Articles about Future Tech

The primary goal of technology should be to improve our lives in some way. So far that has seen us embrace computers, the Internet, smartphones and most recently wearable gadgets. However, many are predicting that the future will not see us hold or wear technology, but have it directly implanted into our bodies.

Already, the transhumanism movement is seeing technology implants gain greater acceptance, but many still feel uneasy about the ethics involved when we attempt to improve our bodies artificially. In response to the advances made in body modification technology, we’ve looked at five high-profile examples below.

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We’re only a few steps away from real-life Transformers. Or Terminators. Or both.

A recent report from the consulting firm McKinsey says the technology used to build the self-driving cars could end up in robots, benefiting the human race in many ways.

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Fresh from a few big mobile announcements at MWC, Qualcomm has announced a new fingerprint sensor technology to compete with Apple’s Touch ID.

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Sense ID is a new technology using ultrasonic waves to create a 3D fingerprint of the user, offering more depth than Touch ID, which uses an area-type capacitive 2D fingerprint.

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Samsung has announced that it has started mass-production of 128 GB ultra-fast embedded memory. Described as an industry first, the memory is based on the Universal Flash Storage (UFS) 2.0 standard and is 2.7 times faster than the commonly used eMMC 5.0.

With performance of 19,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second), the memory offers sequential read and write speeds comparable to SSDs. Despite this, the memory draws half the level of power of existing mobile memory.

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If you curse the speed of your mobile data connection, prepare to shake with fury, turn green with envy, and yearn for a time machine. Forget 3G, forget 4G; at the University of Surrey in the UK, researchers have harnessed the power of 5G to establish a data transfer rate of one terabit per second.

At this speed it would be possible to download a Blu-ray quality video in under a second, but it's likely to be some time before we have the chance to experience these sorts of speeds via our handsets.

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A drone designed to help with search and rescue operations has won the top prize of $1 million in the Drones for Good contest. The contest was held in the United Arab Emirates and when we mentioned Drones for Good a couple of weeks ago, we highlighted the Gimball entry from Flyability. It seems it wasn't just us that was impressed with this drone, as Gimball went on to win!

The Swiss drone was designed as "the world's first collision-tolerant flying robot" and it can help with search and rescue operations without fear of damaging itself or people in the area.

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I should read Harvard Business Review more often. There, Juan Pablo Vazquez Sampere offers insightful and fresh perspective in post: "We Shouldn’t Be Dazzled by Apple’s Earnings Report". Of course, I would agree, having written something similar in past BetaNews posts. Point is the same, just the context changed. I lack his prestige and venue, and that's okay. The observations we both make aren't rocket science, or shouldn't be.

Simply stated: Atop the pinnacle of success, Apple stands at the precipice of failure. The scrappy innovator is gone, replaced by the, ah, Establishment cofounder Steve Jobs and his renegades challenged with years of guerrilla tactics. Apple has in this decade achieved huge success. But managing success is challenging, if your business model is innovation. The two objectives often work cross-purposes.

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Both virtual reality and augmented reality attempt to immerse the users in ways that detach them from the real world, but the subtle differences between the two concepts may ultimately decide which, if either, becomes a mainstream success. While virtual reality or VR devices create a completely fabricated world for the user to inhabit, augmented reality (AR) creates a blend of real and virtual, with the user clearly able to distinguish between the two.

Despite both technologies being able to trace their lineage back more than 40 years to the early VR headset the Sword of Damocles, neither has found widespread traction with consumers. While there has been no shortage of failed attempts in the past, ranging from Nintendo’s Virtual Boy console to the Sensorama multimedia device, successes have been short-lived or non-existent.

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Every year in Las Vegas, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is the ultimate place to see what’s new in technology. CES showcases new innovative and next generation technologies -- It’s a global platform for innovation where cutting edge technologies are revealed to the world. And this year’s show didn’t disappoint. Smart homes, ever advanced wearable devices, wireless home entertainment systems and even personally owned drones all had top billing at the show.

However, whilst the gadget geeks there were clearly bursting with excitement, the network administrators/IT Professionals/IT Managers I’ve spoken to seem to be scared witless as reality dawns on the practicalities of all of this. Issues such as bandwidth hogging, security vulnerabilities and the headache of ensuring compliance were the main areas of concern voiced to me at the show. Here follows the six technologies emerging from CES with the most potential to disrupt the business and network:

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Robots are after my job. They’re after yours as well, but let us deal with my problem first. Associated Press, an American multinational nonprofit news agency, revealed on Friday that it published 3,000 articles in the last three months of 2014. The company could previously only publish 300 stories. It didn’t hire more journalists, neither did its existing headcount start writing more, but the actual reason behind this exponential growth is technology. All those stories were written by an algorithm.

Last summer the publication partnered with Automated Insights -- a US-based company that provides real-time content automation services to "transform data into narratives, visualizations and applications" -- to begin automating quarterly earnings reports using the software company’s patented Wordsmith platform. The algorithm is churning out business reports -- something which requires a human to have a scrupulous understanding of the market, drink a lot of latte, and be damn accurate and quick -- at an incredible pace.

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To celebrate the fact we are now in the year Marty McFly was teleported to, yesterday we had a look back at what Back to the Future II creator Robert Zemeckis got right in his look forward to the year 2015 where he envisaged everything from smart homes and wearables to hoverboards.

There was, of course, also a whole lot he got wrong about the future, and here’s a rundown of the things that didn’t go according to his vision.

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Marty McFly visits the year 2015 in Back to the Future Part II, the sequel to Robert Zemeckis’ 1985 masterpiece "Back to the Future".

Now that we’ve finally hit the year portrayed in the film it’s time to give them a report card on the things they got right.

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Bill Gates is more readily associated with philanthropy than technology these days, but that’s not to say he doesn’t still have more than a passing interest in the world of tech. In their annual letter, Bill and Melinda Gates look 15 years into the future, envisioning a world in which the life in poor countries has improved dramatically.

Technological advancements are key to this vision, and the Gates refer to the importance of mobile banking, cheaper tablets and smartphones, as well as improvements to crops and vaccines. It's 15 years since the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was created, and the couple are making a bet that "the lives of people in poor countries will improve faster in the next 15 years than at any other time in history".

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The humble drone has something of a poor reputation. If it's not seen as a tool for surveillance, then it's a silly toy for those with too much time on their hands to strap a GoPro to and record aerial footage. More recently Amazon has trialled fast deliveries by drone, but a new competition aims to show the incredible things than can be achieved with the unmanned devices.

Drones for Good is an international competition which offers a prize of $1 million for the best and most innovative use of drones. The competition was announced at the Government Summit 2014, hosted by the United Arab Emirates, and has attracted interest from around the world, with entrants from dozens of countries. The list of semi-finalists includes some incredible ideas for how drones could be used to make the world a better place.

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Whether you are an at-home computer nerd, video gamer, or office professional, there is probably something that fuels your days -- caffeine. While technically a drug, many people around the world depend on it for extra pep. Energy drinks like Red Bull and Monster are all the rage nowadays, but coffee is a much more sophisticated beverage.

Many coffee-snobs turn up their noses at Keurig coffee brewers, but I swear by them. Why? Well, the single-serve pods make for an easy clean-up, and quite frankly, produce a great cup of coffee. Plus, you can also use Keurig machines to make things like hot chocolate and tea. Today, GE announces a refrigerator with an integrated single-serve Keurig brewer. This is the convergence that computer nerds dream about!

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