I had a chat with my dad today about technology. Whenever I see him we generally chat about technology, at the moment even more so because there is a slim chance I might be doing a website for something he is involved with. Fingers crossed for that. However this particular time we were talking about technology convergance, which sounds awfully posh, but it isn’t really.
He was admiring my USB memory stick and I was telling him about the wonderful things they are doing with MP3 players, portble memory and mobile phones. For instance, you can now buy memory chips with albums on for use in your mobile phone. Portable MP3 players can also be used to store files in much the same way I used to carry handfuls of floppy disks around with me a few years ago – or, more recently, handfuls of CD-Rs with 5-20mb data on each of them.
I also saw this picture (from this page, where Andrew Jones is wearing what is now affectionately known in my office as “geek bling” (probably; I know the picture isn’t very clear). Notice he also has a camera (probably a digital camera) in his hands. Technological convergence means that while yesterday he could take some pictures, today he can save those pictures to his portable memory stick, and tomorrow the digital camera will have a 200gb hard drive built in to save millions of picture. By next week he’ll be able to take professional quality photos with his mobile phone, save millions of them on the internal memory, share them with other phones, computers and cameras using WiFi, and upload them to his blog at super-fast speeds.
In fact, it’s taken me so long to write that paragraph that it’s probably possible already. Technology convergence means we’ll be able to pay less to get the same features, spawning a whole new “keeping up with the Joneses” race, and, obviously, making a mint for the technology companies that are clever anough and quick enough to come up with the Killer App. Technology convergence, it’s a wonderful thing. Perhaps one day this will all be possible with tiny implants in our heads.