2012 – The Most Important Year Yet in Technology

By Alex Daley, Casey Research, 19/9

Many of us fondly remember the announcement that rang with the turning of the millennium: “the first map of the human genome is complete!” It was a momentus achievement to be sure, even if it did take 13 years and cost about $3 billion. That’s because none of that mattered. It was going to rush in the age of the genetic medicine, and chronic disease would be a thing of the past. Even aging could be reversed.

So, what happened to all the promise? you may wonder. Well, it’s still there. But the problem is, science fiction authors and technology magazine scribes love to announce the arrival of the future as soon as the first scientific discoveries hint at its possibilities. That creates irrational expectations, because the progress of science – from an experimenter’s vision through to technology that can be widely distributed in a commercially viable way – is not instant. Of course, industry insiders know this, and analysts like Gartner even have entire reports dedicated to the “hype cycle” concept. But, that does not stop the average journalist from prognosticating about the possibilities.

Nevertheless, progress does march forward steadily, in the background. And, when it finally breaks through from the lab to the market… boom! You have an iPhone, a flat screen television, a multi-billion dollar blockbuster drug. The last few years have brought some incredible changes, for sure. But, the big promises – genetic medicine among them – might still seem unfilled to many. But, change can come in bunches, making certain years stand out as watersheds in technology. And, 2012 might surprise you as one of those.

Consider just a few of the most vaunted areas of technology to not quite fulfill their promise just yet:

A Future Without Paper (and Books and CDs and DVDs)

It’s long been the goal of many a business to go “paperless.” To scrap the mounds of pulp and ink that once lined hallways and storage rooms of offices around the world, we pushed the limit on storage, bandwidth and our ability to digitize nearly any piece of information.

Unfortunately, the consumer always trailed a little behind business in this regard. Our lives are replete with stuff. Things. Trinkets. Junk. There is likely some Neolithic impulse driving our desire to line the walls of our homes with the things we’ve collected from our travels, whether to Tibet or the local shopping mall.

And, for a great long time a large amount of that stuff has been media. Books. Records come CDs. Libraries of VHS or DVD movies. Recorded media has been a big business since the dawn of the mass manufacturing revolution.

Yet, at the turn of the millennium following the release of countless MP3 players we were told, like the paperless office, that the end of physical media was upon us,. The recording industry would never survive the era of free digital downloads. The first shots were fired in the late 1990s with the dawn of Napster and the mass swapping (cough, stealing) of songs across college and corporate campuses, and the Internet. Music was going digital and it was never going back.

But, by the end of 2001, following the release of Apple’s iPod, only 1% – a single lone digit – of the sales of recorded music was digital. For years, pundits decried the fall of the record, yet five plus years later the aisles of Walmart and Best Buy were still lined with CDs.

Fast forward to 2012 and the story is much different, however. For this year will be the first in history when 50% of all music media sales globally have gone digital. Music went digital when we all stopped watching the iPod and paying far more attention to “apps” and tablets and smartphones.

And, books are now following in the footsteps of music, which of course had a head start. Amazon’s Kindle e-Reader, the iPod-like dominator that truly launched the era of the digital book, didn’t surface for consumers until 2007 – a full six years after the iPod. But, don’t let that lull you into thinking it’ll be a while before books go digital. Thanks to the accelerating pace at which new technologies are being adopted once released, the Kindle and the e-book have caught up mighty quickly.

In January 2012, a full 31% of all books other than academic textbooks sold in the US were sold in digital form. That’s all adult fiction, non-fiction, and children’s books. And that was before people started using the tens of millions of tablets, like the iPad and Kindle Fire, and e-Readers such as the revised Kindles and Barnes & Noble’s Nook line of readers, that they gobbled up at stores that very holiday season.

Despite music’s lead, if the growth rate in e-books has been holding through this year, as most surveys of the business indicate is the case, then by this point in 2012, 50% of all new books sales in the US will be digital. That’s just less than half the time it took for the same to happen to music, and ahead of what promises to be another big holiday season for tablets and e-book readers.

Thanks to the Internet, and the new classes of mobile devices, half of all books and music purchases are now done digitally.

Video, however, is the king of media by most measures – most hours per person per week spent consuming it, most revenue by a country mile if you include movies, cable and satellite TV subscriptions, broadcast, all the advertising those bring in, plus physical media. And, video has been a bit slower to see the transition, with only a smidgen of the colossal industry succumbing to the emergence of Internet delivery.

Modern supply chains are making it easier for economies to industrialise

Date: 08-08-2012
Source: The Economist

GETTING rich used to be tough. For most of the past two centuries, few countries managed it. Lant Pritchett, an economist now at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, wrote in 1997 that “divergence, big time” between the rich and the rest was “the dominant feature of modern economic history.” But those stubborn gaps have begun to close. Industrialisation is suddenly everywhere. Since the mid-1980s, emerging markets have grown faster than advanced economies (see chart).

Liberal reforms and sound macroeconomic management surely helped. Yet recent research by Richard Baldwin of the Graduate Institute in Geneva suggests it is not so much the developing world that has changed as development itself. Today’s emerging markets face a different sort of globalisation than their predecessors 50 or 100 years ago.

Most advanced economies industrialised as part of what Mr Baldwin calls globalisation’s first great unbundling: the geographical separation of producers and consumers. Early in the industrial era, high transport costs restricted trade. Expensive shipping limited most manufacturers to sales within the same city or country. But as the industrial revolution progressed, steamships and railways slashed transport costs, exposing firms to foreign competition for the first time. The most productive firms were those best able to take advantage of economies of scale. A single large plant could produce goods at a lower unit cost than lots of smaller factories, and a cluster of large suppliers at lower cost still. Production clustered in massive cities in a few economies.

Is 3D printing the key to Utopia?

Date: 14-05-2012
Source: The Observer

The ‘magic’ of digital manufacturing could transform our homes and the industries that serve them. But at what cost?
 Magic trick: a 3D printer makes a plastic rabbit. Photograph: David Neff

You know the problem: the dishwasher that has cleaned your dishes faithfully for 15 years suddenly stops working. You call out a repairman who identifies the problem: the filter unit has finally given up the ghost. “Ah,” you say, much relieved, “can you fit a new one?” At which point the chap shakes his head sorrowfully. No can do, he explains. The company that made the machine was taken over years ago by another outfit and they no longer supply spares for your ancient machine.

Up until now, this story would have had a predictable ending in which you sorrowfully junked your trusty dishwasher and bought a new one. But there’s an emerging technology that could change that. It’s called three-dimensional printing.

The Coming Tech-led Boom

Date: 30-01-2012
Source: The Wall Street Journal

Three breakthroughs are poised to transform this century as much as telephony and electricity did the last.

In January 1912, the United States emerged from a two-year recession. Nineteen more followed—along with a century of phenomenal economic growth. Americans in real terms are 700% wealthier today.

In hindsight it seems obvious that emerging technologies circa 1912—electrification, telephony, the dawn of the automobile age, the invention of stainless steel and the radio amplifier—would foster such growth. Yet even knowledgeable contemporary observers failed to grasp their transformational power.

In January 2012, we sit again on the cusp of three grand technological transformations with the potential to rival that of the past century. All find their epicenters in America: big data, smart manufacturing and the wireless revolution.