Future Trends

There are some articles that you have to write because they are timely, relevant and newsworthy. And there are some you are compelled to write because you have witnessed something new, beautiful and extraordinary and you want, in some small way, to be part of it. The Wilderness Downtown falls squarely into the second category. It's a labour of love. Here's the official line on what it is: "

Ernest Wilson, the dean of the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism, put it like this: “What if, after receiving the home and garden section in the morning, the reader could walk right into the section and visit a garden?” This bucolic vision reflects one potential scenario for what we at the Annenberg school are calling “immersive journalism,” a new genre that utilises gaming platforms and virtual environments to convey news, documentary and non-fiction stories. As ...

By the year 2014 the mobile environment will be dominated by smartphones. This is one of the many bold predictions by technology analyst Nick Jones, speaking on Tuesday at the Gartner Symposium on Innovation in the Cape Town International Convention Centre. Jones also predicts that smartphone penetration in South Africa is likely to reach 80% by 2014. Jones is a vice-president at Gartner and his work focuses primarily on mobile business and technology, mobile applications and emerging technologies. He foresees a royal ...

We live in a world of ubiquitous computing -- there are ever more computing devices everywhere. We will soon live in a world of ubiquitous video cameras. You probably have one staring at you right now just inches away from your face -- the camera in your laptop or desktop. There are video cameras on street corners, business premises, highways. The Brits have the most video cameras per head of population but other countries are catching up. The CCTV technology is ...

The average age for Nobel Peace Prize winners is 63, but earlier this year it was decided by popular US tech culture magazine Wired that the most deserving recipient was only 33-years old. That's quite young in Nobel terms, but when one considers the “accomplishments” of the Internet, it is perhaps not such an unreasonable nomination. In a very short period of time the Internet has had a profound impact on the way we live. I have no doubt that its ...

Crowdsourcing, if you haven't heard of it, is also known as the 'cheap, lazy bastard way to get something done'. It's a technique gleefully employed by marketers and media outlets to ensure they get the pick of the litter for less. Separate the wheat from the chavs, as they say. It's also a great way to interact with global communities and to promote work and ideas. Think of it as a way to expose yourself without being arrested. Creative and IT-focused industries ...

California seems to be on a constant roller-coaster of events – technological, economic and social. Strangely enough, the state keeps moving on as the American epicentre of high-tech industry. To technological entrepreneurs, California is synonymous with Silicon Valley, a place where brain-rich can become money-rich. To movie lovers, California is synonymous with Hollywood, where real life can become fantasy. In the 1980s, Silicon Valley defined California’s economy in particular and America in general. It was the first time in the history ...

The user interface employed by mobile phones has not adapted sufficiently to accommodate the communication needs of the average user in the 21st Century. But help is at hand from social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter that can serve as inspiration for designers of handheld devices looking to improve on the way we communicate. So says Pieter Streicher, the managing director of BulkSMS.com, who maintains that "it is ridiculous that many aspects of the mobile phone user interface haven’t changed in ten ...

An old World War II bomb shelter under a cathedral in Helsinki, combined with some brilliant thinking, will soon lead to the greenest databank on the planet and an innovative way to keep a city warm. Or at least that's what Juha Sipila, the project manager for Helsingin Energia, based in the Finnish capital seems to think. Server farms are so energy-intensive that some, like Google's, are reported to use as much electricity as a small city. Many ideas have been ...

When Sipho Hlongwane (@comradesipho), a writer and political and social commentator, proudly accepted the ANC Youth League’s disparaging moniker of “Desktop Activist” in March this year, he joined the ranks of activists the world over who use the web to speak truth to power. The internet, offering free publishing platforms that are constantly evolving, is an activist’s dream. It offers a wide reach, easy access to those in power (in some cases), and with the evolution of mobile platforms, an unprecedented ...