Technology Futures

Here is an interesting iPod gadget: a multimedia center designed for the kitchen. Not only can you plug in your iPod and listen to music, but it will also play video content from your iPod. It has a fold down LCD display, a TV tuner, an AM/FM radio, a clock, and a cooking timer. It is designed to mount under a cabinet, so it could replace a lot of stuff that takes up counter space.

This article [link no longer available] speculates on whether or not Google has a mobile phone in the works. It would make sense for Google to do that, since Google now has a wide array of Web-enabled applications and services that would work nicely on a large screen mobile phone. The phone and its associated service might even be free or very low fee; if it was, Google would recover its costs by restricting what users can do on the phone and/or by interspersing ads with service access (you might have to view an ad to make a phone call or do a search).

Google is also likely to include GPS capabilities, since this would enhance its mapping and ad services. A phone with GPS could provide "you are here" capabilities when delivering a Google map, and the phone could also localize ads. As you walk down the street, your phone could beep at you to tell you that there is a Domino's Pizza a half block away and why don't you stop in for a personal pizza?

The phone will likely be popular with casual users who don't mind the intrusiveness of advertising, but a lot of people will not care for it.

I was at a regional bloggers conference yesterday, where several bloggers spoke about blogging and the value of bloggers to the community as well as the value of business-oriented blogs. One of the invited speakers was a local TV newsperson who has a fairly lightweight blog, and while this person started off talking about blogging, they quickly veered into a fingerpointing lecture about how "real" journalists have gone to journalism school and are trained in the ethics of reporting the news. It went downhill from there. It was particularly comical coming from a news organization that frequently has breathless reports on things like "Dust Bunnies: Are they hazardous to your health and what you NEED TO KNOW!!" Okay, I made that up, but it is not far off the mark. Some area bloggers are actually doing a very good job of covering more local and neighborhood level news, like Keith Clinton's Southeast Roanoke blog, which is a great example.

I have maintained for a long time that traditional news organizations have a healthy and even profitable future if they can adapt to the new realities of the news business, but at least some of them are apparently going to do so kicking and screaming. It was clear from this person's talk that they did not taking blogging seriously, as they said that they "did not have time" for blogging because they were "busy writing news stories." Um, maybe that's the whole point....if you are busy writing news stories, that's content for a news blog. But that clearly went way over their heads. I am not one who thinks that everyone will be blogging in the future; good blogs require good writing, and good writing has nothing whatsoever to do with technology. Access to easy blogging tools does not make you a good writer automatically. That's why most blogs are abandoned in less than three months. But blogging is a new kind of writing and yes, journalism tool. Every business and organization ought to know the basics of blog tools, how they work, and should be able to make an informed decision about whether or not to use blogging as part of an organizational or community strategy. And that includes economic developers.

In what has to be the greatest use of technology ever, someone has developed a refrigerator that not only keeps cans of beer cold but also tosses them across the room to you so you don't have to get up off the couch. The remarkably simple system is highly accurate, and can be aimed remotely so that people sitting in different parts of the room can also get a beer with no more effort than moving an arm (to catch the beer).

In a perfect example of why the Internet is beginning to melt down under the load of video, this particular video clip has already been viewed more than a million times.