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

In The Clouds (Part 4)

The August issue of PC Magazine began the “magazine’s” 30th year and I have not missed an issue, although this is the first one I read on the iPad with Zinio. If someone had described the iPad to me back in 1981 it would have seemed like science fiction. Even the PC at that time seemed an amazing breakthrough. The first PC had a 5.25 inch diskette drive and no hard drive. Anybody have their archives on 5.25 inch diskettes?I hope not because it might be hard to find a drive to read them.

The First Word column by Lance Ulanoff over at PC Mag this month was called Storage Evolution in which Lance discusses how storage has evolved from one type of media to another. When a new size or type of storage is introduced it always seems that the new paradigm will last forever. In the grand scheme of things the evolution looks more like pings on a radar screen. They come and they go.  Sony has just made a decision to end production of the 3.5 inch disks. When the CD became popular for backing up our files it seemed to be the ultimate. Then came the DVD and then double sided and double depth. External drives, zip drives, USB keys, tape cartridges, and perhaps holographic storage soon. Getting the latest and greatest to backup your data is the easy part. What about five years from now when you want to restore some data from your archived storage? Will you have a PC or Mac that has a device that can read the storage medium you had chosen five years prior? Maybe and maybe not.

Why not let someone else worry about all this? There is something about clouds that brings the term into our daily lives. We say “it is a cloudy day”, or “there is not a cloud in the sky”, or if we feel especially elated or happy we might say “I feel like I am on cloud nine“.  More and more people are answering the question of where is there backed up data with “it’s in the cloud”. Some people worry about whether it will be safe and secure in the cloud but from my perspective it is important to compare the risk to that of keeping such data on your own computer. In fact I would say that the risk of your data getting compromised at a cloud backup service is less than the risk of your hard drive crashing or having your laptop stolen at Laguardia Airport, or at some point of being unable to read the data because the storage medium is incompatable with your computer.

Cloud services companies have a lot more at stake than we do when it comes to maintaining high integrity for their operations. They will keep your backup data backed up and they will use whatever the most cost-effective storage media is. As new kinds of media come along they will adopt it and migrate all your data to it. Their problem, not yours. The argument for using them is compelling from my point of view. There are many companies that offer backup services including Mozy, Carbonite, and SOS. See PC Magazine for a review. I have been using idrive.com for quite some time and have found it very reliable. The services can be setup to automaticaly make backups while you are sleeping. You can have the backups run daily, weekly, or even continuously so that whenever a file changes on your computer a backup is made in the cloud. The best part is that you don’t have to buy any devices and worry about how compatible they may be in the future.

Is cloud computing for businesses or for consumers? It is for people. Businesses do not buy from businesses. People in businesses buy from people in businesses. People work at businesses and people work at home. Some people are students and some are e-tired. Clouds are all about making people more productive and increasingly the clouds will be where we will keep all of our data that feel is important.

Other patrickWeb stories that refer to “clouds”

Tags: backup, backup service, cloud, cloud computing, cloud services, diskette, dvd, holographic, ipad, media, pc magazine, storage, storage medium, tape, usb