We no longer simply can travel from A to B – we demand constant entertainment and we connect to our social lives as well .

So the Car of this Generation are more like rolling entertainment and information hubs, plastered with screens and multi media players.

The Car offers Bluetooth, a Cell Phone Charger and an iPod Connection as well. And the Car itself speaks to Satellites for Navigation and it’s Manufacturer about it’s health.

Modern Cars are the first machines we willingly accept instructions from. We blindly trust their commands …

With tools like Skype, eMail and movies online notebooks have become the most important line home. Armies have always tried to deliver personal mail to the front lines – and they still do.

But the Internet makes all this much easier.

I wonder if the virtual "closeness" makes it actually harder to be away? You can see your far away kids growing up, listen to your wife / husband in tears … 

Vint Cerf is a smart guy – he is one of the Fathers of the Internet.  So he know technology and it’s impact.

I think we are slowly understanding the recent impact of “the information at your fingertips”: we have more access to information and better knowledge tools, but more and more people do NOT learn how to dissect, understand and expand that knowledge.

The electronic book is a wet dream for gadget makers and publishers alike. Since the dawn of the CD-ROM they have tried hard to give us the eBook as well as the eNewspaper.

Finally new technology like the Kindle seem to make that possible.

But I think the whole approach is wrong. You simply can’t simulate paper digitally – it’s physical attributes can’t be replicated on a screen.

You can only "advance" the concept and idea of reading and organizing a series of texts into a coherent bigger "story" (book) or collection of articles (newspaper).

We already have that new concept and you are using it right now: it’s called a browser.

People have disliked reading PDFs for years and prefer content in their browsers.

The only reason why they want shove eBooks and eNewspapers down our throats is that they want us to pay for it. We still connect to the concept of "books" and "newspapers" that we have to pay for it. Anything in a browser is supposed to be free.

Amazon wants us all to use a Kindle, so they can track and watch what we read. 

Those eReaders are all about buying content and digital rights management. And we already have seen that the Amazon Kindle as well as the iPhone (another big eBook plattform) have remote killswitches. If they want those companies can simply switch off access to any content you bought and downloaded for on YOUR own machine.

This is very easy to do with electronic gadgets with an internet – try to that with an old fashioned newspaper or book …

To own a digital camera at the end of the 1990’s was pretty unusual and expensive. Ten years later almost every gadget seems to be able to shot photos and videos – even in High-Definition …

Cheap Sensors

The arrival of cheap sensors and storage allowed cell phone and computer manufacturer to stuff a camera into almost every gadget we carry around. There are hardly any cell phones or notebooks without a cam these days.

And the Quality! There was literally an explosion of pixel power – who would today bother with a 1-Mega-Pixel-Camera? Sure pixel resolution is not everything, but the image quality has equally improved with pixel quantity.

Early Nokia prototypes …

Cheap Monitors

But the Revolution of the Pixel includes LCD monitors – which are now huge and cheap (my current 24"-Samsung-Display would have been astronomically expensive in 1999). The analogue monitor is dead – LCDs have overtaken our eyes. Their sharpness and extreme colour range has redefined our viewing habits.

Cheap Storage and Bandwidth

Big sensor create big images – but today we also have the CHEAP big memory cards, sticks and chips to store them – as well as fast broadband to send our crappy holiday shots to all our friends and social media appendices via eMail or Social Media website (like Flickr and Facebook).

The Real Changes: record anything everywhere and at anytime

Because not only Big Brother has CCTV cameras everywhere we mere mortals can and do record anything. Thanks to YouTube and Flickr (and their clones) we can and do share everything we record.

In the last ten years there has been a flood of digital videos and photos. I suspect we all shot more images and hours of footage in these last ten years with our cheap gadgets than all generations before us?!

And the pixelated flood will continue.

On the web you can videos of any occasion and situation: from airplanes crashes, terrorist attacks, amateur sex and children’s birthdays. It alls there.

