Oh, But The Home Of The Future Is Sooooo 1939

The future home will probably be equipped with a number of control centers, from any one of which the homemaker can give her commands to appliances at work in the kitchen and laundry. Electric ranges already are equipped with automatic controls for temperature and cooking time, but there is no practical reason why these operations together with the other appliances cannot be controlled remotely from any room the house."

- Popular Mechanics "The Electrice Home of the Future," Aug, 1939

The folks at the Industry Standard have offered up a new predictive look at the home of future, this time projecting ahead to 2013. The "Home Of The Future" is a common thought experiment that allows futurists, engineers, artists and business people to trace a path to the present by looking backwards from the future (hey, that sounds familiar), and the Industry Standard offers an interesting guide.

t's 2013, and you've just come home from work. As you pull into the driveway, you reach into your pocket and swipe the screen of your smartphone with your thumb. Your garage door opens and the lights in your house turn on. The TV queues up the shows you missed while you were working late. Your favorite songs are following you from the living room to the kitchen. Then you stop. The phone blinks and warbles at you. The fridge says you forgot the milk.

Welcome home.

In the following pages, you'll be treated to a glimpse of the toys and technologies that will grace your home in the not-so-distant future. If you are like most people, you probably have already sampled some of them, but others -- such as automated home control and personal applications of cloud computing -- haven't made it into people's homes ... yet.

Check out the full article here

Chris Anderson Speaks on Free.

Courtesy of the Jason Calcanis and the gang at Mahalo, Wired Editor-In-Chief and Long Tail stopped by to give an hour long talk on his new book: Free. Upon release, he will be giving it away, you guessed it... Free.

Both videos are about 30mins, so it's a 1 hour viewing time. There are some great tidbits in there, and some powerful, if admittedly unfinished ideas.

Link to Mahalo blog post:Mahalo Live Lunch with Chris Anderson

More Brilliantly Halting Prescience...

I was researching something and came across this old interview with Sherry Turkle, the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT (link to her personal site) in support of her 1996 book "Life On The Screen." Some choice tidbits (Dr. Turkle noted where appropriate, otherwise it's the author of the article, Pamela McCorduck):

"Mainframes were modernist, but computing slipped into postmodernism when people got personal computers. Computing continues its postmodern odyssey through the Internet to the most dramatic extreme: the creation of online communities containing online personae. With its screen surfaces, its learning by doing instead of learning the rules first, its hypertext (no one pathway through the text is the correct way or the best way), computing now is as postmodernist as it gets."

"In terms of technologies that have really changed people's deepest conceptions of self, we've had a long run with print," Turkle says. "Print has been a transparent medium for expressing a unitary self. Our cultural memory really doesn't go back to the time we felt we were inhabited by divinities, so we treat the sense of unitary self we've adapted from print as natural. But we're in the beginning of a profound shake-up of that sense of what a self is and what you take responsibility for and what you don't. Computers are central to this. I'm not saying that other technologies haven't changed us, I'm just saying that when you can embody your ideas in a machine that you can then go up and talk to - this is new. When you can have an instantiation of your body on a computer - this is new."

Read the Full (astonishingly well-written) article Here

Matthew Ingram: Twitter bears witness to the world

Matthew Ingram, The Globe And Mail's technology columnist, has advanced a truly exciting idea: namely that microblogging is our first line in the reporting of world events. Before the news stations can get a report out of a location, Twitterers are communicating the reality from a layperson's perspective. Moreover, he claims, Twitter provides a sort of 'first-hand account' of the events that shape our world, and that those who record and study history have new tools to determine what really happened, as it happened. Twitter is our brief, often honest first look at the events that will become the subject of history.

In any disaster, one of the first things that people look for — not just journalists, but readers too — is the eyewitness account, the first-person description, the man on the scene. Whenever something like the earthquake happens, thousands of editors and producers at newspapers, radio programs and TV networks clog the phones trying to reach someone, anyone, who can provide a personal account: they call homes, schools, stores, friends, distant relatives. What was it like? Where were you when it happened? What happened next?

Twitter is able to supply all of those things — and it’s also self-directed. People can post messages about whatever they wish, rather than answering only the questions that a producer asks them. In the study I wrote about recently that looked at Twitter and Facebook and Wikipedia as disaster reporting tools, one of the comments about the California fires was that the media focused on celebrities and how they were affected, but Twitter and other sources gave a more complete version of events and how they were affecting everyone. Paul Kedrosky calls it the democratization of headline news.

Link to full blog post

BBC NEWS | Technology | Web in infancy, says Berners-Lee

h/t to Slashdot for this one, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the individual credited with inventing the Web, claims that despite Web 2.0, the web is "still in its infancy," which is welcome news to those of us that have futurist aspirations.

One of the niftiest bits is the recollection by Berners-Lee colleague Robert Cailliau as to what should be charged for "the Web:"

"Cailliau helped draw up one of the early technical proposals for the web and later helped convince the directors at Cern to 'give the web away.'

'We had toyed with the idea of asking for some sort of royalty. But Tim wasn't very much in favour of that... If we had put a price on it like the University of Minnesota had done with Gopher then it would not have expanded into what it is now.'

'We would have had some sort of market share alongside services like AOL and Compuserve, but we would not have flattened the world.'"

Link to BBC article