10 Tech Concepts You Should Know for 2007

mattnyc99 writes "Popular Mechanics has a new list of wide-ranging technology terms it claims will be big in 2007. From PRAM to BAN and SmartPills to data clouds, it's a pretty nice summary of upcoming and in-the-works trends across the board (with a podcast embedded). Though these aren't technologies they expect to be in everyone's homes next year, they're sure this tech will be in the headlines. How do their predictions from a year ago stack up now?" From the article: "Printed Solar Panels - Tomorrow's solar panels may not need to be produced in high-vacuum conditions in billion-dollar fabrication facilities. If California-based Nanosolar has its way, plants will use a nanostructured "ink" to form semiconductors, which would be printed on flexible sheets. Nanosolar is currently building a plant that will print 430 megawatts' worth of solar cells annually--more than triple the current solar output of the entire country."

#11

#11 = Web 2.0

a future Ask Slashdot...

I tripled the size of my Body Area Network using the Twinkie Expansion Method so I could have enough bandwidth to access my whole personal Data Cloud.

Now my bed is made of Bendable Concrete and my girlfriend has left me, complaining about my Plasma Arc Gasification.

Now who is going to mend my Printed Solar Panel shirts?

2006's predictions were kind of accurate....

For example:

"Pedestrian Protection System (PPS)
Radar sensors and computer-controlled braking will keep drivers safer than ever, but what about pedestrians? In case your adaptive cruise control fails to spot someone darting into the road, TRW Automotive is introducing the PPS system: if you smack a pedestrian, the hood is automatically raised to cushion his landing on the engine block. The system is already being tested, part of a drive to meet new European and Japanese regulations on pedestrian safety which are being phased in, starting with 2006 models."

Jaguar's new XK coupe has this: http://www.jaguarusa.com/us/en/xk/highlights/highl ights/performance.htm [jaguarusa.com]

Not to mention FTTH (via Verizon), Perpendicular Storage (via Hitachi Global Storage Technologies), Mobile WiMAX (Rogers and Bell in Canada have this).

Re:2006's predictions were kind of accurate....

You really didn't get that right at all. The hood rises up and forward, not opening like Herbie's mouth. New European pedestrian impact standards require there to be (I think) 6" of air space between the surface skin of the car and any big, heavy component like an engine or a structural member. This system allows compliance with that requirement, and a low hood line.

Re:2006's predictions were kind of accurate....

screw that.. if I'm buying some fancy Jaguar I want a system that cushions my hood against flying pedestrians.

Salor Power is not yet viable

Even if they make theoretically impossible 100% efficient solar panel. That's not enough for me to buy a solar panel.

However, if they can make a 5% efficient solar panel. I will buy it.

Why? It all comes down to cost. Solar power is too expensive for me. It takes over 5 years for a solar panel to pay for itself. Also, a solar panel only lasts (the efficiency declines over time) about 20 years. The capital cost is too high.

So companies should focus on reducing the per watt cost of solar panels. Not on improving the efficiency. If you can make solar panels for $5 per 100 watt panel .. you can bet I'll be off grid. I don't care about efficiency, I only care about cost.

A 100% efficiency solar panel can take up 1 m^2 and generate a kilowatt, a 10% efficiency solar panel would need 10 m^2 to match that up .. but if you think about it .. the sides of the square are only 3 meters wide versus the 1 meter wide sides of the 100% efficiency panels. That's not a huge land area to sacrifice.

Re:Who is your financial advisor?

"Well, for the sake of argument, if you say that the solar panel is still worth what you originally paid for it 5 years ago"

The problem is that it is now worth a small fraction of what it was worth when you bought it. Just like a car (which also has about a 20 year lifespan), it loses value quite rapidly as it becomes less efficient and closer to being a pile of junk that you have to pay to get rid of.

Re:Salor Power is not yet viable

? moderation?

So in 20 years the solar panel just stops working?

I think not. actually it's an asymptotic curve which levels out over time. Yes their peak is at teh begining, but they still produce Usable power for a long time.

