The Future Is More Than Facebook

The frenzy over Facebook is unprecedented.  There are many interesting dimensions to the story; the most interesting to me, is how the insiders are upping the number of shares they plan to unload on the public.  This does not give one confidence — that those with the most information have decided to reduce their long-term holdings the day before the company becomes public.  I am sure there will be a lot of coverage about that in the days ahead.  The more interesting story was presented by Rich Karlgard in the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal this morning (See Rich Karlgaard: The Future Is More Than Facebook). Rich believes that the tech bubble is large, but more importantly he believes that social media is not the most important area of innovation.  He doesn’t ditz social media, but urges consideration of more important areas needing innovation including transportation, energy, electricity, food production, water delivery, health care, and education.  Great list! Rich poses the question for those who need to go places, which they most value: An iPad, a Facebook membership, or a car.  By 2050 there may be 9 billion people and 3 billion cars.  Will we have the right fuels and road access? Perhaps the Google driverless car is more important than Facebook groups.  In the world of manufacturing, a lot of smart money is going into 3-D printing, which can make physical objects from an artisanal model.  Rich believes that “Made in the USA” is about to stage a major comeback.  In the area of energy, who would have predicted that North Dakota would overtake Alaska in oil production.  Horizontal drilling technology is changing the world.  Rich poses a second choice: If America could have only one, would it choose Facebook, Twitter, or horizontal drilling? I agree with Rich that America remains the world’s innovator and is a country without limits.

Tags: 3D printing, bubble, energy, facebook, Google car, horizontal drilling, IPO, social media, technology, venture capital

Batteries that Breath and Holographic Phone Calls

For many years IBM developed a ten year outlook every year and proudly presented it to executives inside and outside of the company. The TYO was a high-level glimpse into the future of technology. About ten years ago the TYO was stopped because the pace of technology evolution had reached the stage where the future that far out became very difficult to predict. As Yogi Berra said, “The future isn’t what it used to be.” Not that IBM is any less focused on creating the future. The company earned 4,186 U.S. patents in 2008, becoming the first company ever to earn more than 4,000 U.S. patents in a single year. IBM’s 2008 patent issuances exceed those of Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Apple, EMC, Accenture and Google — combined. IBM now issues a five-year forecast annually of five specific technology shifts that 3,000 of its researchers see coming. The International Business Times reported briefly on IBM’s “Next Five in Five” list of five innovations expected over the next five years.

3-D images will not be limited to action movies on TV. A cell-phone call from a friend may be accompanied by a 3-D image of your friend. Videoconferencing is already gaining a lot of traction but when they can be conducted through holographic cameras that fit into cell phones, the virtual reality will become much closer to real reality.
Advances in transistors and battery technology will accelerate — potentially allowing electronic devices to function without charging 10 times longer than currently. Today’s lithium-ion batteries could be replaced by batteries “that use the air we breath to react with energy-dense metal, eliminating a key inhibitor to longer lasting batteries,” IBM said. The amount of energy needed by electronic circuits may be reduced to such a degree that a modest amount of physical motion may create sufficient energy to power them. Wrist watches exist that have no batteries and get their energy from movement of our wrists. Within five years, the same concept may be used to charge mobile phones.
Personalized commutes are another advancement seen by IBM scientists. New mathematical models and predictive analytics technologies will produce the best routes for daily travel. The models will take into consideration the patterns of travelers and various conditions to predict where traffic congestion is going to occur and then give you the fastest and safest route to your destination.
Human beings will also increasingly become “walking sensors,” IBM said. Within five years, sensors in your phone, your car, your wallet plus your texts and tweets will create data that will give scientists a real-time picture of the environment around you. A whole class of ‘citizen scientists’ will emerge using their sensors to create massive data sets for research. The result will be more effective efforts to fight global warming, save endangered species and track invasive plants or animals that threaten ecosystems around the world.
Finally, IBM said, scientists will find better ways to recycle heat and energy from the huge data centers that power the millions of web sites around the world. Up to 50 percent of the energy consumed by data centers goes toward cooling air. Most of the heat extracted is then wasted because it is just dumped into the atmosphere. New technologies, such as novel on-chip water-cooling systems developed by IBM will provide heat for buildings in the winter and air condition them in the summer.

They were not mentioned in IBM’s “Next Five in Five” list, but the company is making large investments in multiple dimensions of healthcare. Breakthroughs are a certainty and technology will play a major role in containing healthcare cost while improving outcomes for patients. Stay tuned at healthdiscussions.net for updates on this topic.

Tags: batteries, data center, energy, green, hologram, holographic, hvac, IBM, research, traffic

IBM Happenings: Solar Energy

The months of January and February were busy ones at IBM with a flurry of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. See the list of the current press releases in the extended part of this posting and an index for prior months here. The major focus of the company is on a “smarter planet“, but underlying that is IBM Research. Much of what happens in the lab finds it’s way into the market as a solution to a problem.

One of the key problems facing all parts of the world today is the economical and clean production of energy. Solar energy in particular has seemed elusive for decades but progress is being made. In fact there may be breakthroughs on the horizon. IBM is not the first company you think of when it comes to solar energy — unless you look at the key challenges at hand and compare them to the core skills IBM has in the areas of microprocessor technology, materials science and manufacturing. Just last month IBM announced it has built a solar cell that set a new world record for efficiency and holds potential for enabling solar cell technology to produce more energy at a lower cost. Comprised of copper (Cu), tin (Sn), zinc (Zn), sulfur (S), and/or selenium (Se), the cell’s power conversion demonstrates an efficiency of 9.6 percent. That may not sound like much but it is 40 percent higher than what was previously possible.

“In a given hour, more energy from sunlight strikes the earth than the entire planet consumes in a year”,  says Dr. David Mitzi, who leads the team at IBM Research that developed the new solar cell. In spite of this, solar cells currently contribute less than 0.1 percent of the electricity supply. The issue is cost.  If solar energy can achieve a cost per watt comparable to conventional electricity generation, the world will be a different place. It is one of the great challenges and IBM is laser focused on it.

At some point the technology IBM researchers have pioneered may end up on the surface of the shingles on our homes and the roof of our cars.

Complete index of IBM Happenings

Tags: energy, IBM, IBM Research, solar, solar cell