Make Me Dumb

There has been number of innovations and invention in last many years and they have been presented as pathbreaking and something which is bound to bring changes and make you believe that they are extremely useful. I beg to differ on several such innovations which I see some of them as useless, totally irrelevant and never required at first place. They are just there to make you dumb.

Tablet computers, to be frank it is really good improvised invention of e-book reader but badly intended for individual consumption. I don’t get the point, why another portable instrument for internet, VOIP, watching movies, pics and running same application that you run on smart phone. Just because its screen size is bigger than that of mobile phone and you have to less strain your eyes for watching movies. I don’t see much any major motive for personal consumption for tablet computers. Tablets for the fact are designed for recreational purposes not much for extensive work or education purpose. I don’t know how many people would like to carry two devices which are grossly similar to each other, infact large number of 3G tablets can make phone call through mobile networks which reduces unique application for personal consumption for a person who is carrying a smart phone. I’m not sure how long will this fad for tablets will continue considering mobile phones itself have 32Gb memory and dual core processor blurring the capability leap of tablets. I must say tablets in coming years would have great application in numerous businesses which seem to be not at all promoted at the moment.

Another make me dumb innovation is playing movies on mobile phones. It is extremely atrocious innovation for a movie buff to watch really shrunk images for hours. Movie makers spend millions of dollars to I know the big leap of this application came when ipod was search for newer avenues to keep ever bored consumer and make people buy same device again & again. Mr jobs pushed it hard as a unattended solution for human gratification of watching shrunk images. Yeah, it is much shameful for a person who himself owns a movie studio making animated movie, but obviously what makes more money was his concern not your burnt eye or creative work becoming invisible. The only reason you watch movie on mobile phones or ipod because you are desperate and not really looking for entertainment, which this application actually kills it.

Segway is an innovation for fun and sometimes with real utility. I hate this machine for the fact that it is designed for short distance usage, which is appalling for our generation which hardly does manual work and any exercise to keep body fit, segway is killer innovation for lazy generation which even wants to avoid walking even short distances. Though, it is extremely useful for aging population.

Social networks have replaced email and are killing it, this is usual announcement and future prediction that emails are dying and eventually would be extinct in future. I couldn’t more disagree with big daddy of social networking ‘facebook’ starting email service. Emails are the safety way to get connected to anyone in the world without losing much privacy and personal information compared to social network sites. Also its almost difficult to reach out to unknown people without email, which is safest bet for such interactions compared to adding a person on your network and then there is no limitation to number of email address people you can distribute but you surely can’t add that number of people to you network. So, I don’t buy the argument to shift my email usage to a social network sites which eventually start providing emails and messenger services, the oldest way to communicate over internet.

The Shallow Life of Camera Pics

It was airport and two guys were sitting asideme with some distance. They were waiting for their flight just like me, to kill the boredom they took out their camera and aimed it on themselves to make it look cooler- their boring lives. They picked up poses one after another, put on their shades, little brood and there it was the pics that they wanted to put on social networking site to show the world how cool their lives and times were. It was apalling but not unusual.

Just sometime back on friendship day I was passing by a mall near our office, there was group of school kids celebrating friendship day, which involved taking pics of themselves, a guy was busy adjusting rose in a fashionable way between the lips (I still don’t know why loosers use red roses on friendship day) and his PYT on one hand, the moment he clicked his pic I knew he got it, the coolest pic for online snob..to get trail of comments and to boast how cool it the moment was. They all seemed busy in making their moments look cool rather than making it cool.

In last few years ever since digital camera have invaded our personal space with shoot, store and forget mode made it easy to click numerous photos and moblie phone cameras have added to the woes even more. Every one nowadays clicks more photographs than usual even at the times uncalled for, even i have done it on some ocassions and we all have developed a habit of piling up photographs. Social networking sites banking clicking frenzy of this generation allow uncontrolled numbers of uploads.

As a result you go anywhere you would find someone busy clicking pics, you go to restaurant/pubs/parks and you would see not just teenagers but everyone (except the really old fellas) busy clicking pics. Now everyone is so much busy in faking the moments on camera that they less about enjoying the moment. Not long back I could look into pictuers and fondly remember the event or the moment, it didn’t matter if I had posed for it or not, a simple photograph used to remind all about the event even those which we forgot or missed to catch it on camera, but now it doesn’t seem to me that people would be able to recall their moments as we care less about it and more about the people would be watching those pictures. Now people are clicking picuters to make it memorable to others than to themselves; it used to be said picture would tell you thousand stories, not any more.

The Show-off Toyz of Next Decade

Saw an advt on tv with tag line what was cool yesterday isn’t cool today. True, what was rich man’s prerogative is common man’s mat today. So, in 80s when most of people had black&white television richer ones had VCR and telephone. Then in 90s when most of the people owned VCRs richer people had LD players. So what gonna be rich person’s toys in this decade. I have some of my guesses.

As technology is changing fast there are less chances that any consumer durable product will be top such list as we everyone has seen that how three different products like telephone, music player and camera, all of which were not owned by common man, has now combined into one and is owned by almost everyone. So a phone or mobile equipment is less likely to make it to showoff list.

But, some thing like electric sports car will definitely make it despite any advancement in technology or even with existence of conventional fuel based models if they survive the government onslaught on fuel efficiency.

Air travel has become less expensive compared to what is used to be two decades ago. Not much fad remains in air travel especially in India. I guess the outer space travel tour will be the fad in this decade. It’s cool and it’s expensive, chances of its cost becoming affordable wouldn’t be arising in a decade or so.

Robots, yeah its not a new stuff to this world but it isn’t not much popular either (Japan being sole exception). A good advancement in robotics has led to increased interactivity, mobility and their ability to multi-task, I bet more people will have robots in this decade.

