Technology of the future

Business Daily is a gizmo-filled special from California. Steve Evans is among the mega-brains now planning all our futures, in San Diego for a conference of some of the cleverest people on the planet.

It is called Future in Review and it's where a lot of the world's top thinkers on technology gather to share thoughts.

So, it's where you can get some sort of sense of the future. For example, what does Xerox's chief technology officer think is the future for paper and printing, given that Xerox, of course, is literally a by-word for photo-copying paper?

Well, Xerox's CTO, running the company's research is Sophie Vandebroek and she's based in Boston but here in San Diego where I met her.

Sophie was talking there about the mass of information that's now on the web - much, much more every single year than all the books ever published. And information is going to get even more abundant because the nature of the web is changing. Until very recently, it was a sort of static thing, with information, say a newspaper, there for all to see, unchanged. Now, there's a continual stream of information that changes all the time - even newspapers run video and sound and blogs so they're anything but static.

And that changes the way we react to the web, as Nova Spivack explained to me. He's what's sometimes called a visionary on these things, starting his first internet company in 1994 and a string of them since.

One of the big debates in the internet technology industry is whether the personal computer is dead. The buzz-word you need to know is "The Cloud", and the idea is that instead of having complex programmes and masses of information actually on your PC to carry round, the actual computing and storage of date will all be done remotely, far away, probably in a big computer center in, say, Oregon where energy is cheap. In other words, the gizmo you carry round won't have much ability to do very much except to connect to the web, or the cloud in the current lingo.

One of the companies developing ways for unsophisticated machines to talk to the cloud or the internet is SIMtone, based in North Carolina and Switzerland. I asked Misha Nossik, one of the company's top brains, a Russian emigre now living in Canada, what was wrong with the current powerful and ubiquitous personal computer.