Toward tomorrow

Those of us in the luxurious position to benefit from new technologies are experiencing the liberation of this movement already - and while the benefits currently extend beyond the means of most of the world's population, I believe we're finally starting to see feasible ways that the less privileged will be brought online - so to speak - too.

Simply put, information technology is finally being designed for practical use by human beings - not just those with the propensity and prerequisite spatial awareness to use it. For the first time we have user interfaces that don't require literacy to interact with - watch a two-year-old playing with an iPad if you need an example of this.

The shift is so fundamental because it is changing not only how, but more importantly, who designs and implements new technology applications. Whereas in the past, the vendors of new technologies would also create the applications of those technologies, things are shifting into the hands of users.

Who would have guessed, for example, that a whole band would be able to replace their instruments with iPhones for a live performance of their music? I'm quite sure this wasn't an application Apple imagined for the device when it was first created, and yet New York group Atomic Tom, along with others around the world, have done it.

And we've only just begun. Augmented reality, the Internet of things and the move to build circuitry sensory awareness into the world around us with open source technologies like Arduino, will present people with an increasing ability to manipulate human-centric technologies - what I like to call 'Anthropotech'.

Things are shifting into the hands of users.

Simon Dingle, contributor, ITWeb

It isn't all going to catch on immediately, however.

Last week, MTN Business hosted its Dialogue event, hosted by yours truly and assembling a group of international speakers for its customers. One of the foreign guests that took to the stage at the confab is Magnus Lindkvist, author of 'Everything We Know Is Wrong' and 'The Attack of the Unexpected'. Describing himself as a 'trendspotter', Lindkvist presented the world of trends and how unexpected - and even unintuitive - these often are.

One of the most resonant parts of his talk related to the success of new products or trends that are first perceived as non-starters. We tend to dismiss things that fail in their first attempts as unviable - but history has shown us that it sometimes takes many attempts at an idea to get it off the runway.

Lindkvist provides many great examples of this; Nintendo's Donkey Kong arcade machine, for one, and the character of Jumpman that eventually became Super Mario. Another is the song, 'Torn'that was written by LA-based band Ednaswap and then covered by Trine Rein and several other artists, before finally being released by Natalie Imbruglia and turned into the chart-topping success we remember it as today.

This has also been a theme of Malcolm Gladwell's presentations on the two occasions I've seen him talk. He asserts that to the public it looks like new breakthroughs came from nowhere - they appeared overnight. In reality, however, successful products, ideas or art take time to prepare. This is not a rule, but is the norm more often than not.

Research firm Gartner believes it has a way of tracking the cycle of new products and trends via its hype curve - a flexible graph that is broken up into five ominously named periods - the 'technology trigger', followed by the 'peak of inflated expectations', the 'trough of disillusionment', 'slope of enlightenment' and finally, the 'plateau of productivity'.

According to Gartner's hype cycle analysis, the Internet of things, augmented reality and NFC payments, as a few examples, will not show up in the mainstream for the next five to 10 years - but the prospects for 2020 are starting to look enticing... or frightening, depending on your perspective.

By that year we expect to see, for example, small personal hard drives with 14-terabyte capacities selling for less than $40. Processors that are now compared to the brains of field mice in terms of their computing power will be more comparable to the human brain - this is one of Lindkvist's predictions. One of mine is that sensory analytics will be part of daily life in major urban zones.

We'll look back on now as the era in which it all started making sense. When the snowball really started picking up momentum. But we have a lot of trying, failing and refining to do before then.