On several occasions I have had the opportunity to catch the late night talk show, Late Night with Conan O’Brian. One of the skits they do is called, “In the Year 2000″ in which several of the stars and maybe a guest puts on funny collars and shine lights up on their face to give a mystical futuristic effect in which they give offbeat prophetic statements about the the future like,

“The hyphen will be replaced by the dash, and the dash will be replacedby the hyphen. No one will notice.”

Well it’s supposed to be the “future” but it’s called the year “2000.” Which of the writing was 8 years ago but It’s more of another way to tell jokes with a play on words and is sort of a homage to all the crazy optimistic futuristic predictions that were made during the sixties and time of the space race where things like space colonies, flying cars and jet packs. Well those things have not come to fruition at least not in as the way imagined for the general public or in the way they were illustrated. However in the 1967 film, 1999 A.D. they did hit kind of close to the mark in regards to what we know today as the Internet and more specifically e-mail and the World Wide Web.

One thing that is kind of funny about the above video is that while it hits pretty close to the mark on you can definitely see they were thinking in the context of their “present day”. Multiple tiny screens instead of a windows-like graphical interface on one computer screen, knobs and dials instead software controls and images of paper receipts instead of text being rendered as part of a web page. It’s very hard to predict the future of technology no more than 2 years in the future. In the year 2000 I would have had a hard time imaging touch and motion sensitive interfaces like the Nintentdo Wii or Apple’s iPhone but the reason they are popular and came about was people want to interact naturally. Let’s do something crazy. In 5 years (2013) we will probably see many changes in technology especially in the worlds of energy, transportation and mobile computing. What do you see in that short time? What can you or your business do to think forward without being restricted to what is the “normal” way of doing things now while at the same time not being so bizarre or financially impractical? What unique products or services do you think we could offer in 5 years?

This entry was posted on Friday, July 18th, 2008 at 10:51 am and is filed under Compelling Content, Innovation, Portable Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.