O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference is a four day meeting of geeks and inventors who share an interest in the technology we’ll take for granted five years from now. As I was traveling to sunny San Diego for the conference, I prepared myself to have an open mind about what our peers think the future holds.
I wasn’t prepared, however, to be hit with a stark revelation of the present from Mike Walsh during his talk about the evolution of media in Asia. Mike reported that half of the top-selling works of fiction in the first six months of 2007 in Japan were composed on mobile phones. Furthermore, there are over 72 million blogs in China, and 36% of them are active.
Similarly, during Dan Morrill’s presentation on Android, he mentioned that the mobile phone’s penetration in European markets is greater than 100%, meaning there’s more than one mobile phone for every person on the continent. So while you might consider mobile internet and blogging to be emerging technologies (compared to, say, the copy machine), you would be wrong. They’re evidently about as mainstream as the television, and maybe even more so.
What was “emerging” a mere five years ago has already become yesterday’s news. Talking about the rate of acceleration itself has even become somewhat mundane. So what’s next, according to the speakers at ETech? So far, here’s what has struck me:
- Bug Labs presented about BUG, their way to enable the long tail of gadgets by providing a variety of hardware modules that can be snapped together to create almost any device imaginable.
- Quinn Norton presented her thoughts about our bodies, the freedom to use technology to learn more about them, the freedom to modify and enhance them, and the dangerous social effects of this technology’s inevitable misuse.
- Kyle Machulis talked about something fascinating, hackable, and utterly utopian that you shouldn’t read about if you’re at work right now.
- Peter Norvig utterly amazed me with his talk about how relatively simple algorithms applied to massive amounts of data can yield interesting results.
- Michael Shiloh from OpenMoko gave us all a rundown of his company’s mobile Linux distribution and Neo handset…which hopes to prove that badass hardware + open development = the best mobile device ever.
- In his evening keynote, Lawrence Lessig strongly protested the extent of corruption in government, and suggested that the solution just might require the next great American heroes: geeks like us.
Naturally, we may find all of these things (and more) to be commonplace by the time ETech happens again next year. If you find yourself overwhelmed, Gina Trapani from Lifehacker spent part of her talk convincing us that leaving our laptops, sitting on a beach, and clearing our heads can make us more efficient in a world of constant technological entropy.
So what’s your take on what our future holds, and how does open source play a role? Oh, and if you think your favorite open source project’s got what it takes to cause the next worldwide social shift, make sure to nominate it for the “Most Likely to Change the World” category in this year’s Community Choice Awards when voting opens in late April!