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Monday, July 11, 2011

The Shape of Things to Come

     Recently IBM completed 100 years. That's a huge achievement and looking at its past IBM kept on innovating and rapidly adopting to the changing landscape and gave us many innovations that changed our lives forever like the ATM. Now here's a look at some of the new-age companies working on cutting-edge technologies that I think are gearing up to revolutionize the future and seem more than ready to take us to the next level in their respective fields. While I am not comparing these firms to IBM, they indeed seem to rock on the innovation front.

1) Better Place - Rethinking Public Transport

   In 2005 when the then SAP veteran Shai Agassi left the Young Global Leaders conference, he had already made up his mind that he will focus on climate change as part of his efforts to make this world a better place and so he founded Project Better Place, later renamed Better Place. Agassi conceived the idea to sell electric cars like the cell phone industry - so the cost of the electric cars (which until now has been one of the main factors affecting their mass adoption apart from charging the electric batteries) will be subsidized depending on the duration of your contract and you will pay for the electricity you will use to charge your car's battery similar to the the way you are charged for talk time by the cellphone operators. Better Place will provide the infrastructure for charging and even replacing the batteries in their electric cars like the cellular operators use towers to provide network coverage. Today Better Place has tie-ups with governments like Israel, Denmark and others to lead the way to sustainable and green transportation.
From their website - 
"Better Place delivers the network and services that make an electric car affordable to buy, easy to use, and amazing to own. Electric car drivers will have access to a network of charge spots, battery switch stations and systems that optimize the driving experience and minimize environmental impact and cost."
That can indeed make countries that are relatively small geographically like Israel become oil-free sooner than we expected! Imagine oil-free!!!

2) SpaceX - Making Space Exciting Again, but Cheaper this Time

   Founded by the legendary Elon Musk in 2002 by investing $100 million of his own money until 2006, Space Exploration Technologies Corp. is a private space transport company.In Dec 2010, SpaceX became the first company to successfully launch a private spacecraft, orbit  the Earth and then recover (return to Earth from orbit) it for which it was recognized with the Space Achievement Award by the Space Foundation. SpaceX has, so far, in its arsenal - 2 main reusable space launch vehicles Falcon 1 and Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy based on a cluster of Falcon 9 and Dragon which is a free-flying, reusable spacecraft which it intends to use for a manned commercial space program. In December 2008, NASA announced the selection of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launch vehicle and Dragon spacecraft and a multi-million dollar deal under the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program to resupply the International Space Station (ISS) when the Space Shuttle retires. While there are others in Space aviation but SpaceX distinguishes itself as having drastically brought down the cost of space travel and will continue to do so further.
From their website -
"In an era when most technology based products follow a path of ever-increasing capability and reliability while simultaneously reducing costs, launch vehicles today are little changed from those of 40 years ago. SpaceX aims to change this paradigm by developing a family of launch vehicles which will ultimately reduce the cost and increase the reliability of space access by a factor of ten."
Next up - a manned mission to MARS and even space tourism.

3) Recorded Future - Predicting the Future the Digital Way

   This one is straight out of a science fiction movie. Recorded Future is an early stage company based out of Cambridge, Massachusetts specializing in predictive analytics with the goal to "unleash all that mankind knows about the future". So what do they do? Recorded Future scours the web using what they call as world's first temporal analytics engine; then extract, analyze and rank the information to make it useful using powerful visualization tools. In sum, they try to predict the future using all the signals available online. No wonder then that some of its investors include Google and the CIA.
From their website -
"The world's 24x7 media flow is filled with temporal signals, including reports of what's transpired or statements of what's expected to come. Recorded Future's linguistic and statistical algorithms extract time-related information and through temporal reasoning we structure the unstructured. We help users understand relationships between entities and events over time."

4) Lytro - Redefining Camera as We Know it Today 

   Now here is a company founded by Ren Ng, a light-field photography researcher from Stanford, that claims to redefine the camera for the first time in more than a century. The current crop of cameras only capture one plain of light. The cameras being developed by Lytro claim to capture the complete light field i.e. the entire amount of light traveling in every direction through every point in space. This essentially means that once you have taken a snap, you can always go back and change the focus in the snap, re-orient it and even switch seamlessly between 2D and 3D. Lytro claims to have used powerful software to replace many of the internal camera components to achieve this. For more details, check out Lytro's photo gallery and how it works. This technology has always been there, but Lytro makes it portable and affordable enough for consumers.

1 comment:

  1. I got to look at the work done by Recorded future, more because it is strikingly related to what I am working on for my thesis project but in a social context.

    I also think that a lot of technological research happens at the academic level, which is then taken over by companies that look to invest in it and make it commercial. I also consider Microsoft as one of the pioneers in research specially after their noteworthy work behind Kinect, that is surely going to change the way we interact with computers.

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