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IBM lists five life-changing innovations for the next five years |
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IBM, in its fifth annual "Next Five in Five" list of innovations that have the potential to change the way people work, live and play over the next five years, has said that in the coming half a decade, people can expect to:
3D Holograms 3-D interfaces, currently part of fiction and Hollywood sci-fi movies, will soon be common place, according to IBM. People will  soon be able to interact with 3-D holograms of friends in real time, with movies and TVs already moving to 3-D and 3-D and holographic cameras becoming more sophisticated and miniaturized to fit into cell phones. The "3-D telepresence," IBM explained, uses light beams scattered from objects and reconstructs a picture of that object, a similar technique to the one human eyes use to visualize our surroundings.Batteries that breathe air Just like the people that use the devices that they power, batteries too will soon use air for a 'recharge'. IBM's prediction will, quite literally, expand the meaning of the phrase “a breath of fresh air.” IBM predicts the next five years will see scientific advances in transistors and battery technology that will allow devices to be powered 10 times longer than presently. Moreover, batteries may disappear altogether in smaller devices. Contemporary heavy lithium-ion batteries could well be replaced by those that scientists are currently working - batteries that use the air we breath to react with energy-dense metal, eliminating a key inhibitor to longer lasting batteries. If successful, the result would be a lightweight, powerful and rechargeable battery capable of powering everything from electric cars to consumer devices. Simultaneously, by rethinking the basic building block of electronic devices, the transistor, IBM is aiming to reduce the amount of energy per transistor to less than 0.5 volts, which could in effect cause batteries to disappear from some devices like mobile phones or e-readers almost completely and evolve into electronic devices charged by “energy scavenging”, similar to what some wrist watches use today. Some automatic watches are charge based on the movement of the wearer's arm, and IBM is looking to expand the concept to charge mobile phones - shake and dial, perhaps? The rise of the citizen scientist There will be sensors everywhere, according to IBM, converting people into walking sensors. In five years, IBM says, sensors will be in your phone, car, wallet and even your tweets that will collect data that will give scientists a real-time peek into your environment. This contribution of data will then be used to fight planetary problems such as global warming, saving endangered species or track invasive plants or animals that threaten ecosystems around the world. The next five years will see the rise of a whole class of "citizen scientists", using simple sensors that already exist to create massive data sets for research. Personalized commutes No jam-packed highways. No crowded subways. No construction delays. No worrying about being late for work. In the next five years, IBM says, will see advanced analytics technologies provide personalized recommendations that get commuters where they need to go in the fastest time. Adaptive traffic systems will intuitively learn traveler patterns and behavior to provide more dynamic travel safety and route information to travelers than is available today. Computers that energize IBM says around half the energy consumed by a modern data center goes toward air cooling, and most of the heat is then wasted as it is just dumped into the atmosphere. However, new technologies, such as novel on-chip water-cooling systems developed by IBM, the thermal energy from a cluster of computer processors can be efficiently recycled to provide hot water for an office or houses. A pilot project in Switzerland involving a computer system fitted with the technology is expected to save up to 30 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year, the equivalent of an 85 percent carbon footprint reduction. A novel network of microfluidic capillaries inside a heat sink is attached to the surface of each chip in the computer cluster, which allows water to be piped to within microns of the semiconductor material itself. By having water flow so close to each chip, heat can be removed more efficiently. Water heated to 60 degrees C is then passed through a heat exchanger to provide heat that is delivered elsewhere. |
LISTS AND RESEARCH
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Global Software Top 100 - Edition 2011
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CRM companies: a short list
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