5 Trends That Will Drive The Future Of Technology

Greg Satell, Contributor

Google's Project Glass. (Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife)

Trends get a bad rap, mostly because they are often equated with fashions.  Talk about trends and people immediately start imagining wafer thin models strutting down catwalks in outrageous outfits, or maybe a new shade of purple that will be long forgotten by next season.
Yet trends can be important, especially those long in the making.  If lots of smart people are willing to spend years of their lives and millions (if not billions) of dollars on an idea, there’s probably something to it.
Today, we’re on the brink of a new digital paradigm, where the capabilities of our technology are beginning to outstrip our own.  Computers are deciding which products to stock on shelves, performing legal discovery and even winning game shows.  They will soon be driving our cars and making medical diagnoses.  Here are five trends that are driving it all.

1. No-Touch Interfaces

We’ve gotten used to the idea that computers are machines that we operate with our hands.  Just as we Gen Xers became comfortable with keyboards and mouses, Today’s millennial generation has learned to text at blazing speed.  Each new iteration of technology has required new skills to use it proficiently.

That’s why the new trend towards no-touch interfaces is so fundamentally different.  From Microsoft’s Kinect to Apple’s Siri to Google’s Project Glass, we’re beginning to expect that computers adapt to us rather than the other way around.
The basic pattern recognition technology has been advancing for generations and, thanks to accelerating returns, we can expect computer interfaces to become almost indistinguishable from humans in little more than a decade.

2. Native Content

While over the past several years technology has become more local, social and mobile, the new digital battlefield will be fought in the living room, with Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple and the cable companies all vying to produce a dominant model for delivering consumer entertainment.
One emerging strategy is to develop original programming in order to attract and maintain a subscriber base.  Netflix recently found success with their “House of Cards” series starring Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright.  Amazon and Microsoft quickly announced their own forays into original content soon after.
Interestingly, HBO, which pioneered the strategy, has been applying the trend in reverse.  Their HBO GO app, which at the moment requires a cable subscription, could easily be untethered and become a direct competitor to Netflix.

3. Massively Online

In the last decade, massively multiplayer online games such as World of Warcraft became all the rage.  Rather than simply play against the computer, you could play with thousands of others in real time.  It can be incredibly engrossing (albeit a bit unsettling when you realize that the vicious barbarian you’ve been marauding around with is actually a 14 year-old girl).
Now other facets of life are going massively online.  Khan Academy offers thousands of modules for school age kids, Code Academy can teach a variety of programming languages to just about anybody and the latest iteration is Massively Online Open Courses (MOOC’s) that offer university level instruction. (For a good example, see here).
The massively online trend has even invaded politics, with President Obama recently reaching out to ordinary voters through Ask Me Anything on Reddit and Google Hangouts.

4. The Web of Things

Probably the most pervasive trend is the Web of Things, where just about everything we interact with becomes a computable entity.  Our homes, our cars and even objects on the street will interact with our smartphones and with each other, seamlessly.
What will drive the trend in the years to come are two complementary technologies:  Near Field Communication (NFC), which allows for two-way data communication with nearby devices and ultra-low power chips that can harvest energy in the environment, which will put computable entities just about everywhere you can think of.
While the Web of Things is already underway, it’s difficult to see where it will lead us.  Some applications, such as mobile payments and IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative, will become widespread in just a few years.   Marketing will also be transformed, as consumers will be able to seamless access digital products from advertisements in the physical world.
Still, as computing ceases to be something we do seated at a desk and becomes a natural, normal way of interacting with our environment, there’s really no telling what the impact will be.

5. Consumer Driven Supercomputing

Everybody knows the frustration of calling to a customer service line and having to deal with an automated interface.  They work well enough, but it takes some effort.  After repeating yourself a few times, you find yourself wishing that you can just punch your answers in or talk to someone at one of those offshore centers with heavy accents.
Therein lies the next great challenge of computing.  While we used to wait for our desktop computers to process our commands and then lingered for what seemed like an eternity for web pages to load, we now struggle with natural language interfaces that just can’t quite work like we’d like them to.
Welcome to the next phase of computing.  As I previously wrote in Forbes, companies ranging from IBM to Google to Microsoft are racing to combine natural language processing with huge Big Data systems in the cloud that we can access from anywhere.
These systems will know us better than our best friends, but will also be connected to the entire Web of Things as well as the collective sum of all human knowledge.  The first of these, IBM’s Watson, costs $3 million to build, but that price will drop to about $30,000 in ten years, well within the reach of most organizations.