Holographic projection tv, I thought it was fringe of my imagination till I googled it for good. Amused but not surprised that as a concept it already existed. Though, it will take time to come out may be by end of this decade. I would love three dimensional hi-definition holographic images, i would be real surreal everything.

My favorite concept is of smart phone with all the applications - universal remote, air conditioner control, lighting control and all electrical controls. But, then it would still be commonman's handytool (not my problem) than show-off piece.

Lost in Version

Just a few days back one of the leading photography technology company launched a new breakthrough product – 3D(dimension) digital camera. I banged my head, with joy and frustration. 3D sounded cool but I’m dead sure that this would make all simple cameras obsolete in two years and our lives will be lost in managing the changing compatible formats and version. I remembered, many months back when my friend and I were talking about vanishing physical form their personal memoirs (letters, cards and photograhs).

It was quite evident that post new millennium my personal history had taken a beating as everyone switched to emails. I still look at with amusement on those old letters I was so stupid, funny and freak (just like my friends who wrote me). But, time and technology later wiped all that as most of such emails got lost or erased by the providers (when I didn’t use to log-in for months) till few years back and before the advent of unlimited email account stuff. This unlimited email account has not helped much as you can’t bring all your friends to same account and thus limits the possibility of chatting with them and that too for long duration. Plus, you may search whoever you had conversation with but you don’t store that with yourself, neither you look up to your email account when you get nostalgic or trying to remember a good conversation which was neither ‘tagged’ nor ‘starred’.

Now, I hallucinate of this free email account as more of trackback on personal lives proxy funded by governments with intention of keeping tab into the lives of everyone (its one of the cheapest means afterall). I know there will be no addition to my collection of letters which actually stopped almost a decade back. May be everyone is loosing some of their memoirs and their history in making. This thought really freaked me out because nature has always been though on civilizations, all ancient civilizations have been wiped without trace (ours survived but not completely, though the knowledge link went missing). We were able to regain some knowledge about them because they were not in digital format!!!

Well, my suspicion gained ground on last Sunday when i watched “Megatron” and “Opitmus Prime” fighting over their knowledge cube, which too was in physical form. Even so called fictitious advanced civilization on silverscreen were keeping thing in physical form. All we are doing is digtalising everything, The future looks kind of creepy to me, as just in few decades kids might not need to learn to write the alphabets because of computers so we may stop inscribing every message. Though, in India it may not be entirely affected (some 100 years down the line you still may see “Mayawati” written on Taj Mahal thinking that it was built by Mayawati). I know the strong argument is about advance civilization would have elctro-magnetic technology but we still forget that we ourselves have not been able to decipher languages from our past.

Anyway, looking into future is not going to help me when I find it hard to collate all the digital photographs, which now scattered over different electronic forms and formats in comparison with hard-copies of old photographs (I know this is not environment friendly argument). As looser to this world of technology now I have to prepare for the life with three dimensional photographs and for sure it will freak out all men who don’t have flat stomach (hahaha).

SecondLife: New Wave, My Predictions

More than three years back, someone started a virtual life community, SecondLife, where anyone can create his/her virtual persona/character and it develops a community. Soon I forgot about it, but it didn’t end there. A few months back, one of my friend came and told me how much he loved Secondlife and how it had evolved - you can buy a piece of virtual land, so many companies had opened virtual stores and virtual shoes, cloths could be bought for your virtual life; they even started their own currency. He loved it so much and had become addicted to it. This was frustrating to me, why the hell people were spending so much time to make themselves up in virtual life? What gratification they got doing by wasting time in creating virtual characters and dressing them up.

It was freaky to find so many young people indulging in it and mostly Americans; I lost no time in terming them as childish and the ones who were more hooked to the virtual life than the real one. Anyways, even that didn’t put the issue to the rest. Few days earlier I saw a report - some hotshot from IBM was telling that they had developed a system wherein people can send sms to virtual characters and users could also transmit the sms to people using their virtual life characters, and added that this would set stage for next level evolution of communication in virtual and real world.

Well, when I thought this fad would die its natural death, it came back and probably it may grow even bigger this time. Then I started thinking what else it could evolve to? So, here is my take on what this virtual world can evolve to! People would surely enjoy reading and sending sms for time being through Secondlife though such effort may not last but who knows it may evolve to mms video massages of SecondLife characters speaking to you. If something like that happens I bet it would be a big hit, people would love watching animated videos of their characters. I guess most of people would be sending weird and freaky massages, specially the times when people are angry with someone.

But what if SecondLife also becomes an alternative to e-cards and people start wishing each other through their characters (specially those valentine ones, guys would get a better tool to purpose- really hidden virtually visible), I think that will nail e-cards business out of business. If something like that ever happens it won’t be limited to a few such offerings. If people become so hooked to sms on SecondLife then they might also like reading their massages on SecondLife with each character reading out the massage, what if you open your mail and your boss says “you are promoted”, I believe such stuff would be a real rage and it would pose serious challenges to e-mail providers like yahoo or hotmail.

Such developments may lead to a lot of such companies starting up their own virtual life portals to protect their market. I know most of you people now will not believe if I say all the social network sites may start using virtual life characters to make it more exciting or SecondLife itself may become social network site like Orkut where every user would have animated character and can talk to other, I know its kind of weird but it may have a future prospect. Then the real and virtual life would get immersed(or, shall I say, messed up) in each and there would be a thin line to differentiate.

But this is not all, my biggest out of the world idea is, if companies start verifying virtual characters just like the online signature and then you can shop online in real life using your virtual life character, man that would be massive, it will blow everyone’s mind. I know most of you reading this may feel like banging their head on wall but what if it really happens, I know most of it wont happen any soon but probably some will in next few years.