Caught cold feet? Switch on your WiFi

It's been long since I wanted to write this. 7 changes that will rock the world in the next 10 yrs. Not surprisingly, I started writing this blog on Sunday, 19th Apr and it realized only today, 22nd Jun 2009!~

1. Auto
The Auto Industry will consolidate to a large extent and it'll be a world of fewer Combis and Powerhorses. Small, fuel efficient cars will triumph. Analysts predict that Plug-In Hybrids and pure Electric cars will make up almost a third of the new car sales in the US by 2020. Companies to watch are Toyota and GM (if it sustains till then).
However, there's a catch in here. I always wondered whether the much hyped Hybirds are really friendly on the Environment; whether they in fact contribute to a greener world. This ambiguity was squashed by a recent research done on it by IEEE (rather IEEE Fellows). It is clear that the effectiveness of a green Hybird car will solely depend on how green will be the Grid that kick starts it. This means that Hybrid Cars do not necessarily contribute to a greener world as long as the Electricity that it needs churns out almost the same amount of CO2 as any normal car would! The study points that a typical hydro electric generating plant powered by coal spews ~110g/km of CO2 whereas an Audi A3 with 110 BHP (which can effortlessly take you flyin at 200 km/hr) spits only 135g/km!!! So, sustainability folks - talk about greener Grids please.


2. Business Applications (for ex: ERP)
My favorite. No prizes for guessing where it comes from:) Being in this industry for a while, have never watched it closer than now.
Software as a Service (SaaS) is getting increasingly popular, more so with the current recession hit world. Enterprises are spending less and less on the huge, on-premise implementations with much cheaper On-demand versions available from umpteen vendors out there. IT spending will dwindle to less than 2% and Enterprises will start using remote, virtual Cloud services. IEEE will come up with yet another standard for Cloud computing security and vendors will rush; this time too many of 'em. Companies to watch are Amazon, IBM and Google.

Does it mean that the vendors for large enterprises will cease to exist? I doubt. With implementations that handle millions of transactions per second writing about 2.5 Tbytes to the DB - - its hard to see it collapsing in the next few decades. Let me revist this blog in 2025:)


3. Collaboration
Loads of changes happening here:

Conventional Postal service, standard desk phones will become extinct, rather, to play safe, definitely be endangered. With VoIP replacing standard telephony and cloud services on the surge, Talking will become dirt cheap or even free.

Collaboration will be seamless. I love to quote this from an article I read a while back "You shall be able to google your lost keys". Just recently, I learnt from a friend of mine that Geeks at MIT are working on a concept of realising Technology to the levels of Nirvana - code named Sixth Sense - augments reality with a pendant picoprojector: hold up an object at the store and the device blasts relevant information onto it (like environmental stats, for instance), which can be browsed and manipulated with hand gestures. The Sixth Sense in question is the internet, which naturally supplies the data, and that can be just about anything -- MIT has shown off the device projecting information about a person you meet at a party on that actual person - - watch this - well, you may dislike the gentleman there but worth watchin it for 3 mins.

Mergers and Acquisitions will be more than ever. We'll see a consolidation in the industry. The mantra will be "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em". While I write this, the news flashed on my screen that Oracle does it again! It acquires Sun.

Business will dramatically change and so will the driving models. Customer is gonna rule - at last (am being a bit ambitious here, but lets see). Companies that doesn't cater to Customer's needs and add absolute value are gonna get butchered. The design will be absolutely user centric, accessibility and usability will be the key differentiators.

Companies to watch are Microsoft, Google, Blackberry, Apple, Adobe and SAP


4. Nuclear energy (A topic which is offtrack but can't help:(
The World will dig out more and more of Uranium and all its usable Isotopes to generate cleaner energy. US and France will play the role of a Big brother to other fellow countries.

Many European countries will begin outsourcing power generation to cheaper countries like India and China. This in my opinion will be the most important and the must do change if we need a better life in the next 50 years. The figures from the World Nuclear Association indicate that that even today, ~50% of the world's electricity is generated through Coal and Oil powered Plants. At this rate, I believe it doesn't take long to exhaust the fossil fuels.

