Four Amazing Technology Waves That Will Change Your Life

Last week, Facebook launched its video chat, and it once again reminded me that CEOs really should read the book Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, because Zuckerberg was really boring. Saying that this was going to be an "awesome" announcement and showcasing basic video chat and group text chat was, and I'm being kind, disappointing. Still, Facebook does have something amazing here -- I just don't think it's worked out yet. But I do think this is the beginning of something big.

Public safety is becoming a vastly more visible issue, as concerns about terrorist retaliation grow. There also appears to be a rapid increase in murders and other violent crimes in city centers, coupled with a massive drawdown in law enforcement. Citizen reporting and video technologies are moving in to fill the gaps -- and this could be even bigger.Tablets are hot, but they aren't done yet. Multitouch and pen are being blended into new products, and tablets are evolving from consumption to creation devices. Finally, the biggest technology wave may be something you haven't even heard of yet: the influx of capacitors to augment batteries and provide for peak power needs, allowing the batteries to last longer and be more reliable alternative energy solutions.I'll close with my product of the week, the Mango release of Windows Phone 7, which potentially takes this platform from catch-up to contender against iOS 4.

The Coming Video Wave

Facebook made the same initial mistake with its video chat feature that virtually every company has made so far with similar services. It assumes that people want to see who they are talking to and be seen while they're talking.
After millions of dollars in trials and post mortem reviews on a number of similar products, I can say categorically that this common belief just isn't true. However, what people do want to do is increasingly share experiences -- and that is at the core of what Facebook does. Video is part of that, but more along the lines of showing what the speaker is seeing and talking about than the speaker themselves.
Think of this more as a blend of Live Meeting, video and Facebook content under the remote control of the folks in the conversation -- that is, I can show what I'm talking about, and the person or people I'm chatting with can do the same.
It is critically important to this that the application be mobile and allow me to show captured video streams rather than just live ones, so I can talk about past events. And there is clearly an opportunity to fire up both cameras on a twin camera smartphone or tablet to get both the speaker (in a small window) and the subject matter at the same time, for real-time chats and citizen video journalism.
Through its partnership with Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), Facebook has all of the pieces. Let's see if it puts them together before Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) does.

Public Safety

The combination of more murders and violent crimes (I stopped a burglary-in-progress myself a few weeks back) and less police, coupled with the inability for city 911 and video capture systems to integrate, suggests we have a huge change coming. The events of 9/11 showcased how bad our systems were, and they still aren't much better -- particularly with regard to being able to forward videos and pictures citizens are now capturing from crimes in progress.
I recently had lunch with James Cape of InterAct Public Safety, a company led by ex-Intel heavy hitters, which is putting together a Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) effort to close this technology gap. I fully expect another 9/11-like event to suddenly catapult technologies that will better integrate our smartphone-carrying citizens and distributed video surveillance systems into a more tightly integrated crime early warning and response environment. EMC (NYSE: EMC) is quietly putting massive resources into video surveillance that will play a huge role as this all rolls out.
There have been a number of instances in which people who could have helped, and were willing to, weren't able to. Communications systems couldn't talk to each other, and dispatchers either couldn't locate their first responders or they couldn't give them the critical information being captured by folks at the event site in a timely way. While it may take a major event to fire up the market to put this technology in place, it is only a matter of time till we have another Columbine or World Trade Center event, and suddenly law enforcement will be connected. My hope, of course, is that this time we actually think before acting -- but unfortunately, historically, we tend to act first and make a mess of the result.