I wonder how he feels about that (public) video in twenty years?

The new global sharing culture enables us to share our lives with others and see how others live their life’s. It has never been so easy to experience, study and learn the human condition.

Since we love Social Porn (<- see my essay on that subject here) this trend will continue. It’s not Big Brother watching us – we love to show ourselves and watch others. This was first limited to celebrities and personal holiday snapshots. Today we can record and broadcast our own lives 24/7 – and some people already do.

That also means that social acceptance of being watched by the government and others has risen. In a world were everybody can record, share and watch everyone the old idea of privacy is gone …

We all know what you did ten summers ago … and you will never be able to delete that image …

The Real Changes: the Web never forgets and will find you

The global visual sharing culture has just begun, already billions of images and videos are online. And the web never forgets …

In the last century your parents were probably the keepers and guardians of your embarrassing childhood shots – today compromising material will sooner or later land on the web.

Many employers as well as "friends" check on Facebook and other social media your history before they get closer.

Thanks to Geo-Tagging and Facial Recognition it will be much easier to find a specific person in a gazillion images and videos. There is no such thing as anonymity in this brave new pixel world.

Reality – captured from many slightly different perspectives. 

The Real Changes: the global Big Picture and Synthesized Reality

Soon there won’t  be a place that hasn’t been photographed or captured in video. We will have a complete visual memory of our planet.

But there is more: all these images and technology will not only allow us to "find" each other – it will allow us to merge all that huge image and video pool into synthesized memory spaces (<- read my essay here).

Smart software literally stitches photos into a 3D-environment and connect / compute additional information into that "space".

When you think that Google Streetview and Google Earth are pretty amazing than hold on to your socks – the new kind of search will finally feel like stranger than any science fiction movie you have seen …

Is it real or is it … HDR?

The Real Changes: Reality is not as good as High-Definition

The last ten years have also brought a different change: the way we perceive what "reality" should look like.

Cameras, monitors and videos have slowly changed from the old 4:3 format to 16:9. The future is no longer square, but widescreen …

But the sharpness, colour range and contrast of images has changed dramatically, best illustrated by so called HDR-Images.

Before and after the HDR treatment …

Similar to before mentioned synthesized memory spaces already available cameras can combine several shots into one "High dynamic range image" that looks more real than reality.

Before the arrival of digital tools (read Photoshop or Paint Boxes for professional TV and Film productions) it was very hard to manipulate images.

Today almost any cheap camera or cell phone cam offers "image improvement filters" ranging from simple red eye removal to face finders and even body slimmers.

All these technologies have changed our perception of reality: old black & white television was unreal, even analogue colour TV looks unreal to a certain degree – and so do "classic" photos.

But today’s image technology allows us to create images and videos that look and feel more real than reality, but catching and synthesizing more details, sharpness and speed than ever before.

Remember him? 

The Real Changes: The Decade of Photoshop Fakery and empty Movies with too much CGI

The last ten years saw the Perfection of Fakery – thanks to tools like Photoshop, After Effects and many other image manipulation tools.

Movies like Jurassic Park and Matrix paved the way for CGI in movies – and helped the directors to tell amazing tales. But today many movies and TV shows feel boring, because there are too many "amazing effects". Special effects have turned into a big bore …

But Photoshop & Co are now also the #1 toys for Fakery – from Beauty Magazines and Advertising to Viral Videos – Fakes are now everywhere.

Every time people see today an amazing photo or video they distrust what they see: "Is it photoshopped or is it real?!"

Fakery is increasingly hard to spot and image manipulation is now standard for almost anything you see printed or on TV.

Especially advertising was always about fake reality, but now that advertised reality looks absolutely real and can be even more beautiful than ever before. Especially woman still try to "achieve" the beauty standards in advertising – but these fake beauties are unreal and do not exist … their "level of beauty" can never be reached by any real person …

LonelyGirl15 – the first YouTube Superstar? 

