Indoor Coverage

This is another prediction involving technology and using the online web. Found it interesting and re-posted here with full attribution to the author.

Fashion: ‘Technology creates smarter clothes’

Fashion is such an important part of the way in which we communicate our identity to others, and for a very long time it’s meant dress: the textile garments on our body. But in the coming decades, I think there’ll be much more emphasis on other manifestations of fashion and different ways of communicating with each other, different ways of creating a sense of belonging and of making us feel great about ourselves.

We’re already designing our identities online – manipulating imagery to tell a story about ourselves. Instead of meeting in the street or in a bar and having a conversation and looking at what each other is wearing, we’re communicating in some depth through these new channels. With clothing, I think it’s possible that we’ll see a polarisation between items that are very practical and those that are very much about display – and maybe these are not things that you own but that you borrow or share.

Technology is already being used to create clothing that fits better and is smarter; it is able to transmit a degree of information back to you. This is partly driven by customer demand and the desire to know where clothing comes from – so we’ll see tags on garments that tell you where every part of it was made, and some of this, I suspect, will be legislation-driven, too, for similar reasons, particularly as resources become scarcer and it becomes increasingly important to recognise water and carbon footprints.

However, it’s not simply an issue of functionality. Fashion’s gone through a big cycle in the last 25 years – from being something that was treasured and cherished to being something that felt disposable, because of a drop in prices. In fact, we’ve completely changed our relationship towards clothes and there’s a real feeling among designers who I work with that they’re trying to work back into their designs an element of emotional content.

I think there’s definitely a place for technology in creating a dialogue with you through your clothes

Dilys Williams, designer and the director for sustainable fashion at the London College of Fashion

The following was an interesting set of predictions that we read on the web and we found it so interesting, we decided to re-post it here with full attribution to the author.

Web/internet: ‘Quantum computing is the future’

The open web created by idealist geeks, hippies and academics, who believed in the free and generative flow of knowledge, is being overrun by a web that is safer, more controlled and commercial, created by problem-solving pragmatists.

Henry Ford worked out how to make money by making products people wanted to own and buy for themselves. Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs are working out how to make money from allowing people to share, on their terms.

Facebook and Apple are spawning cloud capitalism, in which consumers allow companies to manage information, media, ideas, money, software, tools and preferences on their behalf, holding everything in vast, floating clouds of shared data. We will be invited to trade invasions into our privacy – companies knowing ever more about our lives – for a more personalised service. We will be able to share, but on their terms.

Julian Assange and the movement that has been ignited by WikiLeaks is the most radical version of the alternative: a free, egalitarian, open and public web. The fate of this movement will be a sign of things to come. If it can command broad support, then the open web has a chance to remain a mainstream force. If, however, it becomes little more than a guerrilla campaign, then the open web could be pushed to the margins, along with national public radio

By 2035, the web, as a single space largely made up of webpages accessed on computers, will be long gone.

As the web goes mobile, those who pay more will get faster access. We will be sharing videos, simulations, experiences and environments, on a multiplicity of devices to which we’ll pay as much attention as a light switch.

Yet, many of the big changes of the next 25 years will come from unknowns working in their bedrooms and garages. And by 2035 we will be talking about the coming of quantum computing, which will take us beyond the world of binary, digital computing, on and off, black and white, 0s and 1s.

The small town of Waterloo, Ontario, which is home to the Perimeter Institute, funded by the founder of BlackBerry, currently houses the largest collection of theoretical physicists in the world.

The bedrooms of Waterloo are where the next web may well be made.

Charles Leadbeater, author and social entrepreneur