Innovation in Software

For a couple of years now, I’ve been fascinated by the possibilities of a field known as Augmented Reality. In a nutshell, AR allows a digital device to “overlay” digital information onto the physical world. This is quite cool stuff. Watch:

So, that’s nice and everything. We can take a digital device, and through the multitude of sensory input, we can start to use it as a viewfinder. We can even start coming up with zany ways of manipulating the image we’re seeing, which people with very little expertise are starting to play with:

What’s intrigued me though, is can we find more interesting ways to interact with the device. It’s great that I can point my iPhone at a piece of paper with a special block printed on it, and a wind farm comes out, or I can point it at the environment I’m stood in and get extra information that isn’t otherwise easily found. What else can I do? Well, thanks to the same technologies developed for those applications I can suddenly create a virtual reality headset (either to augment my environment or to travel to another distant one):

Again, pretty and interesting and opens all sorts of possibilities. But how much further can we go? I have no doubt we’re just seeing the early adopter stuff here, and that with time lots more interesting applications will become available utilising these technologies. Watch that space carefully.

One of the issues raised by this technology though, is our addiction to it and the fact we become chained to the device. All of us have suffered that weird syndrome that happens when out with friends and suddenly all of you in a group are staring at small boxes of plastic and metal, interacting with virtual worlds rather than the one you’re physically in. If we start to augment reality through this technology, do we lose something about the sense of place and interaction with the real physical World? Do we start to become machines ourselves?

Thankfully, a rather interesting prospect is on the horizon. Even better, it’s open source and achievable with cheapish hardware. It might take a moment for this to “click” with you, but this will likely be the most valuable 10 minutes you’ll spend this year on understanding the future of human interfaces with technology in the next few years. Trust me. If you haven’t clicked that link, do so before going on, or if you want to skip the background and just see it in action, here’s a demo clip with cheesy music for you:

The idea that the device disappears is not all that new – we have seen devices getting smaller and denser for years with that goal in mind – but the way this has been done fascinates me. This technology once developed a little more into something more consumable eradicates the need for a high-end smartphone, multi-touch technology like the $40,000 Microsoft Surface, portable media players, the lot.

What you need: a camera, a projector, a data connection and a pair of headphones, all plugged into something that can understand all of them. Right now, the hardware looks cumbersome, but that’s just a hardware engineering problem: there are already smaller projection devices and cameras coming to market that will make this technology nearly invisible when worn.

What you can do with it: anything a camera, mp3 player, iPhone, desktop PC, laptop, mobile phone, projector, surface table, AR application, in fact anything you can do with any digital device, all in one go. And all of it with the device being near invisible.

What you use it with: ordinary pieces of paper, walls, tables, your hands, the objects and people around you. Instead of staring at pieces of plastic, suddenly you are encouraged to look up at the World.

When something interesting happens you don’t fumble around, open a shutter, focus, click, crop, tag and post. You just make a shape with your hands, and there’s your photo. When you want a flight-time update you don’t fumble, open an app, type, click, read: you just look at your boarding pass. You’re in a bookshop and you wonder if the book in your hands is any good so you fumble, type (or perhaps photo the barcode), click and read, perhaps clicking around a few stores on a small screen. With this, you just hold the book. That’s it.

You might think this is sci-fi, that nobody would ever use all of this or that the “back-end” needed would be too bulky. I would disagree. I would say it’s one of the most interesting developments in technology this decade. I will be watching for the release of the source code due soon with some interest. Pranav’s site is a good place to keep your ear to the ground.

Many years ago I ran FreeBSD on pretty much every system I touched. I loved it. The lack of political polarisation that touches the GNU/Linux community combined with the power of Unix under the hood sucked me in.

I even, almost infamously, had a rant about another operating system I now use daily. I was a zealot. I am ashamed of my attitude in that email – my only excuse is that I was still quite young, a rather naive and opinionated 26 year old.

Today, I use exclusively OS X, and occasionally boot up a virtual Windows instance to test code on MS code. I have a terminal open nearly all the time and often dive down to the Unix goodness, but more often than not the bulk of my work is in the browser, text editor, IDE or Mail app.

Why then, I was asked the other day, do I not just ditch Apple and get a Linux (or even BSD), machine to work with? The bulk of my work (except for iPhone application development) would continue as before.

My answer is very simple: carpenters don’t build lathes.