When Computers Disappear

When computers first appeared, they took up whole rooms and required specialized training to operate them.  Then they arrived in our homes and were simple enough for teenagers to become proficient in their use within a few days (although adults tended to be a little slower).  Today, my three year old daughter plays with her iPad as naturally as she plays with her dolls.
Now, computers themselves are disappearing.  They’re embedded invisibly into the Web of Things, into no-touch interfaces and into our daily lives.  While we’ve long left behind loading disks into slots to get our computers to work and become used to software as a service – hardware as a service is right around the corner.
That’s why technology companies are becoming increasingly consumer driven, investing in things like native content to get us onboard their platform, from which we will sign onto massively online services to entertain and educate ourselves.
The future of technology is, ironically, all too human.

 ==========================================================================================  Explode Your INCOME. Make more money with a powerful online Home Business. You can earn a Full time Income on a Part Time basis while keeping your current Job. When you Love the Idea of Network Marketing and Residual Income, but HATE Cold Calling & Having to Pitch your Friends and Family... You Earn cash while Surfing the Web. Earn cash for Referrals with Trusted Programs. Check it out:

1. You’ve got to have a website or a blog, of course the easiest and most practical Way to Promote Referral Items.
2. Use Valid Email Address.
3. Signing up free for an account with a payment processor such as "Payza".
4. With this in place, join various network sites hosting merchants' products/services. There's usually no charge. You join; you get your own referral link code, so that you can send people to the destination with your own code branded into it. This way, the merchant can determine that the sale was originated by you and you earn a commission.
 5. Choose from the more popular sites for information and/or hard products or services. Many of the products or services offer very generous commissions.                            
6. You can also examine the links that appear here and join the sites.
We have spent the time and put in much effort to create for you something extraordinary! Go to the websites, relax, watch the videos, and get ready...they Can Easily Make you Financially Independent and many more!. You will have more reliable ones as you continue to hang on this blog
 7. Once you joined, just do a search in the network company to find your favorite product/service.
 8. Grab your code and promotional creative, text, banners, etc.
9. Place the link on your website.
10. Go ahead and promote your website. You should get many visitors to your website in order to be able to get enough sales.
11. Do a review of the product/service of your website and make a recommendation. A very good way is to review products/services and point out their pros and cons and rate them according to their quality.
12. Even better is to have your own experience with that product/service and share it with your visitors.
13. Only a small number of your visitors are likely to follow your advice and buy and this also provided that you've done an honest and good job promoting it.
14. You should take a look from time to time in the stats in your account at the network company to see how you perform. The good thing is that you don't necessarily have to deal with the merchants. You can just join a reliable and reputable network hosting the products/services and doing all the work for you.
Click here to check out some of the best PTC sites.




So what are the risks?  With any new start up company you are at risk if the company doesn’t make it. Plain and simple. If you focus on promoting only one product, service, affiliate program or business opportunity and it doesn’t sell or the company goes down – you have nothing! But when you create multiple streams of income – if one of the streams dries up – it’s a bummer but not catastrophic.
 
Here, we will always preach the power of PRODUCTIVE LIVING and of creating MULTIPLE STREAMS OF INCOME as a way to help you make for yourself a large, stable, diverse, passive residual income with less effort and less cost. Earn instant multiple income streams daily. Keep coming back to the blog as we keep on identifying the best methods, unique strategies, effective techniques to earn unlimited income from paid to click, surf, read, promote and sign up excellent passive income sources. These are revolutionary ways to make money online. We select, review and recommend to our associates the best PTC paying sites. In a nutshell, we are helping thousands of people worldwide become their own boss from their own home. The best part is No matter how much experience you have online you can make money month after month! So, Stay subscribed for more-make-money tips & tricks...

Read The Myth of Easy. Why You Don’t Want Easy Online Marketing

Are you interested in generating income from Transport Partnership Click here to check it out!

Join our Facebook Page because we want to connect with all of you as the individuals you are, rather than random statistics and figures on our blog counter. With this page, we hope to know all of you better as readers, individuals and friends. At the moment, there are over 9319 amazing Fortune Fair readers (as of 03-Jun-2013) on the page.

If you’d like to give us a chance to know you better, we sincerely invite you to connect with us on our Facebook Page and Follow us on Twitter. We’ll greatly value your friendship and make the effort to read every message or tweet and reply where we can. Click here to refresh yourself.