Articles about Future Tech

First in a series. One thing about mature markets is they spawn opportunity through pure complexity. What does the press do but sit around discussing the size and depth and pimples on the bum of mature markets? But we spend so much time discussing the implications of what has already happened that we don’t give much space to what’s coming in the form of new ideas. So for the next week or so I’ll be doing a series of columns about new ideas, especially new technologies, that ought to interest us all.

Leading by example I’ll start with a project my kids and I have been working on this summer -- an electric airplane.

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Ghanaian cinema may have already shown us that 2016 is going to be an awesome year, but this week networking technology company Cisco released its Visual Networking Index Forecast which makes some big predictions about data traffic in the year 2016 that are pretty mind-blowing themselves.

Cisco's VNI whitepaper is built upon reputable third-party analyst projections, in-house forecasts, and hard data collection, and it is part of the company's initiative to track the growth of "visual networking," or the use of video as the central communicative and entertainment medium over IP connections, including TV-over-Internet, social video, and video on demand.
In it, Cisco makes a number of noteworthy predictions:

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At the Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Qatar this week, Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang put on his largest "explosion event" of the last three years, utilizing microchip-controlled explosives to form incredible designs and patterns. The video we've embedded of the event is an impressive testament to how a volatile black powder explosion can be controlled and shaped by computer.

Each set of explosions was calculated to paint a different picture. One series of explosions created black smoke clouds that looked like "drops of ink splattered across the sky."

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Oh, why did I sell my Nokia N900 smartphone last year? The N900 can now perform real-time brain scans right in the comfort of my home -- or yours. Seriously, it doesn't get much more geek than this. Watch the video, and you'll see.

I loved the N900. It truly was a pocket computer and shows just how much innovation Nokia can produce -- or did before CEO Stephen Elop killed off what he called the "burning platform". A team from Technical University of Denmark has created what they call the Smartphone Brain Scanner, built around the N900 and wireless 14-channel EEG headset. Arkadiusz Stopczynski, Carsten Stahlhut, Michael Kai Petersen, Jakob Eg Larsen and Lars Kai Hansen developed the scanner, which they promote with clever tagline: "Holding your brain in the palm of your hand".

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