The Real Changes: Democratization of Broadcasting

When 8 mm movies came out it was touted as the Hollywood revolution for everyone. But the technology was cumbersome, expensive and difficult to master.

Today a GOOD video camera is affordable even for amateurs and the quality is amazing. Editing and special effects software is also cheap and basically the same the real Pros in Hollywood use.

But most of all there is now a global and cheap way to show and distribute your videos: the web.

New talent and film students can create movies and no longer rely on movie theatres, Hollywood studios or TV broadcasters to bring their work to the masses.

That means there is a wider platform for artists, moviemakers and crap alike – but it is most of all a true democratization of moviemaking and broadcasting like never before.

Low Budget series like LonelyGirl15 became global brands / phenomenon’s. Becoming a superstar on a budget was no possible!

Hello Human! Do you know where are you going to?

The Real Changes: 3D-Environments and Augmented Reality will change how we deal with real life

Today we are quite used to "live" in 3D spaces, either in games or car navigation systems – not too mention Google Earth …

The visuals of Computer Games have made a huge leap forward in the last 10 years. The X-Box, Playstation 2 and Wii can deliver incredible visuals.

Games have been pushing simulated 3D worlds for now over 20 years. New games look incredibly realistic and have left it’s visually primitive forefather Pong far behind.

But 3D engines, geo-tagging, camera sensors and search engines will merge into a new technology called Augmented Reality.

Here you look at the world through a computer display – and the computer will analyze what you and it sees – and add additional information.

The simplest form of this technology have been car navigation systems, but newer versions will go much further.

This is just a simply version of AR …

They could tell you for example which people or businesses are in a building nearby, because a search engine show you all information regarding the location you are currently at – and also know thanks to other peoples computers and cell phones who is currently near that exact spot you are standing.

Like other technologies this will make us even more dependent on our little gizmos. The pocket calculator robbed us of the need to learn math. The cell phone is our external memory for phone numbers, addresses and even our schedule (be honest how many phone numbers can you remember?).

Augmented Play Time …

Most people could hardly read maps anyway, but Augmented Reality will make them totally dependent on where to go. And thanks to "smart software" it will tell them what to shop where and that the person in front of them is their wife …

Conclusion: a new form of Telepresence

We are developing a totally new visual culture. Once the invention of photography radically changed how we captured reality and made it permanent – so will the digital capture, global storage and synthesizing of photos and videos.

Everybody needs a cam like this and everybody will wear some form of camera in the future anyway …

Thanks to a coming 24/7 always-on camera capture we will also develop a new form of Telepresence we have developed in the last century: first there was the telegraph that allowed almost instant reporting of events far away. Then came the telephone and radio, which allowed us to hear live events far away. With television we suddenly had eyes and ears all over the globe. We could watch catastrophes and music concerts unfold live.

A global web connected camera network will allow us to watch anything everywhere. It is not just a network for "watching" – it also will record, store and cross connect everything it sees.

The new telepresence and visual network will let you watch such events even from "unrecorded" angles …

This global camera network is not like Big Brother – it is a decentralized sister network, which consists of millions of independent digital eyes and ears that record and record …

Like a computer game all that data can be used to replay and synthesize the events it captured.

I hope I didn’t miss one?

Like the "compact stereo system" – the new Übermonitors suck. Apart from notebooks – who should include everything for portability – all other gadgets should be "separate". So when one part breaks it doesn’t spoil all other "elements" and usually the built-in components are not top notch, so you want to replace them anyway – but you can’t. The speakers suck and the webcam/microphone are not as good as say a good Logitech one.

Each new version of the Mac OS/X or Windows creates a frenzy in Nerdistan. Microsoft finally released it’s newest shiny toy to eager consumers this week – and boy it’s all over the place.

I also did my little "Installfest". Windows 7 is great, it simply works … but I downgraded to XP a couple of hours later.

