Technology Futures

Many a science fiction novel has included a device that can spit out any kind of product automagically simply by feeding in design specs for it. Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age is just one example with that kind of technology. But in this case, gee whiz scifi ideas are fast becoming ho-hum reality. Lockheed's Skunkworks airplane design facility has printed out an entire four ton airplane using 3D printing technology, which until recently has been used largely for models and short run fabrication of small parts. Most of the parts in the plane were fabricated using the 3D printing system and then assembled.

Economic developers: When was the last time you held a seminar for local businesses on this technology and its uses? What local businesses could benefit from this technology to improve its products or lower costs?

A three year old Philadelphia project to turn waste into gas, oil, and minerals has been so successful that the EPA and private investors are putting money behind expansion of the effort. One of the new sites will be in Missouri, near a turkey processing plant. The energy recycling plant will turn 200 tons of turkey guts into 10 tons of gas and 600 barrels of oil. The gas is used to power the plant, which is 85% efficient.

This looks like a free lunch because you get three for one; you reduce the amount of waste going into landfills, you get local production of energy products, and you reduce reliance on foreign oil.

The system uses exactly the same processes the earth uses to turn organic matter into oil, but while that takes millions of years for the earth to do it, using heat and pressure in the right amounts lets the energy plant accomplish the same thing in a few hours. The system is owned by Changing World Technologies, and while this has been tried before, the company developed a new approach that makes it much more efficient in terms of the amount of energy required for the conversion process.

This is just one more examply why the notion of running out oil--as a crisis--is looking at things from the wrong end of the telescope--it is an opportunity. How about your region? Do you have companies with significant waste streams of organic matter? Why not compete directly with the Middle East and become an oil and gas producer? It will reduce the strain on your landfill, create jobs, generate taxes, and diversify your local economy.

This article is a great summary of some of the new "Search 2.0" search engines that represent third generation technologies. The first generation of search engines were those that simply indexed the content of Web pages, with the venerable Alta Vista as the best example. Google defined second generation search technology, which looked at links to and from a Web page as a way of determining relevance.

Third generation search engines go well beyond the aging Google model, using intelligent clustering of results, natural language processing, and more human input to improve search results. Clusty is one of my favorites, which tries to cluster results into categories. This is especially helpful when a search query tends to include results from more than one topic area, which happens a lot. When you get search results back, you can quickly pick the appropriate cluster and whack out a lot of dreck. For example, if you put in the word 'record,' which can have different meanings in different contexts, Clusty returns 199 clusters, with the top ten results sets on the first page. It is pretty likely one of those sets is the correct one.

Another interesting one is Lexxe, which says it uses natural language processing to improve query results. It seems to work. The same two word query that Google coughed up 68,000 results for returned just 100 results in Lexxe.

One might reasonably ask why Google has not bothered to improve its search engine. Currently, the company probably thinks it does not have to--its quarterly earnings shot up again. But the Internet can turn on a dime, and I continue to believe that Google could fall, and fall quickly. In the meantime, try some of these new search engines; they save time and produce better results.

Rumors are flying that Apple will announce that the iTunes store will start carrying movies. Apple will hold its annual developers conference in a couple of weeks, and lots of people expect that Steve Jobs will show off the ability to download a movie and watch it at home. Supposedly Apple has struck deals with many of the major movie studios. What is likely is that the movies will have a time stamp that will allow you to watch them all you want for a limited amount of time (like a week or two). This would mirror going down to Blockbuster and renting a movie.

Of course, you will have to have a good broadband connection to do this, and services like this will begin to separate the men (cable modem broadband) from the boys (DSL). It is going to take a LOT longer to download these movies via most residential DSL connections (perhaps 2-3 times longer). But some may not notice too much, as you will have to plan the downloads in advance. Even with a cable modem, we are talking about hours, not minutes, and most people will probably order movies the night before they actually want to watch them.

Movie rental stores like Blockbuster are going to feel the squeeze unless they can develop their own download systems, which has been the Netflix plan all along (note that they did not call the company "Mailflix").