From Wiki ". (Normally, photovoltaic modules have 25 years' warranty, but they should be fully functional even after 30-40 years.)"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photovoltaics [wikipedia.org]

Also, your economics are slightly skewed
your not paying for 100W of e-. Your paying for a system to manufacture a peak of 100W of e- during daylight hours (avg probably 50W (just guessing?))

If it was $5 for 100W panel, e- would be close to free anyway because everyone would produce their own.

Secondly not many man made conversions happen at 100% efficiency.

I am not a huge alternative energy freek, but economics dictate that solar panels are allready a smart choice for home use. Admittedly, if demand for them suddenly increased, that would not be so. But assuming e- prices continue to go up, (they will, you can bet on it in the long term for at least another 20-40 years) Then you have an even more economicaly strong position. Now, it's probably not going to net you the hugest gains, but it pays for itself, and then more. It's a solid return, that lasts a long time, and is scalable, upgradeable, and virtually maintenance free.

P.S. talking about grid tied, inverted system here. None of that silly battery stuff.

Re:What if the cost is almost nothing?

Heck, it's hard to argue against buying solar panels now. If they pay for themselves in 5 years, as has been suggested upthread, and they have a functional lifespan of > 25 years, you could buy >25 years' worth of electricity for the price of 5 years' electricity. The only 'risks', really are: a) what if the price of electricity goes down? and b) what if the price of solar panels (cost:watt) goes down?

If solar panels paid for themselves in 6 months, I'd cover my whole roof with them, sell my cars and buy cars that can run on electricity, convert my gas furnace and hot water heater to run on electricity... and I'd give my oil, coal, and gas-burning brethren unending hell until they did the same. If solar panels were cheap enough to pay for themselves in 6 months, it would make sense for everybody to do it- not only for environmental reasons, but also for economical ones.

Re:Home owners Associations

Even if solar becomes cheap enough, what will prevent me is my home owners association. They don't allow solar panels. Move to a neighborhood that doesn't have that rule? I would have to move to a neighborhood that doesn't have a home owners association. Yeah, good luck in finding one! Folks are so afraid of their property values being hurt, they turn into housing fascists.

Yes, this is a real problem. However, if cells become reasonably priced, and can be "printed", what would it take to "print" them onto an attractive subsurface so that it blends in nicely?

And, lest you think this is a NEW idea, an "I'm feeling lucky" Google search led me to somebody else who already had the same idea. [premierpower.com]

More expensive? Sure! Why else would they go to the extra effort? But it's at least POSSIBLE.

Re:Salor Power is not yet viable

Who paid $10k for an electrian to wire you to the grid?!?

The power company runs the power to your house for free in every state I have lived in. They will even upgrade the service from 100 amps to 200 amps for free. The only "tie in to the grid" is the connection from the meter to the mains, which are less than a meter away from each other, as required by code.

This is a $200 job, not a $10,000 job. Everything else you are paying for, from the mains to the socket, has to be done regardless of where the power comes from. AND you can wire a brand new 2400 sq ft house for less than half of what you are claiming, sockets and switches included.

Now, to hook your DC powered solar panels up to use in your home, you will need to either wire new DC circuits to everything or use an inverter system. To connect YOUR power to the grid to sell back/use off time, and sync the phasing, etc. you are going to spend several thousand for autoswithing, inversion, etc. It's worthwhile, but it isn't cheap to connect your OWN power source to the grid.

Your numbers are simply out of whack and (with all due respect) not based on real world scenarios.

Re:Salor Power is not yet viable

Perhaps the parent is using union labor that has to be paid a living wage? I certainly would never bid $10,000 for a modern wiring job of a huge house (2,400 sq. ft. is huge in my book) if I'm paying my employees $20/hour + medical + taxes.

If it's in new construction it's maybe doable, but as a retrofit job (which I'm assuming is the case as this is being conpared to a solar panel retrofit) it will be extremely labor intensive as old plaster has to be removed and then new plaster put over wherever you have to go into the wall.

Why should I know these?

Most of these are rated "Low" for short term impact. So why do I need to know about them next year?
So when they finally do get well known and publicized, we can all say its a dupe, and post links to this story!

based on last year's predictions...