Why? Simple – there is nothing I really new or better I need. So why change working setup? The Operating System is not doing my work – I am. And Photoshop or Word or Firefox are almost the same – no mater which OS I am using – even running them on a Mac or PC makes hardly a difference. This also applies to my Mac which came with Leopard – and I won’t update to Snow Leopard either …

I am only switching to a new system or version when …

1. The old version breaks or is unusable (security risk), because it’s totally outdated.
2. Offers new and better functions I ACTUALLY NEED and will use for work.
3. There is no third reason.

I always happily trailing several versions behind the Glamour Nerd Flock. I still would be using Office 2000, but too many good add-ons are working with it, so I only switched to Office 2002 – not any newer version. Photoshop CS3 is good enough for me. Apple forces me to constantly update iTunes, otherwise I can’t access my music properly. Also Firefox is a tool I keep updated for security reasons.

Hysteria back then, hysteria today.

Software companies love upgrades, because it makes them money. But I don’t need the newest toy in town to get my work done.

And it’s often smarter to wait and let the In crowd do all the testing and develop work-arounds …

I have to test and explore so many new apps and sites for my job anyway, so I am more than happy to keep my setup simply working.

Someday I’ll join the party and update my Operating System … maybe when Windows 8 is coming.

It basically turned from a 1970’s brown box to an expensive pebble. And Apple still pretends it’s only a single button mouse – keeping up that old idiotic paradigm of fake simplicity.

Some “instruments” have a certain complexity to them: a computer keyboard needs all keys to work. And the Mac OS has been supporting right-clicks for a long time – but Apple still wants users to perceive the Mac as especially “simple” to use.

But it’s new multitouch mouse isn’t simple at all. It takes some training to get it right.

Click ad for more Apple Newton.

Lang before Smartphones computer vendors tried to sell us Personal Digital Assistants. The vision was there, but the hardware was too big and too slow to make it work.

Apple’s Newton was a brave experiment hardly anyone know anymore. I owned two Newtons, because I though the technology was fantastic. But for daily use it was crap.

Only a black & green display – but already with funky special effects. You could expand the Newton with special cards …

For text input you had to learn to write special characters so Newton could understand what you were trying to say. Apple scrapped that feature completely with the touch screen keyboard in the iPhone. You always needed that special pen to operate all these PDAs, which was pretty stupid. Although I am not a big fan of today’s touch screens, but they are much better than those pens.

The Newton died a quick and miserable dead. Apple didn’t try very hard to make it work.

Graffiti Gestures – bit odd at first, but it really worked after some training.

The Palm Pilot a few years later made the PDA market really fly. This was in a time, when cell phones were too stupid to be used to remember addresses, appointments or be synched with Outlook.

Some of the apps for the Palm (and Newton) were really great! The iPhone still hasn’t the same amount of good office applications and synchronization tools the Newton and the Palm offered. That is why I still consider the iPhone a lifestyle product and not a true mobile business tool.

I owned also a Handspring Edge – a small, but brilliant Palm clone. You could attack a pretty good portable keyboard to it – something the iPhone completely lacks as well.

In the end the Palm died as well. Better cell phones supplanted the address book and time management for which the Palm was mostly used.

And they offered eMail and Internet access the Palm struggled with for a long time. Plus cheap notebooks finally became lighter and affordable, so a bastard device like the PDA no longer made sense: there is no real middle ground between a good cell phone and notebook/netbook.

Thank the Digital Gods for iPods, hard drives and flash memory. Tapes were a great and cheap medium. Remember when we taped Top of Pops from radio or made great mix tapes for our beloved girlfriends?

But tape sucked: finding the right track was hard by winding it all forward and backward. All that winding drained your Walkmans batteries and wasted precious time. Some weaker Walkmans couldn’t "pull" long C120 tapes …

The sound of tapes wasn’t that bad – because radio and records weren’t that great either. But when the CD appeared you could hear the difference, which sucked.

