The trend towards the confluence of technologies is hailing unprecedented opportunities for both the commercial and IT sectors and has changed the landscape of traditional business methods and processes.
Various technology "flares", as they are brought together by the rapid advances in communications networks and computing power, are starting to make possible a world of unprecedented mobility and abundant capacity for all kinds of information.
Top of the list is the Internet, which heralded a new age in global connectivity. The phrase "the Internet changes everything" is trite, but true.
Equal to the Internet in terms of its impact, the rapidly growing use of wireless communications is one of the most important trends to influence modern society.
The simple fact of no longer being bound by a wire to a plug in the wall, and the consequent autonomy for people to interact and transact from wherever and whenever they happen to be, has created a whole new paradigm in productivity.
It has opened up the ability to communicate with a person, not a place, and represents a major step forward in freeing people to rule their world, rather than the other way round.
With technologies like General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) and communications devices including cellphones and personal digital assistants (PDAs), the age of wireless communications is already upon us.
However, with advances in wireless communications networks, even these devices will soon become regarded as dinosaurs of personal communications.
Already, there are wireless convergent devices that bring together Internet access, a cellular phone, a PDA and an organiser - all in a handheld personal computer. While these devices currently have serious limitations, this will rapidly change, and soon these devices will act as portable receivers, senders and managers of any information in any format.
It is not too farfetched to say that people will be able to, for example, point the device at a landmark, say, the Acropolis, and receive a potted history on it, using graphics, text, video or voice.
It could go further to advise of special events occurring at the site, including dates and times. The user would be able to book and pay for his ticket to attend an event, identifying himself purely by his voice or other biometric data, rather than by external facts such as bank account details or PIN numbers.
Supporting this belief that such capabilities are not far off, are the orders of magnitude involved in computer performance increases. More than 20 years ago, Moore's Law predicted that computer processing power will double every 18 months. Today, this is doubling every 12 months.
Computers now, therefore, are about 1 000 times more powerful than they were 10 years ago. This means that tasks that were practically impossible to do 20 years ago, are now routine.
A second prerequisite for these applications, bandwidth, is doubling every 10 months - even satellite bandwidth is tripling each year.
Bandwidth is becoming a commodity and in this way, is contributing to the 'death of distance'. In less than five years, we will have more than 100 times the amount of bandwidth available today and it is difficult to imagine the full effect of this.
In SA, we are shielded from that growth due to artificial constraints imposed by the government, but in other societies, where the effect of that growth is apparent, the impact is dramatic.
For example, high-speed access - using Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) for fixed-line - is already widely available in Germany and parts of the US. Also third-generation (3G) mobile communications technology will translate into speeds of 2MBps, enabling people to watch a full video channel on a mobile device.
Another flare has been dramatic progress in speech recognition enabled by increasing computing capability. Until two years ago this technology was effectively unusable, whereas the past 12 to 18 months have seen practical speech recognition applications, though limited, becoming increasingly available and effective. Ongoing improvements in both computing power and software will make present limitations soon vanish.
In addition, biometric verification technology, whereby a person's identity is confirmed by fingerprints, voice verification, retina scanning and face recognition, is similarly progressing rapidly and will become a standard feature of portable, multimedia personal communication devices.
All of the above 'flares' are coming together and one key effect of this will be the ever-increasing amount of information that businesses and individuals have to manage.
As a company focused on managing information, Spescom is exactly positioned to take advantage of continuing information overload.
Two companies within Spescom hold the keys to be able to do this: asset information management software company, Altris, which is involved in the capture of static information, and voice technology specialist DataVoice, which manages live information. (Live information is characterised by its transience: if it is not captured, it is lost forever.)
Spescom is currently working on merging live information such as conversations and static information such as drawings, text documents and faxes, in a single application.
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