To explain, let’s first go back to that rant I had about OS X. About a month later, I ordered my first Apple laptop – an iBook G4 – and was very happy with it. What happened in that month?

I realised when shopping around, I needed to check out the chipsets used for WiFi in each laptop because FreeBSD wireless support was pretty hit-and-miss back then. I also needed to understand the graphics chip-set because I’d need to compile X if I wanted to run a graphical desktop environment. I then realised I’d need to assess pretty much every feature in terms of hardware compatibility to make a purchasing decision. And then, on receipt of my new laptop I would have to spend a few hours doing all the compiling and fixing, and I would then need to do this work every few months as part of an upgrade cycle.

Yes, I’d get the power and flexibility of my own tailored operating system environment, but isn’t that a lot of work?

I recalled a few months previously a friend was playing with his new smart phone. It was running Symbian and he seemed to be doing lots of prodding and poking with it. Enquiring what he was doing, he said he was “doing some maintenance” to keep it in working order. Hang on, was he effectively sysadmin’ing his phone? “Yes, I suppose”, came the reply. When you have to do systems administration work on your phone, your phone is no longer a tool to assist with your work, it is an object of work in itself.

It was this insight when thinking about my operating system choices that directed me to OS X: I wanted the power of Unix, sure, but I wanted it to just work. I wanted to be able to get on with my work, the laptop and operating system as tools rather than objects of work themselves.

This small insight has made my life a great deal easier, and still dictates not using any other operating system. Some of my peers see it as weakness (even more point to my original rant above), but I see it as spending my time doing the things I love.

And it’s also an insight I think that as developers we forget: are we developing tools that assist with objectives, or tools that are objects of work themselves. Are we building interfaces and suggesting business logic that means our customers spend time managing the behaviour to fit around them? If so, why?

In the last few weeks I’ve seen some really interesting “reductions” in functionality that aim to make tools more directly useful, rather than requiring some administration.

Take for example, the role of authentication. You need to “contain” all of your customer’s “stuff” in a way that is linked to their “account”. So we have user registration, user profiles, account activations, password resets, etc. Seems like a lot of stuff. Are we sure we need it?

Take for example, Posterous. Their home page explains it all:

All you need to do is email stuff to post@posterous.com and you’re up and running. No signup, no captchas, no password strength indicators unless you want to add them. You’re a person capturing stuff – why do you need to admin yet another web application?

BootStrap UK (which is worthy of an article in its own right as a concept), needs accounts but has a simpler registration system: just follow @bootstrapuk on Twitter and they’ll follow you and direct message you a password. Done.

There are other examples out there as well, sometimes using software to help break out “lathe obsession” elsewhere in society. One iPhone app I’ve seen reviewed gets the banking system to work around the customer, rather than demand the customer head into a branch to suit the banking system. Brilliant.

We often spend too much time trying to work out how a customers will need to behave around our application, rather than how we need to get out of the way and let our customers use what we produce in order to do their thing. In every customer we need to start seeing the carpenter more, and assume they – perhaps unlike many of us developers – don’t like tinkering with lathes for its own sake.

Whilst it was announced by the conference itself a week or two back and it appeared via @vagueware, I realised today I’d not mentioned it here: I’m speaking at ThinkVisibility on the 12th September.

It’s the first scheduled talk I’ve done in a long while – perhaps the first I’ve done since I started attending/organising BarCamp conferences – so it’s a bit weird actually planning it all this far in advance. I am however looking forward to it, as my talk for online marketers is focused on a subject area I’ve not been able to discuss publicly for the several years I’ve been learning it.

Whilst I’ve sworn to the organisers that I won’t discuss Kagtum per se, a lot of my talk will focus on techniques and technologies that underpin it. My abstract reads like this:

Why do marketers exert more effort trying to convince people who have never heard of their companies – whether it be through SEO, CPC campaigns and building social media audiences – to spend money, than they spend using technology to understand people they already have a relationship with?

Do you know how many of your current customers or site visitors are pre-disposed to buying a particular type of product online? Do you have statistics on cross-selling opportunities at checkout? Do you even know where to find that data? Or how to use technology to make sure your e-commerce platform does?

Applied software engineering, advanced data sets and a little bit of lateral thinking means your website can do your customer’s searching for them, before they know they need to search for something themselves. All you need is a little bit of knowledge, a friendly developer or geek and a leap of imagination.