I should just ignore the ones for 2007.

smart pills

I'm amazed these things are just coming around now. I remember seeing them years ago on some disconvery channel show.

Pretty neat things though.. but I don't envy those who 'recover' the pills after theyve passed through someone.

Re:smart pills

I'm amazed these things are just coming around now. I remember seeing them years ago on some disconvery channel show.

Pretty neat things though.. but I don't envy those who 'recover' the pills after theyve passed through someone.

I don't imagine these are "recovered", but can you imagine the conversation in the doctors office when presented with one of these?

Doctor: Well sir, you have 2 options.
Doctor: We can give you this brand new SmartPill for $500
Doctor: or you can take this recycled SmartPill we just "recovered" from an elderly gentleman with chronic diarrhea for $7.50
Patient: uh...I'll take the new one, thanks.

I'm waiting for SmartDrugs

This way your dealer doesn't need to stock a variety of substances. You pop a pill, when it goes in, it connects with your system, and figures out what you really need to feel good, and then provides it.

What about 2006?

I didn't see anything on the 2006 list that became a buzzword in 2006 - maybe they will in 2007, who knows. Only two on the list, Fiber to Home and IP Television, have made much news. There's a few obscure technologies that people will never care to know the name of, and the rest simply haven't come about. For 2007, how long will we be waiting for these? And why is Body Area Network on the list, a mere repeat of things that didn't make it to prime time in 2006 and is admittedly something they don't think will become widely manufactured or even accepted. In other words, these lists are a total washout.

Short Term Impacts?

So, while the US is facing terrorism that we fund ourselves via our addiction to foreign oil, the president is going on and on about switchgrass, and the entire world may be facing declining oil production while demand continues to increas, technologies that turn trash into power, cheaper solar pannels, and more secure passports will have a LOW impact? At the same time TV and file sharing over the internet, both problems we already have perfectly good solutions for (Cable, Satellite, movie rental stors, Netflicks, HTTP/FTP protocols) will have a HIGH impact? Something just doesn't add up.

Body Area Networks

I work at a hospital, and I'll vouch that we're already investigating body area networks. Patient monitoring, obviously, is the big one; but we're also very interested in the cost savings of a good RFID sponge count system. After each surgery procedure, some poor shlep has to count through all the sponges and make sure that the count matches up with the number used. And if we're short a sponge or two, then we have to take an x-ray of that patient to see if something was left inside of them. And if something *was*, well, obviously it needs to be removed, necessitating more surgery, and another sponge count.... We're hoping that RFID/wireless chips are going to solve this problem. Also coming down the research pipe, as I understand, are a variety of wireless enabled surgical robots that can crawl the stomach and intestines and do various repair work, and RFID/wireless enabled aneurysm clips and pacemakers to warn against putting patients into MRI fields. Obviously, all vital sign monitoring equipment is getting ready to be put on the networks, which is going to be huge, especially with our associated nursing homes and the aging baby boomer population.

I just love these feel good tech articles.

    I wish the real world would really work out like that.

    Last night I watched the movie "Who killed the electric car?",
              (Everyone should see it, along with and "Hacking Democracy", "Fahrenheit 911" and "An Inconvenient Truth").

    In that movie, Texaco bought out the NiMH Electric car battery technology and killed it.
        Then GM and Toyota took back all the EV1's and crushed them.

    I wonder how long it will be before some Oil company buys up NanoSolar and kills them too.

    The same thing happen over and over. It's the same group of Big Oil, Bush and friends, that are holding us back from progress in almost the same way
  MA Bell had done 20 years ago before it's breakup. Most of you don't realize that the Internet, Unix and Video Confrencing was held back for decades by MA Bell.

    It's not technology that moves us forward but the decisions of the Rich and Powerful to allow us to move foward.

 

A Fraction of an Amp?

A fraction of an amp? They'd better be talking about nanoamps, because anything higher would be hell of a lot to have coursing down your arms!

the PRAM mentioned there is already obsolete!

There was an announcement earlier this week by IBM that they've come up with a PRAM that is 500x faster than Flash, with unlimited writes, using half the power. This blows away the PRAM mentioned in this article. The lesson: IBM's unreleased product will always be better than your unreleased product!

