Week 10

In this week's session of TWC, the topic we discussed was Emerging and future technologies. I may or may not have mentioned this before the quote by George Bernard Shaw "You see things; and you say,'Why?' But i dream things that never were; and I say,'Why not?'". This quote is about making things that are seemingly impossible possible. Another quote by Albert Einstein: "Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand." This shows us the difference in imagination and knowledge as well as the importance of having imagination such that we would constantly strive towards something greater than what we already have.

Some of the interesting videos showed today depicted some very innovative and interesting activities. One of which was plastic logic, a company that specializes in plastic technology, currently enhancing plastics to be able to take over silicon. They have also invented flexible screens from plastics, i.e. the flexible ebook. There comes great and many possibilities with this flexible screen as so many everyday devices that have a digital screens which we would like to be unbreakable. The flexible quality of the plastics used make this possible. When using high-tech, thin and fragile devices such as the ipad need not be so worrisome in the future.

Drivers for development of emerging and future technologies are:

• unmet market opportunity and need-this drives companies to want to fulfill this gap to capture the economic benefits and thus resulting in new innovations.
  
• growing body of scientific and technology knowledge. The ever increasing wealth of knowledge that makes technology that were inconceivable even 10 years ago increasingly possible. This also includes new insights and discoveries that may often lead to previously unimagined needs.
• supply can sometimes create demand-where people dun realize they need it until they experience it such as the walkman or the iphone. As the late Steve Jobs use to say in response to the amount of market research that went into the ipad: "None. It's not the consumers' job to know what they want." This driver is very true for many of the apple products available.
• Mass media and advertising-changes the perceptions of need, affecting what we perceive as cool or what's not.
• lastly the confluence of the four smarts(smart people, smart ideas, smart money, smart alliances and partnerships)

The bottomline message for today is: "if you can imagine it, you can make it happen!"

Another interesting distinction that was made in today's session was the difference between sales and marketing. Sales is about pushing products to consumers while advertising is about pulling consumers to really want to have your product. Today i also learned of another reality, augmented reality. this refers to technology that puts a layer of information over the existing reality that we see. I like this session of TWC and would rate it an 8 as it explores the interesting and unbounded possibilities of technology:)