And tapes could simply tear or the cheap plastic parts inside could brake. So you had to know how to repair a precious tapes.

Good bye tape – you won’t be missed … ever!

Ah, the Wonders of digital consumerism! The figure will react to your voice or simply act randomly. I need one asap – get yours here.

I think the Microsoft campaign has done it’s job well: everybody is talking about those cute (more Kylie here) or stupid ads (the dreadful Launch Party video).

I am sure such workstations are used to answer complaints and send birthday letters. Right?

I am still waiting for an affordable Hello Kitty netbook – I would buy it instantly!

In the Stone Age of Multimedia there was just one TV, one Radio, one Phone and one Record Player for the whole family.

Today’s multi-channel multimedia families have multiple entertainment and data devices for each family member. Plus everyone has many different online-personalities all over the intranets.

Instead of living and experiencing a "unified family reality" today we spread ourselves over several planes of virtual existence.

So it’s no surprise that so many families are feeling disconnected, hardly share mutual experiences or participate in each other’s lives. They are connected somewhere else with a million strangers …

The Single-Device-Family was certainly less sophisticated, but they actually had more time on their hands. They didn’t need to learn to handle complex devices, configure their computers, VCRs, cell phones, cameras, digicams, Facebook & MySpace pages, update their operating systems …

Their head were less stuffed with following a gazillion TV shows, celebrities, events in remote places, horrors and hysterias unreported or not yet invented.

Less sometimes really is more.

When this Mini-TV was introduced everybody thought it’s a stupid idea. Small transistor radios sold well, but nobody believed in the idea of "portable television".

Today the screens on iPods, cell phones with video and other portable video devices are hardly bigger, but people are mad about watching clips, TV episodes and whole movies on such tiny screens.

Madness!

But once again the quality technology is not important, as long as it is convenient and the content is good. People are willing to put up with technological limits if they are captured by good shows and stories.

Bigger screens, THX and all that nonsense is simply an added bonus, but not the most important thing about listening to a good song or watching an excellent video.

When I was a kid and heard about the Sinclair QL I was on fire! Great processor, stylish design and powerful graphics. But Sinclair blew the product launch and sold the machine before it was ready for the market. The rest is history as they say.

I still think this is a great machine.

The Deutsche Telekom or Magenta Giant as it’s called here in Germany has never had a good reputation based on it’s often terrible services and products.

Once again T-Mobile proves that it’s still a crappy company. It has decided to block Skype on it’s German networks – so iPhone Users can’t save money and use the net as freely as it should be.

We need Net Neutrality for cell phone data networks as much as for the normal net.

I have only two questions: Does it run Linux? And has it enough memory to store my porn collection?

Actually I once owned a small portable typewriter – but I would never have dreamed of using it on a train or plane. What a strange paradox: today we consider people typing on a notebook everywhere normal, in the old days we would have laughed at anyone sitting an an airport typing on a typewriter …

Technological progress is amazing. In hardly 50 years we have developed very capable video chips to incorporate in almost every gadget.

Most modern cell phones or digi cams can now record video in a higher resolution and more frames per second than the first TV heavy duty cameras. And thanks to innovations like YouTube or Ustream.tv you can broadcast yourself globally at no extra cost …

Ah, Claris Emailer – anyone remember that program on the Mac? It was great and it simply worked. It remember it very fondly and used it a LOT.

But back in the late 90’s our computers were puny compared to today’s powerful machines.

Yeah, the future is upon us – including pictures and comic strips (watch the video and you know what I am talking about).

Too bad that newspapers hardly profit from feeding so much information into the internet today.

PS: I feel very old right now.

So many events are snapped and recorded by hundreds if not thousands of gadgets – and beamed all over the world.

The best example is Obama’s recent Inauguration. The event was recorded from a gazillion angles (or literally points of view). They were saved in our shared digital memory to be be digested by the intranets.

