10 technologies to watch in 2004
 

10 technologies to watch in 2004

By David Pescovitz
Business 2.0
Thursday, December 25, 2003 Posted: 12:54 AM EST (0554 GMT)


(Business 2.0) -- No, they're not quite ready for prime time. But in the year ahead, these promising innovations could start to hit the marketplace.

Home networking
Ultra-wideband: Imagine a television that can wirelessly send three different programs to separate monitors. Low-power, low-cost, and with roughly 45 times the data transmission speed of run-of-the-mill Wi-Fi, this wireless technology is finally ready to debut in the living room.

Supply chain
RFID: While they've been talked about a lot, radio frequency identification tags have yet to appear in a big way in the supply chain. Wal-Mart is making it happen: All its suppliers must use the tags for pallets and cases of merchandise by 2005.

Wireless broadband
802.16: WiMax enables wireless networks to extend as far as 30 miles and transfer data, voice, and video at faster speeds than cable or DSL. It's perfect for ISPs that want to expand into sparsely populated areas, where the cost of bringing in DSL or cable wiring is too high.

Energy
Micro fuel cells: Japan's largest wireless phone carrier, NTT DoCoMo, plans to introduce cell phones powered by miniature fuel cells -- which run on hydrogen or methanol -- late next year. Look for them to also show up as expensive add-ons for high-end laptops.

Household products
Gecko tape: Lizards climb walls using the mechanical adhesive force of millions of tiny hairs on their feet. A synthetic version of those microscopic hairs allows gecko tape, developed at England's University of Manchester, to stick to almost any surface without glue. Applications include gloves that allow a person to climb a glass wall, the ability to move computer chips in a vacuum, and new bandages.

Software
Antispam software (that works): If you've tried filters, whitelists, and blacklists, chances are you still receive plenty of junk e-mail. "Challenge/response" technology may be the answer; it requires senders to manually verify their identity before e-mail is passed along to the intended recipient.

Consumer electronics
OLEDs: Organic light-emitting diodes are brighter and use less power than normal light-emitting diodes. (They rely on carbon with nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen elements -- thus, the "organic" tag.) They're perfect for screens on cell phones, digital cameras, and camcorders, and even for a new crop of affordable flat-panel monitors.

Lighting
LED lightbulbs: LEDs will outrun obsolescence by moving into the home. Philips is already pushing its Luxeon line of LED lightbulbs, which can last 10 to 50 times as long as incandescent bulbs while consuming 80 percent less energy.

Computer memory
MRAM: Magnetoresistive random access memory is (in theory, anyway) more than 1,000 times faster than the fastest current nonvolatile flash memory and nearly 10 times faster than DRAM. "Nonvolatile" means it retains memory when the power is off. Add in its low power consumption, and it's perfect for use in an upcoming crop of computers and cell phones.

Medicine
Bioinformatics: Researchers, such as those at IBM Life Sciences, are finally getting a handle on building complex protein models to aid in drug discovery. The new, computationally accurate models mean that potential drugs can be identified more quickly and stand a better chance of working.

I think burning inflamed rectums are making a come back also :thumbsup

I hear footsteps of The Matrix..

Lets not forget health care for the rise cancer patients.

Its gonna be blamed on the new technologies of several different wireless waves scattering throughout the air.


Cellphones will become the next Big Tobbacco of today

I agree. I've been getting headaches when using my cellphone for longer than 3 minutes.

Fuck yeah!

where did you get the list from?

If they can get the 802.16 to develop correctly we will see the porn biz explode!

Finaly an interesting topic, good shit Rictor:thumbsup

awesome thread bro....

Why? So they can spank off to porn in a traffic jam? I think most people still perfer to look at porn while nobody is around. (Office or Home)

No, because it makes it easier and more attractive for households to get connected to broadband. Broadband is still only at a 25% penetration rate. We all know surfers spend more when the speed goes up.:glugglug

The thing I am most interested in recently is distributed computing...

For example the SETI network is MASSIVELY more powerful that the worlds top Supercomputer. The most powerful computer, IBM's ASCI White, is rated at 12 TeraFLOPS and costs $110 million. SETI@home currently gets about 15 TeraFLOPs and has cost $500K so far.

As an example that extends to what a lot of us do - Looksmart is trying to build a distributed computing powered search engine. Its currently in BETA.

Google has 10,000 servers in its server farm. No clue how many are involved in the crawling aspect - but probably less than 1,000.

The SETI network by comparison has 600,000 computers which could all be set to crawl different sections of the web and effectively wipe out Googles lead overnight.

Distributed computing has mostly been non-commercial but Berkley has announced it will take on commercial projects next year - many of them will be biotech related...

Anyway - Im sure many of you guys will think yeah so what - but personally I think it would become VERY interesting if this power was unleashed on the commercial sector.

I think hypersonic sound will be one of the most exciting technologies for 2004. Speakers that emit sound like a torch does light. You can point and shoot sound to a single person in a crowd and only they can hear it. Might not be the most practical technology but is certainly very cool and would be great for fucking with peoples heads, eg. x girlfriends etc.

http://www.atcsd.com/tl_hss.html