I like this one as the tech involved looks/comes across about as novel as a spinning top, but the effect it creates (“proper” 3d display) is really quite novel. You wouldn’t want to put your hand too close to it, though….
In amongst all the buzz surrounding the Palm Pre launch at CES last week (including an up to 50% share price hike in one day) was something really interesting – and possibly game-changing in the longer term.
I’ve long thought that the youngest and heaviest users of technology today want just one one thing: to communicate. They don’t particularly care, fundamentally, how that communication is done. It just needs to be useful, usable, instantaneous and fun.
Say I get a message from a friend about meeting up later. Do I really care whether it’s email, SMS, twitter, facebook message, MMS or a blackberry message? No, I don’t. I just care about the message, and replying to it.
In fact, it actually gets in the way when I have to remember what technology the recipient has (it is a blackberry? will they get my email instantly, or should I SMS? Are they on Skype on the PC? etc. etc.) before I send a message.
So what have Palm done? They’ve created “Combined Messaging” – all the different kinds of message from one contact go under that one contact.
It just makes sense.
In the longer term, I believe that all the conduits of messaging (from Twitter to SMS even to email) will just become that – conduits. Invisible, unbranded, uninteresting. I don’t want to know how my telephone calls are routed, and I won’t want to know how my messages are routed!
To get the New Year off on a (sort of) positive note, I’ll quote Sir David Tang (who founded clothing firm Shanghai Tang):
Pessimism is the most serious cause for the global economic tsunami
David believes that by becoming more optimistic and positive, we can pick ourselves up from being a “broken Humpty Dumpty”. You can read more of his thoughts on pessimism as a self-fulfilling prophecy over at the Beeb, meanwhile in a completely unscientific aside, the use of the term “credit crunch” in searches on Google is on the way down (and I hope out):
I plan on being optimistic this year, just like last… Have a great year!