But there is more.

Microsofts Photosynth shows how these collective recording can be merged / synthesized into a fuzzy hyperlinked historical "space".

Click image for more details.

You can experience this new technology on the CNN website – but you need to install a new plug-in for your browser for the magic to work.

Photosynth creates this virtual environment from hundreds of pictures. It’s like a walk able picture space. Amazing, but not very useful yet. But I am sure future versions will be able to synthesize videos, audio and images into one "space".

But once again there is more.

With additional facial recognition you will not only be able to pick people out of the crowd, but each person will be linked to their available data all over the intranets as well.

Just like Google Maps currently records every street view in major cities all over the world – so will we ourselves share moments of our lives online by recording videos, sharing our photos, our travel reports on blogs and locations via Twitter or similar services.  And EVERYTHING will be stitched together by "intelligent" software.

A few years in the future our real lives are more or less publicly recorded by our gadgets and saved on the internet.

Information at your fingertips? Nah, more like "Your life on my screen in every detail."

Politicians and the Internet – not necessarily a love affair. Look at Saudi Arabia, China and many other depressing nations. Even democratic countries like South Korea politicians hate the Internet and try to suppress freedom of speech and grassroots movement via the net.

Many American Millenials and Webaddicts love to praise their toys as the transformative element that pushed Obama ahead.

But the numbers simply don’t add up: Obama has a massive 144,000 followers on Twitter. This sounds pretty impressive for a generation that measures it’s self-esteem by it’s friend counts on Facebook and MySpace.

But compare 144,000 Twitter followers to staggering 231,229,580 people in voting age in the USA. Even compared to the meager voter turnout of 132,618,580 people it’s a joke. Most of them have never heard of Twitter or own an account on Facebook. Many won’t even own an computer.

Sure many of Obama’s political ads and related videos got millions of views on YouTube, but these figures reflect a global audience – not just an American one.

Obama’s real victory was not on the Internets, but based on good old fashioned neighborhood help. His foot soldiers knocked on many doors and inspired others to vote for him.

The Internet and all it’s gimmicks certainly helped a lot organizing the effort, but the battleground was still this odd thing called reality.

Mousetivism is a great thing, but not as effective as it’s followers claim.

BBC News: New phone features ‘baffle users’

Apart from the phone designers – is anyone surprised about this?

Most touch screens are only meant for the tiny fingers of 12 year old Asian girls. Most people press at least three functions operating these touch mine fields.

The interfaces are fully Disney-compatible – full of eye candy instead of clear and easy to understand visuals.

To configure mobile internet application or simply the included synching software is often a nightmare. Add Bluetooth networking to make it even more confusing and you have the perfect consumers nightmare.

Those smart phones are hardly smart – most of the intelligence has still to come from the user to make these bloody things work.

Best tweet ever.

I hope the Hackers never get caught, unless they did some serious damage.

When I moved into my new place I had no DSL for two months. I was reduced to an UMTS-Datastick, which works quit well, but is no substitute for real bandwidth.

Now I have 18.000 down and 1.000 kbit/s up. Now that’s what I call speed.

With my old 2000 DSL connection much less bandwidth and my download queue was always full with stuff I desperately needed to be sucked down from the intranets. But today updating my favorite podcasts takes only a couple of minutes, not hours to finish.

So most of the time the huge bandwidth lies dormant.

It’s a paradox: the more speed you have, the less you use it, because everything comes down so quickly.

Even downloading a whole movie sometimes happens under 15 minutes.

But at least I can skype with my friends, download pr0n and surf the web at the same time. That’s nice.

Ah, I finally get it …

Since computers have become lifestyle products instead of tools many companies have started to pander to very different types of consumers.

Pink Tech is already causing me eye cancer every time I encounter it in shops (Video 1 and Video 2).