In a talk tailored for people who are more curious about what’s possible rather than studying the status quo, we’ll briefly cover how centuries old mathematics can help your online presence as much as it has helped your inbox stay junk-free, touch on collaborative filtering and the possibilities unlocked in your software through just one or two key pieces of information about a customer. Finally we’ll touch on how software can constantly learn about your customers and automatically work to increase conversions.

An abstract – and hopefully intellectually stimulating – talk, you might leave wanting to learn some maths and computer science to understand how your website can serve your customers better, even if the thought of such a prospect appals you right now.

I’ll be tweaking it a little bit as I always do when developing a talk properly, but that’s the main gist of it.

A short/cut-down version will probably get done as a screen-cast for some time in later September or early Ocotber, but if you want to hear the full thing or discuss what I talk about in detail in person, I’d suggest you go and register now. The focus is around online marketing and SEO, and my talk will of course reflect the audience who will be there, so if that’s your bag there should be plenty of other talks to grab your attention and make the fee worthwhile. I hope to see you there.

When the UK went to war in earlier this decade, I gave serious consideration to signing up to the Army with the intention of becoming an officer.

Not because I’m a blood-thirsty man looking to kill Taleban foot soldiers or because I had aspirations of heroism, but because I had (and believe I still have) a set of skills that would be of use on a battlefield. I might – just might – have been able to help save a few lives in the British ranks. The main reason I didn’t is because I really have a problem with being shot at just because I’d been told to be shot at. I have “problems with authority”, as they say.

There is a desperate lack of improvisation, innovation and lateral thinking in most battlefield situations. There are some stunning examples of tactical and strategic thinking, but the current row over equipment is an example of how we must wait a number of years for a handful of helicopters to turn up in order to conduct basic troop movements.

I am pleased then, to point to an example of innovative thinking on the battlefield by a US soldier.

In Iraq, Sergeant 1st Class Martin Stadtler had nothing. He was stationed near Mosul, at a base that covers 24 square kilometers. Surrounding the base was a wall, and at intervals along that wall stood watchtowers. Those towers were improvised; they were large concrete water pipes, stood on their ends.

Inside each tower is a pair of soldiers. They’re watching for insurgents. To communicate with the home base, they had standard-issue tactical radios. Unfortunately, these radios couldn’t reach home base — the base was too big. Soldiers had to play a game of Telephone to reach the base: one tower radios the next until they are finally in range of the home base. Obviously, this would not do.

Fortunately, SFC Stadtler knew how to use open source software. Using found hardware, like a laptop pulled from the trash, and wires pulled from collapsed buildings, he was able to establish a wireless network between the towers and the home base. He was able to install freely available voice-over-ip software on this recycled hardware, which turned the computer into a wireless telephone. The soldiers were now able to communicate with each other and the home base. At no cost.

Later on he adapted his night-vision camera equipment using software “invented by a young man in Germany who wanted to watch his cat while he was away from home”, to watch out for insurgents planting bombs beyond the perimeter of the base.

Of course, the flip-side of this is that because its low cost and using commodity hardware, the technical advantage can be lost quickly to the “other side” adapting – they can have improvised night vision systems and cheap long-range secure telecommunications, too. But that’s the nature of warfare.

It just goes to show though, there is a place for innovative software solutions in even the most dusty and difficult of situations.

Disclaimer: it’s no secret I’m not a fan of Microsoft, and I know some of you are. This is just where I am at the moment, it’s not a troll but an observation. I seek constructive feedback only.

John Dvorak is possibly the crankiest man on Earth. Now he’s aiming it all at Microsoft.

Microsoft is a software company. It has been distracted too easily by the success of others in essentially unrelated fields. Here are but a few examples (and there are dozens more):

• Years ago in the pre-Internet era, AOL was the talk of the town, so Microsoft had to copy it with MSN. No money was made; no strategic advantage was gained.
• Netscape was the rage for a while, so Microsoft threw together a browser and got in that business. The browser was given away for free. No money was made; the strategy got the company in trouble with government trustbusters.
• During the early days of the Internet, new online publications appeared. Microsoft decided to become a publisher too, rolling out a slew of online properties including a computer magazine and a women’s magazine. They were all folded.

[snip another half dozen or so examples...]

This is a company that began making development tools for programmers, beginning with a programming language. Does anyone see a pattern here?

[...]

Maybe Microsoft cannot come to grips with the reason for its success. After all, Ballmer is not a computer programmer, and has never been too interested in software or computers and seems to want to run a media company.

