In typical Web-industry style we’re all focused minutely on the leading trend-of-the-year, the real-time Web. But in this obsession we have become a bit myopic. The real-time Web, or what some of us call “The Stream,” is not an end in itself, it’s a means to an end. So what will it enable, where is it headed, and what’s it going to look like when we look back at this trend in 10 or 20 years?

In the next 10 years, The Stream is going to go through two big phases, focused on two problems, as it evolves:

1. Web Attention Deficit Disorder. The first problem with the real-time Web that is becoming increasingly evident is that it has a bad case of ADD. There is so much information streaming in from so many places at once that it’s simply impossible to focus on anything for very long, and a lot of important things are missed in the chaos. The first generation of tools for the Stream are going to need to address this problem.
2. Web Intention Deficit Disorder. The second problem with the real-time Web will emerge after we have made some real headway in solving Web attention deficit disorder. This second problem is about how to get large numbers of people to focus their intention not just their attention. It’s not just difficult to get people to notice something, it’s even more difficult to get them to do something. Attending to something is simply noticing it. Intending to do something is actually taking action, expending some energy or effort to do something. Intending is a lot more expensive, cognitively speaking, than merely attending. The power of collective intention is literally what changes the world, but we don’t have the tools to direct it yet.

The Stream is not the only big trend taking place right now. In fact, it’s just a strand that is being braided together with several other trends, as part of a larger pattern. Here are some of the other strands I’m tracking:

• Messaging. The real-time Web aka The Stream is really about messaging in essence. It’s a subset of the global trend towards building a better messaging layer for the Web. Multiple forms of messaging are emerging, from the publish-and-subscribe nature of Twitter and RSS, to things like Google Wave, Pubsubhubub, and broadcast style messaging or multicasting via screencast, conferencing and media streaming and events in virtual worlds. The effect of these tools is that the speed and interactivity of the Web are increasing — the Web is getting faster. Information spreads more virally, more rapidly — in other words, “memes” (which we can think of as collective thoughts) are getting more sophisticated and gaining more mobility.
• Semantics. The Web becomes more like a database. The resolution of search, ad targeting, and publishing increases. In other words, it’s a higher-resolution Web. Search will be able to target not just keywords but specific meaning. For example, you will be able to search precisely for products or content that meet certain constraints. Multiple approaches from natural language search to the metadata of the Semantic Web will contribute to increased semantic understanding and representation of the Web.
• Attenuation. As information moves faster, and our networks get broader, information overload gets worse in multiple dimensions. This creates a need for tools to help people filter the firehose. Filtering in its essence is a process of attenuation — a way to focus attention more efficiently on signal versus noise. Broadly speaking there are many forms of filtering from automated filtering, to social filtering, to personalization, but they all come down to helping someone focus their finite attention more efficiently on the things they care about most.
• The WebOS.  As cloud computing resources, mashups, open linked data, and open API’s proliferate, a new level of aggregator is emerging. These aggregators may focus on one of these areas or may cut across them. Ultimately they are the beginning of true cross-service WebOS’s. I predict this is going to be a big trend in the future — for example instead of writing Web apps directly to various data and API’s in dozens of places, just write to a single WebOS aggregator that acts as middleware between your app and all these choices. It’s much less complicated for developers. The winning WebOS is probably not going to come from Google, Microsoft or Amazon — rather it will probably come from someone neutral, with the best interests of developers as the primary goal.
• Decentralization. As the semantics of the Web get richer, and the WebOS really emerges it will finally be possible for applications to leverage federated, Web-scale computing. This is when intelligent agents will actually emerge and be practical. By this time the Web will be far too vast and complex and rapidly changing for any centralized system to index and search it. Only massively federated swarms of intelligent agents, or extremely dynamic distributed computing tools, that can spread around the Web as they work, will be able to keep up with the Web.
• Socialization. Our interactions and activities on the Web are increasingly socially networked, whether individual, group or involving large networks or crowds. Content is both shared and discovered socially through our circles of friends and contacts. In addition, new technologies like Google Social Search enable search results to be filtered by social distance or social relevancy. In other words, things that people you follow like get higher visibility in your search results. Socialization is a trend towards making previously non-social activities more social, and towards making already-social activities more efficient and broader. Ultimately this process leads to wider collaboration and higher levels of collective intelligence.
• Augmentation. Increasingly we will see a trend towards augmenting things with other things. For example, augmenting a Web page or data set with links or notes from another Web page or data set. Or augmenting reality by superimposing video and data onto a live video image on a mobile phone. Or augmenting our bodies with direct connections to computers and the Web.

