All four of these technologies have had major breakthroughs in the past year.
Whether you are doing a startup or working in an established company, they
all will change your business and provide new opportunities. Below I introduce the technologies and explain their implications for business.
1) Air Taxis - the dream of hassle free travel
Back in 2001 I
stumbled upon an Atlantic Monthly
article promising
a future flying utopia. The
traveler of tomorrow drives to an airport only ten miles away and parks right
outside the terminal. In minutes she obtains her boarding pass and breezes
through security. Moments after she sits down in the plane, the plane taxis down
the runway and takes off.
This level of efficiency seemed like magic, but the article said that the
development of tiny, inexpensive jets could make it possible. The United States
has thousands of airports that are too small and have runways too short to
support commercial jetliners. Most cannot even support the typical commuter jet.
But they can support a six-seater air taxi. The sheer number of these small
airports means there is likely to be one close to you. Furthermore, the small
flight size and low number of passengers means efficient ticketing, less onerous
security, and no hassling with checked luggage.
The Eclipse 500 -making Air Taxis possible
In 2007 the technological ground work has been laid and the first air taxi
company is taking to the skies. The jet that makes this possible is the Eclipse
500, now available for the low price of only $1.5 million. The second enabler is
the development of incredibly
complex
logistics software
that makes flights with four passengers
profitable.
DayJet
will open the first air taxi
service this summer, serving six cities in Florida. This is a business to watch.
There are already competitors sprouting up, and if successful, the model could
spread across the country very quickly.
Business Implications
The immediate change will be that short range business flying will become far
more pleasant. But the most important thing to watch might be the economics of
location. For instance, land values near small airports might increase relative
to land value near big cities. It's a lot more convenient to live in the exburbs
outside the suburbs if you can get to an airport in ten minutes. Also watch for
locations that might make wonderful tourist destinations or business conference
centers, but that have not been developed due to lack of airport access. These
properties may become hot.
2) E-Ink - online reading that doesn't burn the eyes
The paperless office never happened. Studies show that use of email in an
organization actually
increases
paper consumption by 40%. Meanwhile,
there is an unfathomable amount of information on the web, but the highest
quality information is still in books. Most of these books are still printed on
dead trees and are not available online.
People do not like to read online. The glare of the monitor strains our eyes.
Even a laptop is too bulky to curl up with or read on the bus.
E-Ink
promises to change this. Like a
computer monitor, E-Ink can display digital content such as a web page or PDF.
Unlike a monitor, e-ink does not produce light, but reflects it. That means
looking at it is just like looking at paper. There is no glare.
The
Sony
Reader
is the first product out that uses E-Ink. Unfortunately, the product
is crippled by onerous digital rights management, a clumsy interface, poor
integration with the web, and a high price tag. Blogger Robert Scobleizer
tortured us
with a report that Apple was releasing the iReader with a near perfect design - only to reveal it as an April Fool's joke. But though it might not exist yet, it will very soon.
The price will come down, the design will improve, and web sites like
Amazon will start supporting ebooks in mass. It will become far more efficient
to store a thousand ebooks on your E-Ink reader than to build a huge library of
paper books. And there will be no need to print out that report when you can
just send it to your reader.
Business Implications
Publishing companies should be very scared. Publishers operate under the
bargain that they assume the risk of printing and distributing thousands of
copies of a book, in return for taking almost the entire sale price. But if
there is no printing and distributing, publishing companies become obsolete, and
authors are better off selling direct.
The magazine and newspaper industries are already struggling. Widespread adoption of E-Ink will kill the printed versions. For entrepreneurs this is an
opportunity. There is still tens of billions more being spent on advertising in the
print version of newspapers and magazines than in the online versions. These
advertising dollars will be looking for a place to go. This means increased
demand for advertising networks, analytics, API's, and demographic and
behavioral targeting.
3) Cheap Solar Power
Is news from the war in Iraq depressing you? Here's a graph that will cheer
you up. This is the price of solar power in Japan over the last 15
years:
When it comes to oil, we hear a lot about vicious cycles of violence in the
Middle East. It's about time we finally have a virtuous cycle. As solar power
gets cheaper, more people buy it. The more people buy it, the greater the
economy of scale, and the cheaper it gets. The result is an average price drop
of 7% a year.
In addition to these incremental gains, venture capitalists have poured in
the investment over the past few years. In the past few months I have come
across articles on a
new
dye
that imitates photosynthesis, a
strip of solar film
that can power a
cell phone, and a
new
cell desig
n that doubles efficiency.
While any one of these advances might be mostly hype, there is so much
research going on that some advance probably will succeed. I would bet my hat
that in ten years it will be cheaper to get electricity from the sun than from
oil.
Business implications
Solar power has one awesome property that may be even better than the
environmental and geopolitical benefits. With fossil fuel based technologies,
the improvement in extraction technology has always been balanced by the
increasing difficulty of finding and exploiting more resources. With solar
power, the better the technology, the cheaper it gets. There is no reason that
once it reaches the same price as fossil fuels it won't continue to fall further
and further in price. This cheap power could make many other technologies that
today require too much power - such as the desalinization of seawater - become
economical.
4) Machine Intelligence
Three years ago the book "
On
Intelligence
" provided both a wonderful synthesis of the latest brain
science and a wake up call to Artificial Intelligence researchers. The author,
Jeff Hawkins, was the former founder of Palm Computing. He invested his startup
fortune in both creating a neurology institute and creating a startup to develop
machine intelligence.
Hawkins claimed that Robots today are ineffective at anything beyond the most
basic of tasks, because they operate in a way entirely different than the human
brain. Imagine if every time you shot a basketball you had to take in account
the exact position of every body part and the exact strength of every muscle
fiber in your arms and hands. The calculation would take forever. And then, if
you move just a little or your arm fatigues, all of your calculations are off
and you have to start them over all over again. This is how our current robots
do it - and it's why they are so ineffective at anything outside of highly
controlled situations.
Hawkins proposed that we should model machine intelligence on human
intelligence. Shooting a basketball does not involve calculations, it involves a
memory of patterns. When learning to shoot a basketball for instance, first you
have to learn the basic mechanics of shooting. Once you have committed that
pattern to muscle memory, you do not think about it. But you then reuse that
basic pattern to new patterns, such as a jump shot or a slam dunk.
Last month, after several years of development, Hawkins
announced the release
of the
first version of its platform for machine intelligence. The platform itself does
not do anything, but it allows others to build products that use this brand new
theory of machine intelligence.
At first, the most effective products will be better data mining and
classification tools. But the potential of better machine intelligence is mind
boggling. The beauty of mind is that it can adapt to understand a huge variety
of patterns - from basketball to physics. The right machine intelligence
platform can be used for everything from language translation to cars that
drive themselves.
The AnyBot robot actually walks like a human
Artificial Intelligence has already gone through a couple of hype cycles, and
this may be another. But signs point to this cycle being better. We know far
more about the brain than ever before, and we are getting much better at
applying it. Just this year AnyBots company developed the first
robot that actually walks like a human
. And with
the continuing improvement of computing technology, the processing power and
memory of our super computers are at last reaching that of the human brain.
Business Implications
I liken the state of machine intelligence to the state of the Internet in
1990. Some very cool stuff is going on, but it's still a ways from widespread
commercial use. But watch this space very closely. Those that can get in on it
in the equivalent of 1994, rather than 1999, can make a lot of money.