Ballmer may get his wish by turning Microsoft into one, but I don’t think he’ll like it.

It’s true that Microsoft was taken a few twists and turns. Developing bad ideas is what Microsoft does, and have done for over 25 years. The only truly successful products they have in their stable – the products that finance the entire empire – are the Windows operating system(s) and Office. Nearly everybody expects both to take a massive hit on market share within a few years.

Hugh Macleod has, perhaps in the hope of getting Scoble’s old gig as Microsoft evangelist, tried to change the culture within from the outside with his blue monster meme. He’s had limited (but sometimes notable) success in the nearly three years since he started it, and I expect that might have been Microsoft’s last great chance: it was an excuse to change the culture into something more dynamic.

Talking to people within Microsoft there are two cultures: the old guard who want to run things as normal, and the newer breed who want to mix things up. The simple truth is senior management have seemingly let both sides down in the last decade (if not longer).

Without a fundamental culture change, and an ability to focus on core skills (rather than dancing everywhere and anywhere as Dvorak points out), means Microsoft are risking everything.

Nobody cares about Windows any more, because the applications of the future are on the web and the OS is becoming nothing more than a local file store. Nobody cares much about search beyond the engines they already use, no matter how much you try and get them to switch. Everybody hates the Zune. The development tools are over-complex, but that’s perhaps because the underlying libraries are over-complex and the bizarre insistence that an application written in Windows 3.1 should run smoothly in Vista makes developer life awkward.

So what are Microsoft’s core skills? Well, despite Visual Studio being a pig, it has a fan base. MSDN is loved by the people who love it, and as Apple realised with their ADC programme in the move to OS X, it’s those guys who are key to the future. Go and ask developers what they need to build the tools of the future and focus on it.

Apple took a gutsy move in clearing the decks with OS X and basically stopping support for System, but in the process they were able to focus the APIs to make programming for their platform much simpler, cleaner, more fun.

They targeted the very best developers on the planet, who in turn produced applications so desirable that “alpha users” wanted to buy Apple kit to run them. Go to a gathering of leading technologists, designers, writers or other alpha users today and the Windows machines will be notable by their absence (or extremely small presence). If the laptop hasn’t got an Apple logo on it, it’s odds on it’ll be running a flavour of GNU/Linux.

Microsoft need to do the same. They need to focus on the aesthetics of software, and take their base of developers and make them champions.

Then they need to think about how to help their customers become the very best customers they can be. When I sit down at a machine to work, to play, whatever, I don’t want to think about using a computer: I want to think about the job I’m doing. I want to think about how to get what I’m doing, done.

In short, Microsoft lost my business because BSD Unix and OS X allowed me to get to the pub sooner.

This needs to be the focus of the Office team: how do we make things so easy, users don’t even need to think about what they need to do for more than a few seconds before we’re helping them do it.

If the culture internally wakes up to the reality off campus that they need to change, and get senior management backing to focus on those changes, they can build a platform for the future that keeps Microsoft in the top flight for another generation. If instead they continue to stick their heads in the sand and think they can be any company they want to be, well…

Trying to shift to a monetisation strategy based on advertising in this economic climate is just pure foolishness, just as building a strategy on your competitor’s leading product is going to make you forget about making your own products the very best they can be. Microsoft’s current strategy is akin to Adobe announcing they’re going to launch a search engine: most of their base are going to ask very loudly “WTF?”

I suspect though that Ballmer will be allowed to continue playing in the sandpit that is Microsoft, the cultures will continue to clash, and nothing useful will be produced as a result. Potentially they’re going to find themselves in the same position as GM within a few years.

Shame. Who will I moan about when Microsoft goes under?

[Up-front Disclaimer: I didn't do Computer Science at University. I did "Software Engineering". It involved formal methods and quite a lot of Z notation. I have some pretty strong views on Software Engineering as a discipline as a result. Most of my CompSci colleagues generally do not share my beliefs.]

Johannes Ernst posted yesterday a pointer to an article from IEEE Software by Tom DeMarco, pronouncing Software Engineering as “an idea whose time has come and gone”. Tom’s argument can basically be summed up as:

[...] you need to distinguish between two drastically different kinds of projects:

• Project A will eventually cost about a million dollars and produce value of around $1.1 million
• Project B will eventually cost about a million dollars and produce value of more than $50 million

What’s immediately apparent is that control is really important for Project A but almost not at all important for Project B. This leads us to the odd conclusion that strict control is something that matters a lot on relatively useless projects and much less on useful projects. It suggests that the more you focus on control, the more likely you’re working on a project that’s striving to deliver something of relatively minor value.