If these are all strands in a larger pattern, then what is the megatrend they are all contributing to? I think ultimately it’s collective intelligence — not just of humans, but also our computing systems, working in concert.

Collective Intelligence

I think that these trends are all combining, and going real-time. Effectively what we’re seeing is the evolution of a global collective mind, a theme I keep coming back to again and again. This collective mind is not just comprised of humans, but also of software and computers and information, all interlinked into one unimaginably complex system: A system that senses the universe and itself, that thinks, feels, and does things, on a planetary scale. And as humanity spreads out around the solar system and eventually the galaxy, this system will spread as well, and at times splinter and reproduce.

But that’s in the very distant future still. In the nearer term — the next 100 years or so — we’re going to go through some enormous changes. As the world becomes increasingly networked and social the way collective thinking and decision making take place is going to be radically restructured.

Social Evolution

Existing and established social, political and economic structures are going to either evolve or be overturned and replaced. Everything from the way news and entertainment are created and consumed, to how companies, cities and governments are managed will change radically. Top-down beaurocratic control systems are simply not going to be able to keep up or function effectively in this new world of distributed, omnidirectional collective intelligence.

Physical Evolution

As humanity and our Web of information and computatoins begins to function as a single organism, we will evolve literally, into a new species: Whatever is after the homo sapien. The environment we will live in will be a constantly changing sea of collective thought in which nothing and nobody will be isolated. We will be more interdependent than ever before. Interdependence leads to symbiosis, and eventually to the loss of generality and increasing specialization. As each of us is able to draw on the collective mind, the global brain, there may be less pressure on us to do things on our own that used to be solitary. What changes to our bodies, minds and organizations may result from these selective evolutionary pressures? I think we’ll see several, over multi-thousand year timescales, or perhaps faster if we start to genetically engineer ourselves:

• Individual brains will get less good at things like memorization and recall, calculation, reasoning, and long-term planning and action.
• Individual brains will get better at multi-tasking, information filtering, trend detection, and social communication. The parts of the nervous system involved in processing live information will increase disproportionately to other parts.
• Our bodies may actually improve in certain areas. We will become more, not less, mobile, as computation and the Web become increasingly embedded into our surroundings, and into augmented views of our environments. This may cause our bodies to get into better health and shape since we will be less sedentary, less at our desks, less in front of TV’s. We’ll be moving around in the world, connected to everything and everyone no matter where we are. Physical strength will probably decrease overall as we will need to do less manual labor of any kind.

These are just some of the changes that are likely to occur as a result of the things we’re working on today. The Web and the emerging Real-Time Web are just a prelude of things to come.

This is an older version of this article. The most recent version is located here:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/future_of_the_desktop.php

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I have spent the last year really thinking about the future of the Web. But lately I have been thinking more about the future of the desktop. In particular, here are some questions I am thinking about and some answers I’ve come up so far.

(Author’s Note: This is a raw, first-draft of what I think it will be like. Please forgive any typos — I am still working on this and editing it…)

What Will Happen to the Desktop?

As we enter the third decade of the Web we are seeing an increasing shift from local desktop applications towards Web-hosted software-as-a-service (SaaS). The full range of standard desktop office tools (word processors, spreadsheets, presentation tools, databases, project management, drawing tools, and more) can now be accessed as Web-hosted apps within the browser. The same is true for an increasing range of enterprise applications. This process seems to be accelerating.

As more kinds of applications become available in Web-based form, the Web browser is becoming the primary framework in which end-users work and interact. But what will happen to the desktop? Will it too eventually become a Web-hosted application? Will the Web browser swallow up the desktop? Where is the desktop headed?

Is the desktop of the future going to just be a web-hosted version of the same old-fashioned desktop metaphors we have today?

No. There have already been several attempts at doing this — and they never catch on. People don’t want to manage all their information on the Web in the same interface they use to manage data and apps on their local PC.