But this pink keyboard from Greybusters with a mirror really takes the cake. And don’t miss all their other great offerings!

Could anyone please stop these people? It hurts.

Each time I test some shiny new phone in a cell phone shop I am appalled by it’s stupidity and lack of ‘usability’.

Most of these ’smartphones’ have mutated in almost unusable cell phones. The menus are too complicated, the battery time is bad, sound quality is often mediocre and call handling was too cumbersome.

But developers and gadget vendors can’t help themselves stuffing ever more function into these gadgets. But for whom?

Most people simply want a phone with a simple address book and texting capabilities.

The number of iPhone or Smartphone user who really use ALL the functions of their gizmos is rather limited, but companies insist of giving as all these additional ‘distractions’ even when we don’t want them.

Most annoying of all: the touch screens and pygmy keyboards are often hard to operate and unusable for some real work. Most of them are overpriced data peep holes, where you can lookup something on the web or have a peek at an important email (because you are addicted to that always-on lifestyle).

Go into any cell phone shop and ask for a simple phone – and you will be amazed how limited the selection is. And most simple phone are build for the elderly with big displays and keyboards.

If I want to take a notebook with me – I’ll take my notebook with me. A mutant cell phone / smartphone is not suitable to replace a notebook.

Today’s elections are fought in real life as well as in cyberspace. Campaign websites and special applications are as important as old school posters and TV ads for the candidates.

But the Obama iPhone Application really takes the cake.

First you have to own an overpriced gadget from a really snobby company called Apple.

Second you have to be computer literate and well educated to handle the bloody thing.

And third you need to willingly seek out and download that application via the Intranets.

Hardly something for your average red neck or these small town value Americans?

In the Age of Mass Exhibitionism via the Intranets everybody deserves to be a star for 15 milliseconds.

So get this great Hollywoods USB-Webcam-Kit and prepare for your few moments of fame and YouTube glory.

Browsing records in a store was simply more fun, than …

… flipping images on a tiny device.

Sure: covers have shrunk incredibly over the last 20 years. From record size to tiny pixels on your iPod or MP3 player.

I always loved record sleeves – there was some great artwork on some of them. The CD was already too small for good design work and special covers (like foldouts or embossed covers).

These tiny images are just … too tiny and boring. And there is no haptics experience as well.

This is just a preview – you can watch the whole interview here.

It is an illusion that there is such a thing as privacy on the Internet, since everything is based on “labeled” data packets that have your address on it.

And most people give away their privacy by shamelessly sharing and providing big companies (not just the Google) with personal information.

How can you force companies to protect your privacy if you don’t do it yourself?

We are slowly entering the Age of Human-Machine-Symbiosis. Sure – it’s all very crude at the moment and we are still ’smarter’ then machines.

But …

Can you remember all the telephone numbers of your friends?

Would you socially disappear if you cell phone would be gone?

Do you mostly use computers as a bridge to communicate with others – or just your human ‘interface’?

Can you still perform easy calculations without a machine?

Can you write a perfect text without a keyboard and automatic spelling checker?

Can you entertain yourself without a digital machine delivering moving images, games or music to you?

Why are modern males so obsessed with their cell phones, notebooks, desktop PCs, iPods and all these other electronic gadgets?

Some time ago I had a short look at the Ladies and their relationship to technology (Girly tech and why pink is for pussy). I think it’s only fair to look at myself and the Technolust of my gender.

Read the rest of this entry »

Unless you are 12 years old, female and own a pair of very rich parents – you shouldn’t own such a piece of crap. A €190 for a 4 Gbyte USB stick is not only overpriced, but will make your "precious data" even more interesting for any thief.

More? Buy this shiny objects here

For years now newspapers have been closing down all over the world – and once again it has been a miserable year for publishers. It’s not only paper, but also TV and radio who find themselves under attack from the net.

Personally I love paper – but apart from my weekly edition of the ever great Economist – I don’t read any newspaper or magazine at all.

