The future of IT, and the future of IT Korea was discussed at the Creative Futures Forum, held on October 12, 2010 at Seoul Electronic Grand Fair 2010. Four renowned speakers took the floor at Ilsan KINTEX, in which the forum was held. The speakers were Dream Company CEO Rolf Jensen, Senior Vice President of Gartner Research Peter Sondergaard, Director of IBM Watson research center Dr. David Cohn and Neurosky CEO Stanly Yang.
Rolf Jensen CEO of Dream Company talked about the IT industry in the next 10 years. In order to foresee the future, we must first know about the past. The human history had advanced progressively, we used farmers, industry workers, and now we live in the dream society. In the dream society, dreams, innovation and creativity are called for. Over the past few years, Internet users had drastically increased. There used to be no smart phones, no tablets, but today, smart phones and tablets are widely used.
Companies in the future must be creative, and this can be achieved by having clearly defined objectives, fast feed-back from management, allowing mistakes, a team of creative people, time to get organized, and knowledge. Furthermore, the responsibility oriented organization will be replaced by value based ones. Jensen also introduced the term "Teenage companies". "Teenage companies are more explorative, break rules, and are aggressive, daring, and creative. In order to succeed have your company stay young."
In the future laptops, smart phones, tablets and cameras will all be merged into one device: the eBag. IDs, passport, keys, and bank accounts, will all be replaced by the eBag. eBag will be more important than your spouse. The Top Ten industries of smart phones, tablets will still remain at the top, through the eBag. But the eBag will be personalized, just as your car and clothing.
In ten years there would be one global Internet language. This would be plausible by instant translation. As of this technology, reaching the world would become much easier.
Past development of IT influenced business and had rarely influenced schools. In the future IT would also be actively used in the classroom. With hardware and games comes smart and fun learning.
IT will also change the way information, already in the US, online news companies are threatening the paper newspaper. Entertainment will also be changed. Everyone would be able to make their own movies, games, music. Jensen calls it the Democratation of Entertainment.
IT will also enable people to make friends all over the world on the mobile device, because of the powerful translation. The office, contrary to belief, will not disappear, as the office is a meeting place, a social area, but working hours will no longer exist. Companies will need anti-stress programs, and people will have to find a balance between family and work.
Among the many inventions Jensen believes that the 3d printer is the true revolution. And it will soon become available for commercial use. This will shorten the value chain and will produce thousands of small business owners, and cause collaboration between those owners. Customers would want custom-made products and the size of business will reduce, whereas the numbers would increase.
Due to the growth of e-commerce Jensen foresees that the traditional retail shopping will transform from sales to experience. Shopping to them will no longer be an act of consuming, but an experience. The advertising in the future will become personalized, targeting you and only, specifically you. Jensen advised Korean IT companies to merge consumer electronics into one device, personalized products. Let designers, storytellers, artists meet technology experts, he advised.
Senior Vice President of Gartner Research Peter Sonderaard's theme was "The Future of IT technology" To know the future of IT technology; he also proclaimed that it is best to look at the past. 20 years ago the client computer was first introduced and it took 10 years to fully establish it. In 1994 there were no SMS, but in 1996, over 100 million people had handheld phones. Now over 1.5 billion cell phones are used. The next 10 years will have more improvement than the years before. By 2015, revenue will be the key factor determining compensation for most new global 2000 CIOs. Sonderaard explained that the future of IT technology will be categorized into 4 major themes. The themes are cloud social, context, and pattern.
Cloud computing is enabled by Internet hand technology. Open public cloud environments would cause hundreds maybe thousands of external companies. Cloud computing will also start cloud brokers and cloud ecosystems. Cloud brokers are a third party working on behalf of the consumer of one or more cloud services to add value to the service being consumed, and cloud ecosystems are the foundation to build/host, deliver and/or support a service delivered to cloud consumers.
Dr. David Cohn Director of IBM Watson Research had also talked about cloud computing and it's appliance in smarter government. In his opinion the collaboration of cloud computing and governments would result in transparency, cooperation between governments, new business models and roles as the cloud broker.
According to Sonderarrd, Social interactions will also be an important factor in the future. UCC & social trends will converge. Businesses, CRM, Public social sites will collide, collective behavior will drive value, and most importantly online videos will top the list for social media tool usage. He emphasized the importance of video content management and archiving will be needed, privacy issues and use policies must be addressed, and the appropriate use of internal and cloud-based storage & delivery should be determined, once online videos becomes mainstream.
Context-aware computing and user experience platform will also emerge. They will include tools to build and validate usability. In the near term, Sonderarrd suggests strategies for HTML 5, Silverlight, and Flash. In the longer term, follow-me portals, hyper-personalization, ensemble interactions will occur.
Sonderarrd also predicted that the traditional offline analytics will be changed into a more predictive analysis. He also provided a short and long-term guideline to companies to get ready for the future.
Stanley Yang CEO of NeuroSky introduced the future of bio-interfacing. He opened his speech with the famous Star-Wars opening theme, and introduced NeuroSky's Star-Wars Force Trainer. It enables users to use the force in real life by wearing a headset that analyzes neural patterns and interprets them into commands a machine might understand. Apart from NeuroSky's Star-Wars Force Trainer, many interesting items related to bio-interfacing were introduced. In 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics people were able to change the lights of Niagara Falls by using a headset. Yang also introduced interactive movies, in which the viewer could change the outcome of a movie
In the present, humans conform to machines, as machines do not understand what we need. Young foresees that by 2025 we would be able to teach machines what humans want, machines will conform to humans.