Partly this is due to the difference in user experience between using files and folders on a local machine and doing that in “simulated” fashion via some Flash-based or HTML-based imitation of a desktop. Imitations desktops to-date have simply been clunky and slow imitations of the real-thing at best. Others have been overly slick. But one thing they all have in common: None of them have nailed it. The desktop of the future – what some have called “the Webtop” – still has yet to be invented.

It’s going to be a hosted web service

Is the desktop even going to exist anymore as the Web becomes increasingly important? Yes, there will have to be some kind of interface that we consider to be our personal “home” and “workspace” — but ultimately it will have to be a unified space that all our devices connect to and share. This requires that it be a hosted online service.

Currently we have different information spaces on different devices (laptop, mobile device, PC). These will merge. Native local clients could be created for various devices, but ultimately the simplest and therefore most likely choice is to just use the browser as the client. This coming “Webtop” will provide an interface to your local devices, applications and information, as well as to your online life and information.

Today we think of our Web browser running inside our desktop as an applicaiton. But actually it will be the other way around in the future: Our desktop will run inside our browser as an application.

Instead of the browser running inside, or being launched from, some kind of next-generation desktop web interface technology, it’s will be the other way around: The browser will be the shell and the desktop application will run within it either as a browser add-in, or as a web-based application.

The Web 3.0 desktop is going to be completely merged with the Web — it is going to be part of the Web. In fact there may eventually be no distinction between the desktop and the Web anymore.

The focus shifts from information to attention

As our digital lives shift from being focused on the old fashioned desktop to the Web environment we will see a shift from organizing information spatially (directories, folders, desktops, etc.) to organizing information temporally (feeds, lifestreams, microblogs, timelines, etc.).

Instead of being just a directory, the desktop of the future is going to be more like a feed reader or social news site. The focus will be on keeping up with all the stuff flowing in and out of the user’s environment. The interface will be tuned to help the user understand what the trends are, rather than just on how things are organized.

The focus will be on helping the user to manage their attention rather than just their information. This is a leap to the meta-level: A second-order desktop. Instead of just being about the information (the first-order), it is going to be about what is happening with the information (the second-order).

Users are going to shift from acting as librarians to acting as daytraders.

Our digital roles are already shifting from acting as librarians to becoming more like daytraders. In the PC era we were all focused on trying to manage the stuff on our computers — in other words, we were acting as librarians. But this is going to shift. Librarians organize stuff, but daytraders are focused on discovering and keeping track of trends. It’s a very different focus and activity, and it’s what we are all moving towards.

We are already spending more of our time keeping up with change and detecting trends, than on organizing information. In the coming decade the shelf-life of information is going to become vanishingly short and the focus will shift from storage and recall to real-time filtering, trend detection and prediction.

The Webtop will be more social and will leverage and integrate collective intelligence

The Webtop is going to be more socially oriented than desktops of today — it will have built-in messaging and social networking, as well as social-media sharing, collaborative filtering, discussions, and other community features.

The social dimension of our lives is becoming perhaps our most important source of information. We get information via email from friends, family and colleagues. We get information via social networks and social media sharing services. We co-create information with others in communities.

The social dimension is also starting to play a more important role in our information management and discovery activities. Instead of those activities remaining as solitary, they are becoming more communal. For example many social bookmarking and social news sites use community sentiment and collaborative filtering to help to highlight what is most interesting, useful or important.

It’s going to have powerful semantic search and social search capabilities built-in

The Webtop is going to have more powerful search built-in. This search will combine both social and semantic search features. Users will be able to search their information and rank it by social sentiment (for example, “find documents about x and rank them by how many of my friends liked them.”)

Semantic search will enable highly granular search and navigation of information along a potentially open-ended range of properties and relationships.

For example you will be able to search in a highly structured way — for example, search for products you once bookmarked that have a price of $10.95 and are on-sale this week. Or search for documents you read which were authored by Sue and related to project X, in the last month.

The semantics of the future desktop will be open-ended. That is to say that users as well as other application and information providers will be able to extend it with custom schemas, new data types, and custom fields to any piece of information.

Interactive shared spaces instead of folders

Forget about shared folders — that is an outmoded paradigm. Instead, the  new metaphor will be interactive shared spaces.

The need for shared community space is currently being provided for online by forums, blogs, social network profile pages, wikis, and new community sites. But as we move into Web 3.0 these will be replaced by something that combines their best features into one. These next-generation shared spaces will be like blogs, wikis, communities, social networks, databases, workspaces and search engines in one.