Overall mainstream media has lost the plot and has been to unwilling to confront the technological change and – MOST OF ALL – the contact to the reader. And there is still that thing called competence …

I knew many journalists in the early 90’s who sneered at so called "New Media" and it’s shiny new world. Today they are either unemployed or deeply into Internet publishing. But still most of them don’t like talking to "the reader" – their very audience. But if you don’t care about your readers – why should they care about you?

Make me smarter, not dumber!

Blogging brought back the "citizen journalist" – who stands on the same "height" as their readers and therefore love the exchange, no matter how bloody it is.

Many great publishing houses and broadcasters have started blogs on their own – trying desperately to build that very same relationship. But they usually fail. You can’t pit the passion of a 24/7 self-propelled blogger against a 9 to 5 work attitude of a normal employee.

But there is a final big mistake all these stations and newspapers make: the lack of depth, seriousness and competence. In the days before Google and Wikipedia it was very hard work for a normal person to research anything those newscasters and experts told us. Today it’s easy to find out if these "professionals" are competent.

Dunno where all that crap is coming from?!

Most mass media web sites are written poorly, offer no depth and real competence. They still just recycle what comes out of the big news agencies like AP or Reuters. Even my beloved BBC publishes only very short and not very deep news articles  – I dare not to mention CNN or MSNBC, which are a lot worse.

Most publishers are still under the illusion that if they offer infotainment and loads of celebrity crap people and advertisers will flock to them. That is why all stations and newspapers have so much trivial crap on their sites, pages and shows. And they is why they are all so exchangeable and don’t deserve any viewers loyalty.

Keep the paper – and give us competence!

Plus: since they all use the same news agencies all their content reads and looks the same. Reuters and AP also offer video and images – not just text anymore. That is why most smarter surfers "leech" the news directly from these providers – not from the recyclers like CNN or any newspaper.

But readers have to evolve as well. They have to be more willing to pay for good stuff and services. Only a few web sites so far have managed to get some money directly from their audience. And that’s a shame! Good journalism shouldn’t be funded by advertising, but by the readers.

But I am afraid in our "all for free" culture this won’t happen.

Finally the digital revolution enters the next stage of small and affordable computing. The success of the Asus Eee PC has spawned a whole range of competing machines. The Eee is so far a huge success: it’s small affordable (under 300 Euro), very portable (just around 1 Kg) and it simply works (the screen and keyboard are obviously not very big – but bigger and better than anything a cell phone or PDA like a Palm can offer).

Now this is finally a machine that has enough power to surf the web, do some work and communicate with your buddies (via Skype or instant messaging).

It’s a great secondary machine – because it has not enough memory to hold your complete MP3 collection no does it have enough horse power to do image a lot image or video editing. Not to mention it’s graphics are far to weak to play any serious game. But give it some time and those weaknesses are solved as well.

Most of all: the machine is CHEAP. So mobile computing becomes a cheap commodity (all machines are around 300 Euro) – so you are less afraid of carrying your precious computer around. Plus our global infrastructure offers more and more free wireless access – without which such a machine would be worthless.

I am looking forward to a whole batch of machines for next Christmas – and by one in addition to my other – heavier – notebooks.

Normal hard drives are built like record player: you have spinning platters and an "arm" that reads and writes the data to the "records".

Computer drives only based on memory chips are nothing new – but bloody expensive. But sooner or later they will replace normal drives, since they are much faster, less less energy, have no moving parts and much more durable. Best of all: no more humming noise.

Especially for notebooks Sold State Drives are a blessing: batteries will last much longer and they will produce less heat.

At the moment these drives are EXPENSIVE. A 64 Gbyte SSD is usually around €700 to €1.000. But like all computer gizmos the prizes will come down.

Samsung has recently announced a 256 Gbyte SSD with a killer performance. The Nerds are drooling like mad – and so am I.