There’s a remarkable fact in today’s New York Times: if you stepped into a time machine with your iPad 2 and went back just 17 years to 1994, the Apple gadget would rank among the world’s 500 fastest supercomputers. And that’s just measuring processing speed—when it comes to ease of use, the iPad obviously leaves those old machines in the dust. It all testifies to the transforming power of exponential patterns like the one we call Moore’s Law. And it means the personal computing devices we’re using another decade from today are likely to be far more powerful than the ones we have now—with new capabilities that are hard (though not impossible) to foresee.
We’re going to try to foresee some of them next Tuesday at Beyond Mobile: Computing in 2021, where we’re gathering some of the West Coast’s leading minds in computer science, system design, and infotech entrepreneurship to speculate in an informed way about how we’ll all be using computers, both mobile and otherwise, 10 years down the road. And if you want to try your own hand at technological forecasting, you can win a pair of free tickets to this exciting event.
Here’s how: Go to Twitter and post your zaniest prediction about computing in 2021. Be sure to use the hashtag #XconPredicts so that we can search for your tweets. On Tuesday and again on Friday of this week, we’ll tally up the answers give away a pair of Beyond Mobile tickets to the person with craziest, funniest, or cleverest idea.
The winner of our first round of tweeting last week was Jason Wilson, a product manager at Mapquest. His winning tweet was:
“location based apps won’t need GPS, they’ll simply tap into the semantic place api of the brain’s place cells! #xconpredicts”
Okay, that one was a bit nerdy, if you’ve never heard of place cells or APIs. But you get the idea. So head over to Twitter, put on your Carnac the Magnificent hat (if you’re too young to catch that reference, look it up), and let us know what you think the future holds.
