As science continues to create amazing
new technologies, we have two choices: Either embrace them and use them to our
advantage, or be blindsided by them and watch them make our businesses
obsolete.
To help you understand what lies ahead,
we’ve identified 10 of the most important trends in information technology that
will soon make a big difference in your life and your business:
- The memristor
- Wireless power
transmission
- Gesture-based remote
control
- Universal wireless
standards
- Truly paperless
transactions
- The Internet of things
- The business of
avatars
- Spatial computing
- Brain-controlled
mobile phone applications
- Visual computing
Let’s take a closer look at each of these
transformational trends in information technology, starting with the memristor.
According to the scientific journal Nature,1 this device, developed at the
Information and Quantum Systems Lab of Hewlett-Packard, combines the functions
of the capacitor, the resistor, and the inductor. Its name means “memory
resistor.”
Originally conceptualized by an
engineering student named Leon Chua in 1971, it has remained out of reach for
practical applications — until now. The most important property of the
memristor is that it remembers the amount of charge that has flowed through
it. As recently explained in Wired magazine,2 the memristor can be used to create both
digital switches and analog devices.
One of the first uses to which it will be
put is as a memory device. Since it remembers which state it was in, it doesn’t
matter whether the power is off or on. On the other hand, when you turn off
power to conventional random access memory, it completely forgets what you were
doing. That’s why when you turn on a PC, it takes so long to boot up: It has
to retrieve all that information from the hard disk and load it back into RAM.
If it had memristor memory, your computer would turn on like a light bulb —
instantly.
Your computer’s memory and even its hard
disk will probably be replaced by memristors within the next decade. This is
...
