Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Device and technology confluence

My first personal organizer was an electronic Rolodex from Radio Shack. It was cheap and also very thin. When people were carrying pagers plus cell phones plus Yepps plus Palms, I rejected that, claiming that all these devices should be squished into one! (and enabled with Personal Area Network (PAN) technology so you would not have to also carry business cards!)

We'll - that's here and now with the iPhone - digital camera plus phone plus personal organizer plusmusic plus email plus web. In Japan, you can pay with your phone too.

Now, technology confluence leads online streaming to the home entertainment console in a real way with Netflix on XBOX. I still remember when we were trying to do karaoke and video-on-demand at IBM in the 90's - technology way ahead of its time - it was too expensive to deploy :-)

Divergence to stand-alone devices....but soon back to the basics - my phone, my tv!

No comments: