apollo 12 Pilot Alan Bean Interview
Alan Bean, Apollo 12 lunar module pilot, Skylab mission II commander, Apollo-Soyuz Test Project backup commander, backup astronaut for the Gemini 10 and Apollo 9 missions and eventually head of the astronaut candidate operations and training group within NASA’s astronaut office, spoke exclusively to Flightglobal.com about his time as an astronaut at the Autographica event in London on 12 October.
A member of the third group of astronauts named by NASA in October 1963 he became lunar module pilot for what was the second Moon landing in November 1969. He and mission commander Pete Conrad explored the ocean of storms, deployed several surface experiments and installed the first nuclear power generator station on the Moon. Richard Gordon, the mission’s command module pilot, remained in lunar orbit photographing landing sites for future missions.
Russia’s Space City Frozen in Time
Rockets still pierce the heavens in a halo of smoke during launches, and engineers and military men still crack open bottles of vodka to celebrate a successful launch. What has changed are the passengers. Nowadays Baikonur embraces the world, from wealthy space tourists to the world’s first Malaysian cosmonaut, Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor, who blasted off for the international space station on Oct. 10.
The city itself is a rusting relic of the golden age of Russian rocketry, yet if anything, its place in the space industry is heading toward expansion. For at least four years after the space shuttle program ends in 2010, the U.S. will completely depend on Russia – and Baikonur – to send its crews to the international space station.
Facilities and equipment are workable but old. Remnants of demolished buildings and pieces of rusty metal dot the landscape along the roads to the launchpads. Dozens of apartment blocks that were abandoned after the 1991 Soviet collapse stand in rows like tombstones, their windows bricked up.
Map Making Firms Rumored to Sell for Billions
The latest hot segment of the technology business appears to be maps.
MapQuest, Yahoo! Maps and GPS (global positioning system) navigation in cars are very popular, and all of those maps came from one of just two mapmaking companies.
Both of those companies now are being snatched up by bigger companies for billions of dollars.
Creating a digital guide to the world’s highways and street addresses may be the cutting edge of technology, but it is also just long hours on the road.
Jeremy Onysko’s orange van has four digital cameras mounted on the roof. They are snapping pictures every 30 feet — recording road signs, lane markings and anything else a driver might need to know.
The Inevitable March of Recorded Music Towards Free
The DRM walls are crumbling. Music CD sales continue to plummet rather alarmingly. Artists like Prince and Nine Inch Nails are flouting their labels and either giving music away or telling their fans to steal it. Another blow earlier this week: Radiohead, which is no longer controlled by their label, Capitol Records, put their new digital album on sale on the Internet for whatever price people want to pay for it.
The economics of recorded music are fairly simple. Marginal production costs are zero: Like software, it doesn’t cost anything to produce another digital copy that is just as good as the original as soon as the first copy exists, and anyone can create those copies. Unless effective legal (copyright), technical (DRM) or other artificial impediments to production can be created, simple economic theory dictates that the price of music, like its marginal cost, must also fall to zero. The evidence is unmistakable already. In April 2007 the benchmark price for a DRM-free song was $1.29. Today it is $0.89, a drop of 31% in just six months.
A conversation with Ed Iacobucci about the reinvention of air travel
In Free Flight, the seminal book on the forthcoming reinvention of air travel, James Fallows tells a story about Bruce Holmes, who was then the manager of NASA’s general aviation program office. For years Holmes clocked his door-to-door travel times for commercial flights, and he found that for trips shorter than 500 miles, flying was no faster than driving. The hub-and-spoke air travel system is the root of the problem, and there’s no incremental fix. The solution is to augment it with a radically new system that works more like a peer-to-peer network.
Today Bruce Holmes works for DayJet, one of the companies at the forefront of a movement to invent and deliver that radically new system. Ed Iacobucci is DayJet’s co-founder, president, and CEO, and I’m delighted to have him join me for this week’s episode of Interviews with Innovators.
I first met Ed way back in 1991 when he came to BYTE to show us the first version of Citrix, which was the product he left IBM and founded his first company to create. As we discuss in this interview, the trip he made then — from Boca Raton, Florida to Peterborough, New Hampshire — was a typically grueling experience, and it would be no different today. A long car trip to a hub airport, a multi-hop flight, another long car trip from hub airport to destination.
Who’s afraid of Google?
RARELY if ever has a company risen so fast in so many ways as Google, the world’s most popular search engine. This is true by just about any measure: the growth in its market value and revenues; the number of people clicking in search of news, the nearest pizza parlour or a satellite image of their neighbour’s garden; the volume of its advertisers; or the number of its lawyers and lobbyists.
Such an ascent is enough to evoke concerns—both paranoid and justified. The list of constituencies that hate or fear Google grows by the week. Television networks, book publishers and newspaper owners feel that Google has grown by using their content without paying for it. Telecoms firms such as America’s AT&T and Verizon are miffed that Google prospers, in their eyes, by free-riding on the bandwidth that they provide; and it is about to bid against them in a forthcoming auction for radio spectrum. Many small firms hate Google because they relied on exploiting its search formulas to win prime positions in its rankings, but dropped to the internet’s equivalent of Hades after Google tweaked these algorithms.
And now come the politicians. Libertarians dislike Google’s deal with China’s censors. Conservatives moan about its uncensored videos. But the big new fear is to do with the privacy of its users. Google’s business model (see article) assumes that people will entrust it with ever more information about their lives, to be stored in the company’s “cloud” of remote computers. These data begin with the logs of a user’s searches (in effect, a record of his interests) and his responses to advertisements. Often they extend to the user’s e-mail, calendar, contacts, documents, spreadsheets, photos and videos. They could soon include even the user’s medical records and precise location (determined from his mobile phone).
A Report on GPS Navigation Systems
CNET:
Many of today’s new cars offer in-dash GPS as an option, and some offer it as standard equipment. The earliest models were CD-based, lacked detail and had a robotic voice. Nowadays, any in-dash system worth its salt is DVD-based, so maps for the entire country have more detail and Malaysian maps will usually fit onto a single disc. In-dash systems are usually more expensive than their portable counterparts, but they usually feature larger screens and integrate better with other vehicle electronics. And even when the signal is lost, the car’s sensors will keep tracking the car on the map until the signal lock is regained.