On Future Technology

Not so much about China, but about technology in general.

I think I've spotted a trend in current popular applications and internet sites. Of course a popularity of a device or a service is greatly determined by usability and convenience, but there's more. On devices secondary physical features are important too, but it's not my point.

Information retention. The idea is, that we will see many more devices and services which allow as to retain as much information as possible. Let's start from the photographs of old. They were a superior form of retaining a picture compared to a painting as they were more accurate and faster to take - they allowed you to gather more information more quickly. You probably have a picture or two of your grandmother when she was young. More of your mother and many, many of yourself and your siblings. This is of course because the pictures became cheaper and easier to take as the technology grew cheaper and more common, but the promise of the technology was to retain information.

I'll take Google as another example. Remember how Gmail became a thing? Why? They said "We'll let you retain your mails, we'll give you 2 gigs of space so you'll never have to delete an email again." It's a clearer example than the photographs, and very recent. Similar internet phenomena exist. Sites like Facebook are not popular only because we like to stay in touch with our friends - they are popular because they allow us to retain information. Birthdays, likes, dislikes and such.

This is a future trend that will continue. I firmly believe those mobile gadgets that allow us to carry on more information, more conveniently and better organized will prevail over those mobile devices which offer different funtions. I'm drooling for the new iPhone since they promise the new service will allow me to get my emails pushed to the device on the road. They also promise to keep my contacts and calendar up to date between the phone and computers. It's a promise of retained information.

Pay attention to this, it's not something the companies will market by my term, but a thing which will be pushed more and more. Soon you will want a phone which can not only retain phone calls or audio/video messages, but organize them. We're not there yet, but I'm sure many companies would pay for a way to keep track of things said during a phone call. 

This desire to hold information and keep it available will also remove some limitations we now think normal. Someone will soon market a cellphone which not only can save all of you text messages but also organize them and synchronize them if you so want. And if it's not big enough of a benefit to market it'll happen quietly and accross the board - especially if video messages run over SMS's.

It's a trend with internet applications, but synchronized services like mobile blogging and social networking sites make their profit out of it, just by holding on to things you already know so you don't need to remember.

OP out.