PRAM

New? Anyone who's ever done anything with old Macs knows this is the Preferences RAM [wikipedia.org], and when the clock starts acting funny, it's time to replace the PRAM battery.

As a Mac user

I've known about PRAM for many years now. I was hoping by 2007 I wouldn't have to know about it, as it would be made obsolete - and I would no longer have to "zap the PRAM" when things start acting funky. Sigh.

In Summary

For those of us who don't want to RTFA [popularmechanics.com], (in no particular order):

10) Bendable Concrete
9) PRAM (Phase-Change Random Access Memory)
8) Printed Solar Panels
7) Passport Hacking
6) Vehicle Infrastructure Integration
5) Body Area Network
4) Plasma Arc Gasification
3) VoN (Video on the Net)
2) Smart Pills
1) Data Cloud

I guess when #3 comes about, we will be living in the "VoN Age"?

Bendable concrete isn't new

My Grandfather [adelaide.edu.au] was an expert on concrete, especially pre-stressed concrete. One of his party tricks was to show off a piece of thin, flat concrete, slightly larger than a standard ruler, then bend it in an arc.

He'd created this by stretching a thin wire with weights along a form, then pouring the concrete. Once the concrete was set, he removed the weights, which caused the wire to shrink, compressing the concrete and rendering it much more flexible.

Admittedly, they're actually talking about a different technology in the article, but they make it sound like no-one's ever made bendable concrete before.

BAN

Body area network, must be invented by a geek who can't get laid:

"Let me just examine your body area network to see if I can pin-point this little problem... Do you feel a little tingeling here?"

Don't Read Popular Science

Don't read Popular Mech.. I mean Science. I used to think they were okay until I found out they are a total tool for the man. They are tasked with shaping public perception and expectation. I read a report pointing out several examples but just the most recent one I can think of is thier 'debunking the 9/11 truth myths'. They are completely full of shit, although there is some cool technology in the mag.

If you watch 'They Live' three times in a row and then look at an issue of PS, I swear you will see the brain slugs all over that rag.

Believe it.

That's all fine and dandy...

but when do I get my flying car?

BAN?

Butt-Area Network? As in "you can take your poxy 56k modem and route it via your BAN"...? Hm, maybe I should go and read teh article!

THis is the problem with our country...

I won't buy a Hybrid car, it's too expensive. I won't buy solar panels for my roof, they're too expensive.

The fact of the matter is that if we want our planet to be here for our children, we need to re-evaluate our priorities, do things that GASP might inconvenience us. It's not a game anymore, it's we're not talking about 3 toed butterflies or baby seals, global warming is happening as we speak, and we can stop it.

Re:units?

Wake me up when it's 1.21 jigawatts.

Re:data cloud

Data Cloud is a silly name for online file storage, but it is something that will be exceedingly useful. There are files storage services now, but many of them charge ten times what it would cost to back up your files locally. The innovation is that these services will finally become cheap and/or free, even for data in the hundreds of GB.

This gives you countless advantages: You can get away without buying extra drives and implementing RAID. You are protected against fire, theft, and (possibly) accidental deletions. You don't have to open up an FTP channel on your local router. You aren't required to have a static IP for your home machine, and you don't have to always keep it running. You can take apart your local machine, rebuild it, and move things around without worrying about your files. You can backup things which were previously impractical to back up, such as ripping your entire DVD collection and storing it without extra compression. Sounds pretty darn good to me.

What's the business model

What exactly is the business model of giving people unlimited free storage? Hard disks cost money, bandwidth costs money, and most people block ads anyway, so where is the profit? I find it difficult to believe that a company can run a business like that, with the exception of those companies, like Google, who can run it at a loss and support that loss with some other line of revenue. I suppose the service would have some prestige points, but I really see no way to make money that way.

Re:data cloud

I just did a backup of my laptop. It took 6 single-layer DVDs, which were nearly full. At 20KB/s upstream, which is about what I get (and yes that's kilobytes not bits), that's a minimum of 17 days of continuous uploading, and that's assuming Comcast doesn't shut me down first.

