Welcome To the Future

I had a taste of the future today, the future that we already live in. It all started when Microsoft's Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb started tweeting about behind-the-scenes goings on at the lead up to Microsoft's CES Keynote. His tweet read, "Steve B is just walked by me...wearing a very red sweater . We are getting ready to start". Steve B in this instance is Steve "Developers, developers, developers" Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, who was to do the talking at the keynote.

Things got more interesting as I started to watch the live stream of the keynote which was being pushed out across the internet from Las Vegas to anyone with a browser and the Silverlight plugin. The audio level was pretty low and I had to bump my system volume up to maximum in order to hear what was going on. Then Major Nelson tweeted this, "Told the stream dudes about the audio level. They're fixing"... was he in my head? No, other watchers had tweeted back to Major Nelson about the audio level.

The left channel dropped out then came back as the right channel then dropped out. When the audio stream returned in stereo at a much improved level The Major asked, "Let me know how the audio is....they tweaked it." Myself, and I'm sure many others, replied to say that all was good which prompted Larry to offer up a final tweet on the subject, "I brought the streaming to my PC to see your tweets about audio. You guys helped fix it :)"

It was at that moment that I really thought about what was going on. It might sound like ordinary day-to-day goings on but seriously, I was watching a live video of Microsoft's head honcho half way around the world giving a speech to thousands of people while at the same time I was communicating directly with another Microsoft senior employee who was doing techy stuff in the wings. Can you imagine doing that just a few years ago? We really are living in the future.

Wireless Renewable Energy Device Charger

OK, the title of this post may be a little misleading but a whole bunch of funky devices are being shown off at this year's CES including a rather gaudy but highly useful wind/solar USB charger and Powermat's wireless charging mat.

The wind/solar charger looks a bit like a personal fan but actually works the other way around and if it's not windy enough you've got the rather large solar panel on the front (weird place for it?). This made me think of putting something like this on your bike or even your car to capture the wind as you pedal/drive... but then again you could probably just put one of those wheel things on the rim like the old fashioned bike head lights.

The second item, the Powermat, is a wireless charging technology where you just place your device on the mat and magically it starts charging up. There's a video in the link above if you don't know what I'm talking about.

Now, the point of this post is that we need some convergence here. If we could get the renewable energy into a wireless form factor we'd be laughing. Any takers?