Any group of two or more individuals will be able to participate in a shared space that connects their desktops for a particular purpose. These new shared spaces will not only provide richer semantics in the underlying data, social network, and search, but they will also enable groups to seamlessly and collectively add, organize, track, manage, discuss, distribute, and search for information of mutual interest.

The personal cloud

The future desktop will function like a “personal cloud” for users. It will connect all their identities, data, relationships, services and activities in one virtual integrated space. All incoming and outgoing activity will flow through this space. All applications and services that a user makes use of will connect to it.

The personal cloud may not have a center, but rather may be comprised of many separate sub-spaces, federated around the Web and hosted by different service-providers. Yet from an end-user perspective it will function as a seamlessly integrated service. Users will be able to see and navigate all their information and applications, as if they were in one connected space, regardless of where they are actually hosted. Users will be able to search their personal cloud from any point within it.

Open data, linked data and open-standards based semantics

The underlying data in the future desktop, and in all associated services it connects, will be represented using open-standard data formats. Not only will the data be open, but the semantics of the data – the schema – will also be defined in an open way. The emerigng Semantic Web provides a good infrastructure for enabling this to happen.

The value of open linked-data and open semantics is that data will not be held prisoner anywhere and can easily be integrated with other data.

Users will be able to seamlessly move and integrate their data, or parts of their data, in different services. This means that your Webtop might even be portable to a different competing Webtop provider someday. If and when that becomes possible, how will Webtop providers compete to add value?

It’s going to be smart

One of the most important aspects of the coming desktop is that it’s going to be smart. It’s going to learn and help users to be more productive. Artificial intelligence is one of the key ways that competing Webtop providers will differentiate their offerings.

As you use it, it’s going to learn about your interests, relationships, current activities, information and preferences. It will adaptively self-organize to help you focus your attention on what is most important to whatever context you are in.

When reading something while you are taking a trip to Milan it may organize itself to be more contextually relevant to that time, place and context. When you later return home to San Francisco it will automatically adapt and shift to your home context. When you do a lot of searches about a certain product it will realize your context and intent has to do with that product and will adapt to help you with that activity for a while, until your behavior changes.

Your desktop will actually be a semantic knowledge base on the back-end. It will encode a rich semantic graph of your information, relationships, interests, behavior and preferences. You will be able to permit other applications to access part or all of your graph to datamine it and provide you with value-added views and even automated intelligent assistance.

For example, you might allow an agent that cross-links things to see all your data: it would go and add cross links to relevant things onto all the things you have created or collected. Another agent that makes personalized buying recommendations might only get to see your shopping history across all shopping sites you use.

Your desktop may also function as a simple personal assistant at times. You will be able to converse with your desktop eventually — through a conversational agent interface. While on the road you will be able to email or SMS in questions to it and get back immediate intelligent answers. You will even be able to do this via a voice interface.

For example, you might ask, “where is my next meeting?” or “what Japanese restaurants do I like in LA?” or “What is Sue’s Smith’s phone number?” and you would get back answers. You could also command it to do things for you — like reminding you to do something, or helping you keep track of an interest, or monitoring for something and alerting you when it happens.

Because your future desktop will connect all the relationships in your digital life — relationships connecting people, information, behavior, prefences and applications — it will be the ultimate place to learn about your interests and preferences.

Federated, open policies and permissions

This rich graph of meta-data that comprises your future desktop will enable the next-generation of smart services to learn about you and help you in an incredibly personalized manner. It will also of course be rife with potential for abuse and privacy will be a major function and concern.

One of the biggest enabling technologies that will be necessary is a federated model for sharing meta-data about policies and permissions on data. Information that is considered to be personal and private in Web site X should be recognized and treated as such by other applications and websites you choose to share that information with. This will require a way for sharing meta-data about your policies and permissions between different accounts and applicaitons you use.

The semantic web provides a good infrastructure for building and deploying a decentralized framework for policy and privacy integration, but it has yet to be developed, let alone adopted. For the full vision of the future desktop to emerge a universally accepted standard for exchanging policy and permission data will be a necessary enabling technology.

Who is most likely to own the future desktop?

When I think about what the future desktop is going to look like it seems to be a convergence of several different kinds of services that we currently view as separate.

