181% is what Gartner projects will be the growth rate of tablet PCs (e.g., iPad) sold in 2011, to 54.8 million units. Gartner estimates that by 2014, the number of tablets sold worldwide will reach 208 million, representing 58% of all “connected mobile consumer electronics.”
Today in 1888, Louis Le Prince shot Roundhay Garden Scene, the earliest surviving motion picture. 
Today in 1860, James Wallace Black made the first successful aerial photographs in the United States. He photographed Boston from a hot-air balloon at 1,200 feet. One good print resulted, which the photographer entitled “Boston as the Eagle and the Wild Goose See It.” 
Today in 1983, the wireless industry was born when the head of Ameritech Mobile Communications placed the first commercial cellphone call from Chicago (home of the first city-wide cellular network) to Alexander Graham Bell’s grandson in Germany. Today industry revenues in the U.S. are over $155 billion and wireless penetration (%f total U.S. population) is 93%. In June 2010, 24.5% of U.S. households were wireless-only.
Today in 1988, Steve Jobs unveiled the NeXT Computer at Symphony Hall in San Francisco. A day or two later, I was among a standing-room only crowd at Boston’s Symphony Hall admiring the all-black, beautifully-designed “workstation” with a brand-new optical drive (no hard disk drive in the computer of the future according to Jobs) that played a duet with a human violinist.
That night I sent a gushing memo to my colleagues at DEC, telling them that the future has arrived and that Jobs education-sector-first marketing strategy was brilliant. Indeed, CERN was one of the early adopters and Tim Berners-Lee developed the first WWW browser/editor on the NeXT workstation. But NeXT Computer, Inc. went on to sell only 50,000 beautifully-designed “cubes,” getting out of the hardware business altogether in 1993.
For many years, I have kept in my office the “Computing advances to the NeXT level” poster I got that night as a reminder that forecasting the next big (or small) thing in technology is tough, even impossible. 
And yet, many people believe that technology marches according to some “laws” or pre-defined trajectory and that all we have to do is decipher the “evolutionary” path technology (or the economy or society) is destined to follow.
Jobs went on to introduce the iPod and the iPad, industry-changing devices whose invention was made possible, among other things, by a tiny disk drive. The possibility of a significant boost to the simultaneous shrinking (of size) and enlarging (of capacity) of disk drives was known since the discovery of the giant magnetoresistance effect in the very same year the NeXT Computer was introduced, 1988. Still, no one predicted the iPod. Similarly, in 1990 no one predicted how the Web will change our lives or in 2000, how virtualization will change the lives of IT managers, although both technologies existed at the time.
To quote someone who had the opportunity to meet his future, “Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead. But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change.” We cannot predict our future. But, like Ebenezer Scrooge, we can create it.
Today in 1979 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was published. Among many memorable observations by Douglas Adams: “First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII — and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we’ve realized it’s a brochure.”
“For 40 years now, the tech industry has been digitizing everything in sight. The next 40 years, businesses will be focused on how to make sense of all that information.” —Jonathan Spier, CEO and cofounder of Netbase
I hate to bite the hand that
Feeds me so much information
— Duran Duran
Today in 1996, the US Postal Office introduced a special “Computer Technology” stamp to mark the fiftieth anniversary of ENIAC, the first large-scale, electronic digital computer. The stamp shows an image of a brain partially covered by small blocs that contain parts of circuit boards and binary code. 
The image encapsulates well the conviction that computers are giant brains, articulated in 1949 by Edmund Berkeley in his book, Giant Brains or Machines that Think: “Recently there have been a good deal of news about strange giant machines that can handle information with vast speed and skill….These machines are similar to what a brain would be if it were made of hardware and wire instead of flesh and nerves… A machine can handle information; it can calculate, conclude, and choose; it can perform reasonable operations with information. A machine, therefore, can think.” Thirty years later, Marvin Minsky famously stated: “The human brain is just a computer that happens to be made out of meat.”
To which Joseph Weizenbaum replied: “What do these people actually mean when they shout that man is a machine (and a brain a ‘meat machine’)? It is… that human beings are ‘computable,’ that they are not distinct from other objects in the world… all this is not the fault of the computer. Guilt cannot be attributed to computers. But computers enable fantasies, many of them wonderful, but also those of people whose compulsion to play God overwhelms their ability to fathom the consequences of their attempt to turn their nightmares into reality. I recall, in this connection, a debate I once had with Herbert Simon. Perhaps frustrated by my attitudes, he shouted: ‘Knowledge is better than ignorance!’ (I think he thought he had me there). I replied: ‘Yes! But not at any price.’”
But Weizenbaum was in a small and ever-decreasing minority. In his 2005 book, The Singularity is Near, Ray Kurzweil predicted that by 2045, machine intelligence may equal or surpass the collective intelligence of all human beings on Earth.
Last night I saw the future of social networking at the IBM research center for social software. The open house, part of the FutureM events this week in Boston, showcased 11 experimental applications: New ways to enhance collaboration over the Web and new tools to help us sift through, find, and mine the abundance (over-abundance?) of information available to us today.
All the applications presented were very interesting, but here I will discuss three that attempt to answer the age-old question of how to efficiently and accurately reduce “noise” and connect to what’s most relevant to us at any given moment. With social networking, “relevance” has an added dimension of “influence.” We are no longer interested only in ranking what’s most relevant to our search, we also would like to know how relevant is the information to others. In other words, does it influence them?
IBM’s Banter lets the user search the blogosphere for a specific topic and then ranks the results not just by the number of links to a certain blog post, but also by how many other bloggers quote the text verbatim. To help busy communications professionals lost in the sea of comments about the company they work for, Banter’s text analysis also provides indicators of positive, neutral, and negative sentiment. And much more, such as the ability to measure the viral potential of a Twiterer.
Answers and SaNDVis identify influencers inside IBM. Answers is an internal Web application where any IBMer can ask a question and others can answer and comment on it, including voting on its accuracy and applicability. The more you pose questions and the more you answer (correctly) others’ question, the higher you are ranked by the application. SaNDvis uses advanced visualization and interaction techniques to present the network of relationships between content and people across all social networks at IBM. It creates a social map based on social connections, co-membership in a group or project, co-authorship, organization, and tags. It identifies the dynamic social fabric and its centers of influence around areas of interest and expertise.
In the 50s and 60s, studies of the way innovations are spread and adopted (most notably Coleman, Katz, and Mentzel on medical innovation) discovered the importance of social networks and of gatekeepers (influencers) in the process of diffusion. In the era of mass communications, they argued, interpersonal relations still matter. The future of “social networking” is the past of social networks. It’s just that now (and even more in the future) we can see our changing, dynamic social map right there on our computer screen.
The Story of Information 