Everything about you will be connected in future: Google

24 June 2015 03:03 am

By Dulasha Hettiarachchi
In the next 4 or 5 years, just about everyone and everything will be connected, and it is harder to predict what will happen in the next 10-20 years or beyond, according to a Google official who was speaking about the future of technology, at the Millennium Information Technologies (MIT) yesterday.

“In the future, everything about everyone will be connected and all you have to do is essentially look around you and look at all the things that happen from emerging technologies,” Google South East Asia and India Vice President and Managing Director Rajan Anandan said.

He exemplified his point with one of Google’s latest projects, the ‘Project Jacquard’ that takes the textile industry into a whole new level by making it possible to weave, touch and gesture interactively into any textile using standard industrial looms.

“How many years did it take new major consumer-facing platforms to move from 0 to 1 billion users?” he questioned.

It took as long as 110 years for landline telephones, 49 years for the television, 22 years for the normal mobile phone, 14 years for internet and only 8 years for smart phones to reach this target, he said, while adding that every new major wave of technology only takes half as before to reach 1 billion consumers.
“This depicts what happens in the world of technology, and it also means that the current major consumer-facing technology that is at production scale will take a lot less than 8 years to move from 0 to 1 billion users, noted Anandan.

He said that in a many more years to come, it will be possible to witness new consumer-facing technology platforms moving from 0 to 1 billion users in less than a year. Anandan while revealing that only 3 billion people from 7 billion people living in the world have access to internet connection, said that Google’s ground breaking Project Loon – a network of balloons travelling on the edge of space aimed at providing internet access to remote and rural areas bridging the gap between the online and the offline worlds, would soon connect the remaining 4 billion people to the internet.

He also spoke of emerging technological platforms such as Xiaomi, UBER, Wealthfront and Slack replacing disrupting traditional business models.

Xiaomi is a Chinese Mobile Company that only sells mobile phones online on Tuesday evenings, so a customer reaching Xiaomi in the morning or afternoon cannot purchase their phones! but still they have topped the mobile industry in China. UBER cab services excludes the necessity of customers calling cab drivers and waiting forever till the cab reaches you simply because of the availability of a Smartphone, exclaimed Anandan.

“If I was born today, I would choose to be a technologist, because all of this is happening as we speak and the future is now,” he concluded.