It will be hosted on the cloud and accessible across all devices. It will place more emphasis on social interaction, social filtering, and collective intelligence. It will provide a very powerful and extensible data model with support for both unstructured and arbitrarily structured information. It will enable almost peer-to-peer like search federation, yet still have a unified home page and user-experience. It will be smart and personalized. It will be highly decentralized yet will manage identity, policies and permissions in an integrated cohesive and transparent manner across services.

By cobbling together a number of different services that exist today you could build something like this in a decentralized fashion. Is that how the desktop of the future will come about? Or will it be a new application provided by one player with a lot of centralized market power? Or could an upstart suddently emerge with the key enabling technologies to make this possible? It’s hard to predict, but one thing is certain: It will be an interesting process to watch.

Another interesting article on the move towards wireless power, or what some are calling "WiTricity." I’ve written about this previously. The team at MIT is making some good headway. Check out the article for a diagram of how their wireless power beaming system works. It can power any device within about 9 feet.

Nikola Tesla was working on wireless power beaming in the early 1900′s, but since that time nobody has really succeeded in replicating his work or taking it further. Wireless power is an important and necessary step in technological evolution that simply must happen. My guess is that it will be a commercial mainstream technology within 20 years, if not sooner.

If you or your children use cell phones frequently, consider getting earphones…

Long-term users of mobile phones are significantly
more likely to develop a certain type of brain tumour on the side of
the head where they hold their handsets, according to new research.

A
large-scale study found that those who had regularly used mobiles for
longer than 10 years were almost 40 per cent more likely to develop
nervous system tumours called gliomas near to where they hold their
phones

A group of physicists at MIT have come up with a new model for beaming wireless power to mobile devices, such as computers or cell phones. It promises to do for power, what wireless ethernet hubs do for network connectivity.

I’ve been interested in wireless power ever since I first read the biography of Nikola Tesla in the early 1990′s. Tesla was perhaps the most important inventor of the 20th century — he singlehandedly invented much of what enables the modern electrical power grid today. He also pioneered radio, and many other technologies. But his greatest dream was wireless power. He believed he had discovered a way to beam electricity to any point on earth and embarked on several ambitious projects to test and commercialize his appraoch. But sadly his projects were never completed due to funding problems and interference by competitors and investors who had conflicting business interests. By the end of his life Tesla was a lonely and forgotten man, feeding pidgeons in the park.  At his death, many of his lab notebooks were confiscated and classified as Top Secret by the US military — never to be seen again — (and at least some this confiscated information was later used as the foundation for the Star Wars particle beam weaponry program). The greatest electrical genius in history was just too far ahead of his own time.

Tesla’s work has still not been fully understood or replicated today. But what remains unclassified is a treasure trove of invention of great relevance to the world we live in today.  In 2003 I blogged an article, called "I Want Wireless Power" outlining why I want this technology. Another great article about this opportunity is here.

Blackberry email devices can be so addictive that owners may need to be
weaned off them with treatment similar to that given to drug users,
experts warned today.

They said the palmtop gadgets, which have been nicknamed
‘crackberries’ because users quickly become hooked on them, could be
seriously damaging to mental health.

The study, carried out by New Jersey’s Rutgers University
School, claims the Blackberry is fuelling a rise in email and internet
addiction, with sufferers able to survive only a few minutes without
checking for new mail.

One key sign of a user being addicted is if they focus on their Blackberry ignoring those around them

Japanese cell phone company KDDI is offering a new GPS-enabled 3D navigational tool to their 17 million subscribers (see article and picture). Their system helps consumers navigate city streets and even within buildings, using an innovative 3D map and audio directions. This system is similar to (but possibly more advanced than) the in-car navigation systems we are familiar with, such as Hertz "Neverlost" or the Magellan products (note: I have a Magellan aftermarket nav system in my car — it’s one of the most useful things I ever bought!).