To my mind, the question that’s much more important than how to control a software project is, why on earth are we doing so many projects that deliver such marginal value?

Can I really be saying that it’s OK to run projects without control or with relatively little control? Almost. I’m suggesting that first we need to select projects where precise control won’t matter so much. Then we need to reduce our expectations for exactly how much we’re going to be able to control them, no matter how assiduously we apply ourselves to control.”

Frankly, I can’t believe such a narrow and misguided argument has come from the pen of Tom DeMarco.

Imagine if you will the next time I go into tender on a project.

Customer: So how much will this project cost to deliver, and how long will it take?
Me: Well, how much value is it going to add to your business?
Customer: Pardon?
Me: Is it going to add a little bit of value to your business, or a lot?
Customer: A lot, I expect.
Me: In that case, I have no idea. Let’s just roll with it and see where it goes, eh?

I’m not convinced that’ll go down well.

There are a few logical mistakes in Tom’s argument (and I can’t believe I’m having to point them out), that basically means he’s talking a great big pile of crap:

1. We can not assess the true value of software until it is shipped.

   We might be able to sense the potential value, but it’s a guess.

   I have one project on my books now with a mid-sized build budget, potential value in the hundreds of millions. Another project for a smaller build budget with a potential value of £200k-£300k. Another project with a tiny build budget that if it goes viral could be worth billions five years from now.

   Or maybe the project with the tiny build budget sinks, the medium project gets on NASDAQ in 5 years and the biggest project eeks out a living but never goes stellar.

   We simply don’t know. We can’t know. We’re guessing. There are too many variables outside of the software engineering process to be able to assess the potential value accurately.

   In essence, we have to treat all projects as being potentially of very high value, because they all are.

2. Value is potentially nearly unlimited, budgets are not.

   It might be well and dandy to say that it doesn’t matter if the budget might slip because the value is so high, but budgets are fixed.

   Thousands of software builds are being worked on right now where a 5% budget slip is potentially going to kill the project because there just isn’t more money after the budget is gone, and without being feature-complete the software is going to have near-zero value.

   Yes, incremental development is the way to do things, yes we should be able to stop and ship after each day’s work. However to fulfil the project’s objectives (and maximise its potential returnable value), we must aim to get all the features in to the final build within budget.

3. There are other factors beyond budget, schedule and value to control.

   John Glenn once quipped about being sat on the launchpad, “I felt about as good as anybody would, sitting in a capsule on top of a rocket that were both built by the lowest bidder.

   However, whilst budget was important, he shouldn’t have felt in danger: the political ramifications of a death would have meant that the people who built that rocket and capsule were going to make sure he survived.

   And some software systems are the same. What is the “value” of a nuclear power station control system? Or the control systems in a fly-by-wire aircraft? Do we care more about the financial value or the safety value? I would suggest that controlling the build – engineering the build – in these situations is critical because the safety value is very high.

   In fact, it betrays immediately the fallacy of Tom’s that only the marginal projects need tight controlling – if you’re not controlling the processes around a software build that keeps 400 souls alive at 35,000 feet, you really should be in another profession.

There is a lot of cruft in software engineering. Waterfall methodologies are now considered almost laughable. However, it’s a young discipline and we have barely begun to understand the correct way to engineer software.

Agile philosophies are taking over in development shops because it allows for less process, more communication and ultimately better software being produced at the other end.

Behaviour-Driven and Test-Driven Development methodologies are providing useful benefits to our clients in a way we could barely imagine just a couple of years ago. In certain situations, formal methods and algebraic proofs are confirming that software is “correct” and “complete” in such a way we can literally bet our lives on it.

Tom admits himself he’s not on the front-line of software development these days. Perhaps his metric-centric universe is correctly condemned, but most of us aren’t using those methods anyway. We’re looking at perhaps a few numbers instead: test coverage, remaining days in budget/schedule, remaining features to be implemented. We’ve moved on. Perhaps he just doesn’t get what we’re doing in dev shops these days.

And we’re still learning new techniques, new ways of doing less process, more quality software. Software Engineering is definitely not something that has “come and gone”: it has barely got its foot in the door.

