Cochrane Talk

I heard a great talk this morning at the Etel conference. The very smart and entertaining speaker was Peter Cochrane. The presentation was about a number of future trends (VOIP, RFID, GPS, mapping, demise of telcos, convergence as a myth, and more), he used a combo of slides from presentations that are worth checking out here. A couple of examples that jumped out at me:

• As a future product idea he talked about a cell phone with built in GPS, compass and accelerometer that you could flick towards a building and it displays info on that building for you (by detecting your position, direction and gesture and looking up the data for the spot that you are flicking towards)
• He talked about the evolution from internet -> position nets -> sensor nets where smart machines can do things like move products across the globe with much higher efficiency because they know where everything is with relation to each other at any given time (which is the kind of complex logistics problem that computers are great at solving and humans aren’t)