Technology Futures

The Intelligent Community Forum has announced the twenty-one community candidates for 2015. This year's submissions come from diverse locations ranging from Kazakhstan to Kenya and Taiwan to the United States. The Smart21 represent a cross section of the world with five communities from the United States, four from Australia and four from Taiwan as well as three Canadian cities. Plus one each from Kazakhstan, Brazil, Japan, Kenya and New Zealand. More than 300 communities submitted nominations.

I have been a juror for the final seven for several years now, and it has been interesting to read about these communities, as they validate what I have observed in my own work reaching back into the early nineties.

The communities that are successful with their broadband initiatives are almost always the ones that have taken the time to answer the question, "What do we want to be in ten years?" "What do we want to offer as a community to keep people here and to attract families and businesses?"

Answering these questions is hard work, takes time, and requires developing a consensus in the community about where to invest time and energy. But it pays off with often dramatic results. Another thing I have observed about the top ICF candidates is that they plan and execute for the long haul--that is, they don't think that there are silver bullets out there that will solve all their problems magically. ICF communities succeed because they work at being successful.

How about this for a future trend? Being treated for Google Glass addiction...A patient who checked into a rehab facility was experiencing involuntary physical tics (constantly tapping his temple to turn the glasses on), and among other issues, was experiencing dreams in which the dream itself was being viewed in Google Glass. There were other psychological issues with the patient, so it is not clear which came first. But dreaming in Google Glass "view" is creepy and worrisome.

I get asked all the time a variant of the same question: "Isn't this whole Internet thing just about done?" What they are trying to ask is if most of the interesting stuff has already happened. If we were talking about the impact of the automobile, then we are only at about 1920, when Henry Ford began mass producing cars and they really started to become affordable.

Another things people ask me is, "What can you do with all that bandwidth?"

Well, how about making things? Dremel, a major manufacturer of hobby and consumer power tools, has announced it will be releasing a 3D printer in time for Christmas. For $1000, you get a small, well-packaged 3D printer with the software you need to start making stuff. And you will want that fast Internet connection to start downloading and uploading the CAD files that are used to drive the 3D printer.

I first became interested in 3D printing twenty years ago when I read The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. Stephenson, in that novel, predicted very accurately a world where nearly anything could be made on the spot in your home by a device no larger than a refrigerator. In the book, carbon, which is basically clean, cheap dirt, was used as the raw product, so most finished "printed" items were made of diamond.

The fun is just beginning....onward to infinity and beyond!

Following on the ridiculously over-priced acquisition of the smart thermostat company (Nest) by Google--they spent BILLIONS on a thermostat, we are now seeing . If you read the language about the ZEN thermostat, they are taking a direct swipe at the over-priced and over-rated Nest thermostat.

Good for them. Competition is a wonderful thing, and Google will never, ever get their money back because competing products like ZEN are going to crush Nest.

The ZEN appears to support heat pumps, which are widely used in the southeast and the south...but here's the thing....heat pumps don't do well if you are constantly changing the temperature. They are most efficient if you set the temperature to one thing and leave it. That's what I do, and I have very modest heating and cooling bills. During the heating season, if you start monkeying with the temperature, the "auxiliary" heat kicks in, which is just an electric heater built into the heat exchanger. And that electric heat makes your electric meter spin like an out of control merry go round.

So the ZEN thermostat is attractive, but I cannot come up with a single reason to buy one, other than the cool factor. And I'm way beyond cool.

I don't want smart dishwashers and smart-aleck dryers and obesity-checking snitch refrigerators sending everything I eat to my doctor whether I want it to or not. Just because those things CAN be done does not mean they should be done. And it makes everything cost more.