Using Nuclear Energy for Power generation contributes to cleaner Grids and better Sustainability. Lets hope for 0 power cuts in Countries like India in 2020!


5. Healthcare - Powered by Intel. Take it with a pinch of salt.
Intel in collaboration with GE is working on a Chip meant to be implanted in Human bodies that indexes information upto 2million parameters every minute (starting from heartbeat to neural snaps). The Chip by itself is 20*10*2 mm. It is made of a special material that is absolutely harmless when implanted. It can be implanted anywhere, recommended part being Hands. It is automatic, in the sense that it is powered by the heart beats (strange but true).

The Chip reader is being designed by GE wherein the information on all the 2 million parameters are correlated, verified and validated against the best fit/ideal Body condition. The reader then gives a report of the probable illness and the root cause as well enabling Doctors to do further diagnosis (should there be a need). The idea is to have the Chip implanted and the Owner can get his chip read at the card reader in case he wants to have a preventive checkup or a reactive probe. No more XRays/CT/MRI, no more registration at hospitals and chaotic waiting times.

Intel is also working on a model where the data can be read remotely via wireless. Of course, data protection and privacy, security are the parameters that are yet to be looked into.
So, got cold feet? Turn on your WiFi...... This breakthrough innovation will revolutionize Healthcare - - as long as it is not my fantasy:)

Now, I let go the last two changes and ask you folks to shoot out your thoughts on changes that you expect to see in the coming decade. Do you see people visiting Mars for a vacation/a comet hitting Earth and givin us salvation/Robots finally replacing Humans/????

Park and Fly. Courtesy - Blackberry

Last week, I had to fly out of town to Greece from Frankfurt International Airport. Recession in Germany impelled me to look for the most cost effective option available to commute to and from the Airport. My flight ticket had cost me about 48 Euros and I was reluctant to spend anything more than that. The strikingly disciplined State owned Deutsche Bahn (DB) would cost me ~ 50 Euros! One of my colleagues suggested me to look for private ParkPlatz (Parking Place) near to Frankfurt which offer cheaper options.

Google came to my rescue and phew! was soon on the page of Park and Fly! The parkplatz was located 15 kms away from the Airport but all I had to to do is drive to the parplatz with a time buffer of 20 mins. The personnel at the parkplatz would drop me back to the Airport immediately and even pick up on my return!! Was indeed surprising. The cost? 40 bucks - dirt cheap; having given the fact that I can call for hitch hikers. I make 20 bucks from the hitch hikers and shell out 20 more from my pocket. Sounded a great deal.

I managed to get two hitch hikers, dropped them at the Terminal and drove to the Parkplatz. It was an irregular open piece of land of about 10000 sq ft fully occupied with Autos (German name for Cars) I got in and squeezed my Audi into a corner, collected the receipt and was on my way back to the Airport in his car. Took about 15 mins and I put my naive German into test to talk a bit to the Business User.

While he was getting incessant calls, I almost immediately guessed he's a busy man. He told me that the parkplatz is open 24*7 with just two people managing the show. My only question was how does he manage all appiontments during such peak times. He then gave me the complete picture within the next 10 mins (as any German would do)

He gets requests from three sources: Internet (through his website), phone calls, or people who drive in to take a chance. Each of the requests from the website gets logged into his MS Outlook through a simple program that he got done from a small time company. The appointments from Calls are manually transferred to Outlook by whomever receives the call, so is the case when people just drive in. This was the setup since 2 years and it worked fine but they were pissed off by this tedious process of looking into their calendars every now and then and making note in a scrap/make calls between both of them almost 50 times a day.

Since last two months, they have a Blackberry and bingo!!! There was a sudden gush of eternal satisfaction on his face the moment he waved his blackberry at me. He synchronises it with Outlook and he's on the move! His car is now clean without stickies and scraps, has a cool head; he's on top of his business and most importantly, he has happy customers. He says when he picks up the customers on time on their arrival - they're almost everytime so amazed that they return!

That was a business case for me. And so he was a Business User. Enquired about cost benefit and he grinned:) Ofcourse, a bit of investment but he's happy to have a relaxed smoke while waiting for his customer in the Terminal than breaking his head into the crap PC:)

A small time parkplatz owner using technology to ease his life. Go baby Go!