2015 Top 10 Technology Trends

2015 could be an exciting year of Zero-to-One paradigm-busting innovation, honoring and distancing humanity from Excellent Sheep mode, bringing online more of our 7 billion people in a rich and connective collaboration to scale forward progress in a truly global society.

Top 10 Technology Trends: 

1. Deep-Learning
2. Wearables/IOT
3. Digital Payments
4. Video Gaming Hardware Mods
5. Quantified Self-Connected Car Integration
6. Consumer MedGadgets
7. Smarthome, Smartcity
8. Personal Robotics
9. Cognitive Computing
10. Blockchain Technology

Predictions for 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009 

Dynamic Group Cognitive Coordination through Wearable Tech

A surprising ‘new functionality’ enabler of smartwatches and wearable tech is not just getting real-time alerts and notifications to a single user as the front-end of the seamless connected computing world, but group coordination. Real-time group coordination could foster a whole new class of wearable applications, for a wide range of ‘serious’ and ‘fun’ uses in both large and small groups.

35 teams presented at the Apple WatchKit Hackathon at Silicon Valley’s Hacker Dojo on Sunday November 23, 2014. Many interesting apps were shown, mostly for only a single smartwatch like MoodyBaby, NowCash, MedAlert, ItsRaining, LoveTap, and ScrollforSushi.

Best Tech was won by this author’s own team project for WatchSet: a multi-player social gaming app for smartwatch wearers in proximity to self-discover and play interactive games (Figure 1).

Figure 1: WatchSet Multi-player Social Gaming App for Smartwatch.

Large-scale Dynamic Cognitive Coordination
The level of where we are starting to operate now with technology is automating lower-level cognitive tasks. Linking any and all data streams on-demand in the connected computing world is allowing us to conceive of automation in new ways - as both mechanical task relief and cognitive processing offload. This suggests that we may be able to shift the whole way we interact with the world, and organize human activity in new and dynamically coordinated ways, that are potentially at a much larger scale than has been possible previously.

Gaming Apps to Unlock Video Archive Footage

One of the leading digital media foundations in the San Francisco Bay Area, GAFFTA, the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, held a hackathon for film-makers and developers March 21-23, 2013. The challenge was to come up with new uses for open-source video archive footage (for example from the Internet Archive).

One idea would be to merge mobile gaming, crowdsourcing, and video archives to make the archives a fun and accessible tool for telling new stories. Here are some app ideas:

App: This is not my story!
In this gaming app, person 1 (whose image or profile photo is shown) selects a video micro-clip that he or she feels is ‘not my story.’ Then person 2, matched randomly from the crowd of the app’s community members, adds a short caption to the video as to why the video micro-clip is not that person’s story. Humor would be tantamount. Other community crowd members could validate the caption (e.g.; police spam), and vote on it with ‘likes’ to determine game winners.

App: PostSecret Video
This gaming app is the video version of the successful, strikingly poignant, and deeply human PostSecret project. PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard which are then posted on the web and compiled and published as books. Instead of sending anonymous postcards with ‘my secret,’ anonymous participants would find a video micro-clip that corresponds to their secret. Other community members would guess what the secret is from the video micro-clip.

App: Exquisite Video Corpse Again taking advantage of the community to create crowd art, this gaming app uses the exquisite corpse technique invented by the surrealists. In a group story telling exercise, the first person selects a video micro-clip. The second selects a second video micro-clip that is the next few frames of the story. The third selects the third, and so on. Each new person selecting can only see the story 1-2 nodes back. Again the crowd could vote on newly created video stories.

How would you use passively multiplayer gaming?

Passively multiplayer gaming is using applications that track one's computer usage and transform the information into fun, productivity and interesting interactions with others. Passively multiplayer gaming is also called "myware" (as opposed to spyware) articulating the self-controlled element. Multiplayer gaming denotes the possibility of getting bonus points and leveling up to demonstrate progression like in the gaming world but in computer applications: World of Warcraft drum roll please, you have leveled up in Excel! These ratings could be shared with others (employers, online reputation networks) to communicate skill and experience.

Biggest benefit
The biggest benefit of passively multiplayer gaming is the ability to increase the interconnection and synergistic cooperation of human brains. Teillard de Chardin and others long ago voiced the idea of the increasing encephalization of the earth; the increasing interconnectedness of human minds extending and implementing knowledge and information. Technology is quickening the linked human hypermind, initially via cities, newspapers, BBS, etc., then with Internet-based email lists, forum discussions and search, then with podcasts and text and video blogs, now the latest step is electronic event calendars that can be shared with others, the mobile computing platform and passively multiplayer gaming, including permissioning friends into real-time personal location data via GPS. Minds no longer need to be individual but are becoming interconnected hivemind clusters.

Other benefits
First, passively multiplayer gaming contributes to the evolving trends in transparency and life documentation with lifecamming, lifeblogging, flickr photo streams, etc. Second, passively multiplayer gaming contributes to personal productivity. We know we spend too much time in WoW, the blogosphere, Internet news feeds, etc., but actually seeing the numbers tabulated and using applications that will spring up to overlay the data and make it useful for estimating project phase completions, etc. will be very useful.

Third, next level non-hackable smart monitoring could allow skill-acquisition and ratings that are used to communicate expertise. The gaming achievements currently listed on resumes could extend to many other areas, including job force training and life-long education activities. Some sort of smart monitoring is important for measuring effectiveness as time spent alone does not confer expertise.