cryptochrome's Journal: Combinatorial Technology

The release of the Airport Express with its built in USB port and audio jack got me thinking again about a potential digital lifestyle product strategy - what I like to call combinatorial technology. As opposed to (but in reality working alongside) convergence devices, combinatorial technology would intelligently combine smaller less functional devices to do jobs neither could do alone simply by connecting them, without having to deal with complex menus.

So for instance, (next gen color screen) iPod + iSight = Video Camera. iPod + Airport Express= networked drive and music server. iSight + Airport Express= wireless web cam. iPod + iPod = in person file sharing. And so forth. Airport Express is already the best example of this, as +speakers or +printer or +airport creates functionality not available to either alone. Imagine if that USB port could be put to other uses besides just printers.

Of course there's the significant problem of there being too many different jacks/cables/interfaces out there. Frankly I don't understand why technology hasn't moved towards a single physical port/plug style (with perhaps a few variations for slightly different applications such as powered/unpowered, pos-lock, mini, etc) which intelligently and automatically adapts to support the appropriate protocol for the two devices. I.e. you can plug in a cheap mouse or internet connection or a hardrive or monitor or speakers into identical ports, and they just work as if you had plugged them into their exclusive ports we have today. I suppose it would ideally be serial optical with power, although even that could be tweaked (such as sending digital or analog signals over either the wire or the fiber). Anyway, if such a port/plug scheme existed combinatorial devices would be trivial. You could make dongles to support conversion to other plug styles/protocols. Heck, if you made the design compatible with the optical mini audio jack as used on Airport Express (with perhaps a second side plug of different style so they wouldn't be confused) you wouldn't even need to worry about the simple unidirectional analog devices.