Towards the end though, Tom does make one point I can’t agree with more:

Consistency and predictibility are still desirable, but they haven’t ever been the most important things. For the past 40 years, for example, we’ve tortured ourselves over our inability to finish a software project on time and on budget. But as I hinted earlier, this never should have been the supreme goal. The more important goal is transformation, creating software that changes the world or that transforms a company or how it does business.

This reminded me of a talk given by Ted Nelson at OpenTech 2005 where at one point he almost screamed:

I didn’t get into computers to automate trivial crap! I got into it to change the World!

Didn’t we all? But I think we can do it without having to just free-ride our way along with our fingers crossed, hoping we don’t run out of money.

There’s a lot of interesting things happening out there right now. HTML 5 is about to make a whole suite of new applications possible thanks to:

• Much better rendering of graphics on the fly
• Client-side storage of application data
• Drag-and-drop interfaces that make web apps feel more desktop-like

But there has to be something we are missing out on that is niggling us all at the back of our collective group-think mind. Perhaps watching the Google Wave introduction got you psyched about something that suddenly became possible. Perhaps the very way the web inherently works bothers you, and you envisage a new platform.

I’m interested in hearing about it now the comments are getting a little bit of love across articles. Go crazy. Throw them in there…

Steve Wozniak (co-founder of Apple), gave a keynote speech in Miami yesterday at Software AG’s Innovation World.

“You don’t have to convince people to do everything like you. Do what you want to do–you have to know who you are,” he said.

He developed a theme that a lack of resources – specifically a lack of money – forces you to find new ways to get a job done.

Whenever I’ve wanted to try and find some really new ideas, I try and find a way to do big sweeping projects with as few resources as possible. This then leads me to finding a whole bunch of components I need to make it happen, all of which are potentially stimulators for whole new projects in themselves.

When you want to innovate, think small.

via ZDnet Asia

As most of you now know, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking recently. I’ve even been ranting a fair bit. I sound downbeat when I talk about it (as I did at GeekUp this week), but there are small shards of optimism I can extract from all of the discussion, and it’s those I’m going to focus on.

For several years now, an idea has been bugging me. It addresses hard problems, big social issues I care about, and I believe I can actually do something useful, innovative and entertaining in the space. I have called it Kagtum.

The article I found the most upbeat about my rant has actually make me think it’s worth dealing with this set of problems again from a fresh perspective and push the ideas forward into code.

In the years thinking about these problems I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to make it happen. I’d spoken to a lot of people. I’d sniffed around investors. I’d watched blogs by people in the same space and saw where they were heading and thought about where they might trip up. I’ve watched people trip up (90% of them by focusing on the wrong thing), and made mental notes.

Today, something clicked. I realised can actually make the beta happen, in my spare time quicker than I thought and not break a sweat whilst having fun. And, even better, I don’t need to drop any of my current commitments around vagueware, idea banks, other business ideas.

That sounds like a plan.

So, it’s time to kick things off. I’m trying to recruit a user base of people interested in news, current affairs and emerging technology against which to bounce ideas off. I’ve started that process by setting up a page on Facebook and CPC’ing people on FB interested in those topics. If you want to become a fan, please do so and you’ll be behind the wall on the first release.

The Vision Thing will continue. However, now I’m going to try and deal with the issues not by complaining, whining, ranting and criticising, but trying to find a way to be optimistic and beat a path. I will aim to show, not tell. Maybe I’ll mess up and people will laugh, maybe I won’t. Should be fun finding out, either way.

At tonight’s GeekUp (Briton’s Protection – just 50 yards from the usual venue – 6pm), there is another social discussion event. This time, another area I spend a lot of time thinking about is up for consideration. From the announcement:

Discussion Topic: “The Future of the Internet”

• How do you see people using the internet in 5/10 years time?
  • What features do you want to see browsers supporting?
  • Will people still be using browsers? If not, what will they be using?
  • Does anyone actually use 3G video chat? Will VoIP mainstream
    follow too?
  • Will Google always be the number one search engine?
  • Will Google be even bigger? Perhaps it might run our lives …
  • Will IPv6 actually be adopted by the masses?
  • Anyone up for a 3G wireless dongle biometric implant to hook your
    memory up to the net?!
  • Semantic Web – is it the future? what does it mean?

How we intend to get through that lot in a couple of hours I have no idea. I expect I will be writing up notes and reporting back tomorrow if people can’t make it, but if you can make it, you should.