Smartphones. Are we smart enough?

Smartphones

It's amazing how the evolution of smartphones is changing the Internet and technology environment. According to Gartner, by 2013 internet connections through smartphones will overtake the ones make over Pc's and notebooks. Additionally, the penetration rate of these devices is 8 times faster than the penetration rate of the Pc's 10 years ago.

Are we prepared to change our big screens and do everything into 2 inches screen? Kind of difficult, isn't it? What I foresee regarding to this issue, is that smartphones will replace all processing power of current devices; however we will still need a place to do our job. A dumb terminal, a screen, a projector, many possibilities. But the fact is that the processing power and even the internet connection can be managed by such a small device. Are we smart enough?

So, we are now focusing into processing power and so all these predictions have a competitor "Cloud computing”. This will concentrate processing power into a central connection and all devices (including smart phones) will use it from the central power. This is actually very possible, however it will depend who will chase the rabbit first. For the time being I think phones are winning.

Google Chrome: Browser Battle

My expectations concerning Google Chrome launching were very high considering the fact that one of the outstanding features of Google is the feasibility of integration with other Google’s products. Blogger, Gmail, Google Analytics, Google docs, Adsense are part of my day to day application uses. However, from my point of view still features of Google chrome are not showing especial advantages from the integration point of view side. The browser current scenario working as a dumb terminal is one of the big flaws of the browser architecture. 

Considering that PCs and laptops have high processing resources and will continue evolving as Moore’s laws established, resources are not being effectively used. From this side, the industry of software applications will evolve into a richer client (browser) application with local processing to make a faster experience for end users. I’m sure Google’s engineers have these things in mind and in a few time we will experience that Google´s applications will run faster and better in google chrome that in the rest of browsers.  Is the client-server architecture back?

Education Technology

Technology has been helping education for a while. Since internet became popular, students and educators use it as a a good source of information. But now many schools and universities are launching virtual education in which students has a complete access to a virtual area to follow the subject. I think that the future will bring amazing opportunities for this, but my question is, will this kind of education good for the human society?. I’ve been working for a virtual university for a while I’m a tutor of a couple of courses and my impression is that even virtual education have a lot of potentiality still people need to communicate and shares ideas person to person. But that wont be a problem if we are training people, cause in this activity students acquire skills, knowledge and why not experience. So it will depends on the benefits/Cost balance. The problem would be if we move virtual education to more base education as elementary school. In this stage students beside training are receiving education which is a much more complex activity where students develop mental and moral values. if we want to develop a better society (and better persons of course) we would keep education the way it works now and let the training for information technology.