Consumer bandwidth is the problem for those services, really.

Re:data cloud

The problem with the whole "Data Cloud" thing is that the network bandwidth just isn't there yet. I get impatient enough waiting for my files from my LOCAL hard drive (which has a peak transfer of around a gigabit per second) and yet the best broadband access you can get at the moment is lucky to exceed ten megabits peak transfer (and forget sustained). It's the same issue with network backups - you just can't transfer the terabyte of information I have on my home machine to anywhere on the internet fast enough for it to be called anything even approaching useful. I'll just keep the RAID setup for now, thanks.

Sorry, but I've been hearing about the wonders of storing all my data on some network drive for a long time now, but the storage requirements of "all my data" have been growing faster than the network bandwidth has. Until that trend is reversed, local storage is here to stay.

Re:data cloud

Large user created data: photos and home movies.

A high percentage of people will have high resolution digital photos. Some users will have digital camcorders. A few will have 300 hours of their kids filmed on HD digital camcorders, which would be terabytes of data.

And practically, there is a need to back up one's CDs and DVDs, since if something happens to them, there's no other way to get them back short of repurchasing.

An example: Amazon S3

Amazon's simple storage service (S3) basically gives you access to a virtually unlimited supply of highly redundant data storage for pennies a month ($.20/gig transferred, $.15/gig stored... I believe). There is no minimum or fixed start-up costs and you only pay for what you use. This is much cheaper to startup than buying HDs for performance-insensitive large blobs of data, since you don't have to pay for power supply, case, drives, motherboards, cpu, memory or ongoing electrical costs. It's also a 100% quieter than running an extra storage server in your apartment. Sure, you can't stream HD video off of this thing, but it definitely has its uses.

Last month I backed up all my important financial and other data completely encrypted and lot more secure than I could have doen it locally. I conveniently mapped S3 to a drive letter on my local system so most programs can access it without even knowing what's going on. I mapped my Roboform password data to the drive, so I can access the same set of data files from multiple places without having to remember to always carry along a USB key. I even tried storing my Firefox profile there... though it technically worked, the problem is that Firefox accesses like a hundred files every time it starts up, and file access latency was too high to make this workable. What you use it for is really left up to your imagination. Anyway, all told, it cost me $.12 for the month.

You need three things to make this work for you:
1. An amazon S3 account
2. An online storage client that supports S3 (I use the free Jungledisk program, but there are several free clients available for Win/Mac/Linux)
3. Optionally (for Win32 users), a utility that can map webDAV drives to a physical drive letter. I use Webdrive.

Re:An example: Amazon S3

This is a fine solution for storing a gig or two of data, but let's say you need to store 300 GB. For this example, we upload the data once, download or update it an average of three times per byte, and store it for two years:

300*(.20 * 4 + .15 * 24) = $1,320

I don't see how that's a reasonable rate. A 300 GB drive goes for about $100 these days. Also, compare this to Dreamhost's web hosting plan. There you can get the "Code Monster" plan which gives you 400GB of storage, 4TB transfer per month, not to mention an entire web hosting package. If you pay for 2 years up front, it costs $382. That's much cheaper and you're getting much more bandwidth usage.

Now imagine if you used all that storage and bandwidth with S3:

4000 * .20 * 24 + 400 * .15 * 24 = $20,640

Yikes! Amazon's prices seem to have little relation to the real cost of hosting and transfering data. (Disclaimer: I'm a Dreamhost customer but I have no other interest in their company.)

Re:units?

Thats the equivalent of powering 1.3 Libraries of Congress. Or a string of AA batteries that would wrap around the library of congress 3 times!

Re:units?

How many times do I have to tell you people? Hogsheads!

Re:units?

I assume from the title you think there's something wrong with the units used. They didn't say "430MW/year".
If you make a 43W cell, and you can make 10,000,000 of them in 12 months, then you can make 430MW worth of cells in a year. Units are ok, just a question of whether they have the technology and resources to achieve it.

Re:10 Tech Concepts You Should Know for 2007...

Exactly. You'll be left at new years eve and be forced to party until new years eve 2007. On second thought, that's not so bad... Oh damn why did I read the article?