GPS-enabled mobile devices and the location-aware services they enable are definitely a "Next Big Thing" contender.  They have many compelling potential uses in the near-term and mid-term future. Below are some of my wild speculations on how this technology could be used:

• Personal navigation. Your device can help you find your way when walking, driving, or even on the water or in the wilderness.
• Location-aware advertising. Your device can get special offers from stores near you, as you walk or drive around, according to your permissions, preferences and profile of course.
• Location-aware storage, search and retrieval. Your device remembers where you were when you wrote a note, took a photo, or sent a message.You can later search for your stuff based on where you were — for example, "photos I took in Brazil" or "Notes I made at PC Forum in 2006" (for the best example of this, see the amazing product, EverNote — the next version of which I got to preview recently, it is mind-blowingly cool!).
• Location-aware photo-enhancement. When you take a photograph it is not only tagged with time and location where it was taken, but the content of the photo can be automatically tagged based on the orientation of the camera. For example, if you take a photo of the Empire State Building, your camera will someday be able to tag the photo as being about the Empire State Building, and can even detect and tag the shape of the building itself in the photo.
• Location-aware social networking. Your device can track people nearby who are your friends, family, colleagues, or who match your interests and want to meet you (for example: dating). This can be useful to find people at a crowded event, or to hook up with your friends while out on the town, or to meet people at a trade show or conference.
• Location-aware personal security. Your device can keep a transcript of your movements on a server. Parties you authorize can track you if they need to find you immediately, or in case you go missing. In addition, bulk alerts can be sent to people who happen to be in particular areas — for example, if a tornado is coming, people who happen to be in that vicinity can be warned.
• Location-aware information services. You can get news and other local info about the place you happen to be in. If you are standing outside a restaurant you can see reviews and discussions from people who have been there before. If you are already in the restaurant you can see recommendations of what to order from people who were there before you. Information can be virtually posted to particular places or regions — you can hang a virtual post it note in your doorway so that anyone who passes through it gets the note.

This article just came in (via Kurzweil)

A little-known start-up has demonstrated wireless broadband 1000
times more efficient than WiMax – and claims the technique could also
make wireless LANs that will run for years on watch batteries.

xG
Technology, based in Sarasota, Florida, used a transmitter not unlike a
cordless phone base station, operating in the unlicensed – and crowded
- 900MHz band, to send a 3.7Mbit/s data signal to a radius of 18 miles
across the suburbs of Miami, using 50mW and an omnidirectional antenna.

The data rate and specifications don’t exactly match xG’s original plan, which we reported in July,
as the demo uses a narrower band and a lower data rate. However, with
an omnidirectional antenna, the demonstration appears to have
transmitted a signal at a power density other schemes would find
impossible. The company’s xMax technology uses a novel modulation
scheme, described at xG’s own site.

NASA’s research on subvocalization technology is moving forward. Their system intercepts nerve signals to the vocal cords before the speaker makes a sound and then figures out what words they signify. This technology will enable people to speak silently on the phone or to their computers, without moving their lips or making a sound. It’s almost telepathy. I blogged about this last year when it first came out. It’s actually a technology I dreamed about a while back — "silent speech" is one of those things that has to happen in order to truly free humans from keyboards (although I must confess, I love to type).

Here is an interesting article about an analysis of SMS messaging versus e-mail messaging on mobile networks. The conclusion is that e-mail messaging is more efficient for mobile consumers because email networks are scale-free networks. The article predicts that services based on scale-free topologies will ultimately win out over less optimal alternatives. Thanks to Murli.

HP researchers have devised a new way to save power on mobile devices by only activating the part of a device’s display that the user is actually looking at.

It’s finally happening in the USA — your cell phone is about to morph into a credit card, and soon will evolve into your digital wallet. Read more.

NFC. An interesting way for devices to share data, if they are within a few centimeters of one another. Sounds kind of like Bluetooth — which I have still not needed for anything. But I like the vision anyway — if all devices did this it could be very useful — I’ve always wanted to be able to “grab” data by swiping my phone near something I am interested in (without needing a bar code scanner).

Following up on my earlier post about storing messages in DNA it might be interesting to explore ways to encode large volumes of data directly into parts of the human body. Messing with DNA is risky — it may be safer to store data in other parts of the human body (with the one potential disadvantage that such data would not be passed down via heredity). Here are some suggestions for parts of the human body that might be good media for data-storage:

- Fingernails. It may be possible to encode data on fingernails. This could be accomplished via micro-etching onto the surface or better yet, via holographic etching within the matrix of the fingernail itself. An advantage of using fingernails to store data is that you could easily read the data by inserting a finger into a scanning device. Also, different fingernails could be used for different data partitiions. One disadvantage is that fingernails grow and eventually data would be lost if not refreshed — however this might actually be a feature in that the storage is self-expiring which could be useful when you want data to be permanently removed from storage.

