The future of the internet

Maybe like myself you have got used to your internet speed, maybe you are quite content, it works and you don't need any further improvements nor do you understand what this would achieve.Well 4g L.T.E. is coming to a city near you soon!  This is great in two ways, firstly it means the government is expected to earn about £4billion in licensing, which is great for the state of this country.  Maybe they took advice of Microsoft and Apple how to license off intangbile stuff, I mean they are licensing radiowaves, sounds weird to the layman, but if it helps the country so be it.

4g and you

The second reason is that finally our "modern" society are privileged enough to be receiving faster mobile broadband (4g) or L.T.E. as it's known. Though of course we are not the first, look at this article I read last year, 4g in Russia!  Though I should not complain a couple of villages away from my home have only had broadband (ADSL) a few years and have been on dial up up until then!  Also you must remember that the government promises fast broadband to all of the UK BY 2015 so you may have the option of mobile or land line broadband or both (for the greedy)!

To some of you this means nothing, but fast broadband is such a big deal to many people and businesses, that media companies can finally offer useful services to mobile people.  With streaming becoming mainstream to many households you will finally be able to access everything everywhere (I don't work for orange) just like the slogan goes.  For those unaware EE (everything everywhere) is the new trading style of Orange and the first to role this out around the major UK cities, which is great considering I just moved to the country!

Imagine your watching your favourite program or recording or a live event and someone says hey wana meet down the pub, well you can get your mobile out and watch it till you arrive at the destination.  Or for those households that someone hoggs the tv, you will be able to watch something else on your phone, tablet or pc whilst your downloading your favourite legal music downloads, your kids are playing on the latest angry birds etc.  It will also mean technology could change so that computers no longer need storage capabilities (cd drives/dvd drives/hard drives) so everything you ever do is in the cloud and accessible everywhere, but hey I expect we are going that way anyway.

I think the great thing about the potential of the technology is it will offer you choice, so for those who don't want landlines or move frequently, they can simply get a mobile contract that offers the benefit of quality internet where ever they go and not just one house in a street.   My (business) thoughts are that you could get a mobile contract and share this connection around a local area and share the cost and speed, maybe something I could suggest and create my own start up.

Anyway, as the advert says, the future is bright, the future is orange?

Return of slavery?

Technology has certainly changed many peoples lives, whether this is for the good or bad of humanity, but along with this brought a whole new level of intelligence.  Although this story relates to the ability of humans working algorithms, I am more referring to the level of autonomous systems or applications available, at the touch of a few key strokes.

Over the last few decades, only the educated scientist and geek could program his computer device to do things for him, this has radically changed over the last few years to the extent that we rely on computers and have no idea how to do things for ourselves.  You can think back to simple things like passwords, years ago you had to remember your password otherwise you would be in trouble with your IT department, now you can choose "remember your password" on your browser.

Moving this level of intelligence forward there are tools available now to help you automate tasks, that can save you time and stop you from boring repetitive tasks, after all computers were invented to help humans.  I draw your attention to ifttt.com, a truly useful and unique site that allows you to perform so many different tasks its unbelievable.  You can automatically get it to email you, text you, search for you, grad RSS feeds, grab news, upload, download to many of the popular tools and social media sites you use.  This may sound good, but think of the practicalities, if someone updates a web page it will trigger to send an email to you, wow, this saves time.  How about downloading photo's from facebook when you get tagged, imagine how much time that costs you, looking through feeds!  How about emailing or texting you today's weather forecast?  Really the only limits are the sites they can work with and your imagination.

Then suddenly I read today about a similar service but this one is an (beta) app for Android (iOS in development) that uses trigger in the same way iftt.com does, so this could perform tasks for you on your phone while you drive or walk around or go for a jog.  The product is called Atooma and looks nice and simple to use.  All you have to do is think of what actions a phone can perform, text, telephone, record, speak and of course has built in GPS if enabled, so you only have to imagine how location could be used with events.

Taking an overall look at these facilities you can look forward to many more services to make your life easier, soon you may not need to do anything for yourself.  With autonomous systems advancing maybe they will run your life, remind you to occasionally think, do your work for you, tell you the best response to immortal human questions.  Hell, maybe they will learn enough to communicate with each other, so we no longer have to go out and work for our salary?  So who will be the slave, us or machine?...............  Times are changing, technology advancements will change history, excited?