Technology Review: Microsoft's 3-D Strategy: Microsoft has joined the wave of companies betting that 3-D is the next big thing for computing. .... treating the device as a natural extension of how they interact with the world around them. ..... have people shopping and searching in 3-D as well. .... move computing from today's graphical user interfaces to the "natural user interface" ..... gesture and voice .... a natural interface frees up attention and concentration so that they can focus better on the task at hand .... processing high-definition, 3-D video in real time would strain the capabilities of most home computers today .... the average person views 3-D technology as something used on special occasions, not as a day-to-day technologyThe graphical user interface itself was a huge jump. Before that you had to enter exotic commands into your machine. The natural user interface - or 3D computing - promises to be a similar big jump, comparatively a bigger jump.
Just like a big chunk of humanity never bothered with landlines and went straight to mobile phones, I can see the same thing happening with the natural user interface. The natural user interface could end up the majority of humanity's first introduction to the full fledged computing experience.
A computer is not a tool. Computing is an environment.
eMarketer: Email Still Tops Facebook for Keeping in Touch: 86% of survey respondents said they used email to share content, while just 49% said they used Facebook ..... ages 18 to 24, reverses the trend, with 76% sharing via Facebook, compared with 70% via email. .... Rather than focusing on sharing content they thought the recipients would find helpful or relevant (58%), most respondents cared more about what they thought was interesting or amusing (72%).
Technology Review: Craig Mundie's Cloud Vision: cloud computing--the trend shifting computer processing and storage away from desktop computers and onto distributed computers across the Internet. .... Traditional procedural programming languages tend to mask or in fact squeeze out the inherent parallelism in many problems just as a byproduct of the structure of the languages. How you get programs to be correct at larger and larger scales across this distributed concurrent environment is another problem. ...... "Look, I just expect to be able to listen to my music no matter what device I happen to pick up." .... what I call this composite platform, where you've got a balanced set of roles between what you expect the cloud to provide and what you expect the clients to provide themselves.