- The lens of the eye. The lens of the human eye may provide a good medium for encoding data. Data would be written into it using laser holographic etching. An advantage of this approach is that biometric authentication of user-access to data could be integrated with the data itself. For example, to access the data that is encoded onto the lens of your eye, you would look into a reader that would first do an iris scan to authenticate your identity and permission to read the data, and would then read/write the data as you request. A disadvantage of using the lens to store data is that it might not be reusable — it may be difficult to erase or overwrite data on the lens, although the jury is still out on this question. Another important consideration would be to ensure that the data encoding did not interfere with vision, although it is not expected that this would be a problem as it is easy to encode data microscopically such that it would not affect visual refraction.

- Teeth. Data could potentiallyl be encoded into teeth, although it would be difficult to write and read it off later. Furthermore, food and fluids in the mouth could potentially interfere with read/write operations. This is probably a non-optimal storage solution!

- Hair. Strands of human hair would be good media for storing data. Data could be etched into the hair strand using a laser. The advantage of this is that the body has lots of hair and it is constantly being regenerated, so there would be an infinite supply of storage and rather than worrying about how to erase or overwrite, you could simply use a different strand of hair to encode new data. The disadvantage is that hairs are easily lost, which could make data stored on hairs a bit fragile. Another problem is that it might be difficult to locate the data once stored — since presumably a given person has more than just a single hair on their body, which would require some method of locating the particular hair containing the particular data of interest. One solution might be to redundantly encode the same data on all the hair in a given region, say the forearm of a person, such that any hair from that region would contain a complete copy of the data.

- Skin tissue. It might be possible to encode data temporarily into regions of skin tissue. This could be accomplished using micro-tattooing technology, or perhaps by “dying” the tissue with a memory-bearing dye, perhaps one that is infused with micro-crystalline storage particles of some sort. This would be a very fragile and temporary way to store data however as skin cells are constantly regenerating, sloughing off, and getting affected by environmental conditions.

- Blood Nano-Infusion. It might be possible to integrate nanotechnologies into the human body in a manner that could provide integrated digital storage without harming the body itself. For example, suppose there were a way to take a pill that containined nanocrystals encoded with particular data that you wanted to “store.” This pill would be digested and the nanocrystals might be then distributed throughout the bloodstream for some period of time until they were naturally excreted by the body.

- Artificial Memory Implants. Of course, rather than modifying the biological substances of the body it might be simpler to just implant a memory-bearing device under the skin. This is similar to current work on implantable RFID chips. The advantage is that such devices may provide a large volume of digital storage in the future, and could potentially be written to and read from remotely using RFID technology. A disadvantage however is that (unless such devices were in pill-form) they require surgical implantation and removal.

- DNA. As has been previously proposed (see link above), DNA provides an excellent medium for data-storage; particularly the junk DNA regions which presumably are less involved in critical functions of the DNA (although recent evidence supports the hypothesis that so-called “junk DNA” may be more involved in cell specialization than was previously thought). Storing data in DNA has the advantage that data is distributed throughout the entire body. Furthermore, if stored in the sex-cells, stored data can be passed down to offspring. A disadvantage of using DNA for data-storage is the possible unanticipated effects on cell development and health.

- Benign viruses as storage media. An interesting possibility might be to create a benign virus that could be used to carry stored data. This virus would have to be non-transmittable and have no adverse effects on health, functionality and well-being of the host organism. Data could be encoded onto specimens of this virus and then injected, ingested or inhaled to “store” it in the human body. Later, the data could be retrieved via a small sample of blood containing the virus. Ideally, this virus could be tagged genetically such that differently tagged viruses could be identified and used to store different data. Data would never have to be erased — instead a new tagged virus would be created containing the new data and would simply supersede the previous virus. One potential issue is immune-response to the virus however, which could cause the body to attack it and result in lost data. Another potential concern would be viral mutation, and the possible effects on data and on health that could result.

Check out Microsoft’s new patent for transmitting power and data through the human body. Good idea.

New software can figure out where you are positioned based on analyzing a photo in near real time. Simply send it a photo from your camera-phone and the software will match the image to a database of locations — such as buildings in a city — and give you back your coordinates. The software is potentially more accurate than GPS.