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It's Only Common Sense: The Future is Now

Editor's Note: To listen to Dan's weekly column, as you've always done in the past, click here. For the written transcript, keep reading...The future is here, now!

I love watching the future unfold right before my eyes. I’ve been on a technology kick lately, reading everything I can get my hands on about new, exciting innovations. I came across a piece in this month’s copy of Wired that really blew me away. It’s called New Tech Cities: Urban Upgrades. Here are a few the neat things happening in a city near you.

• Pothole Patrol: Teeth-rattling roads are nasty. In Boston the Street Bump app uses your phone's motion sensor and GPS to report rough rides and save your shocks
• Smart Spaces: The Parker app uses cameras and in-ground sensors to flag open spaces. It also tells you when your time is up so you don’t get a ticket.
• Watchful Lights: Motion-sensitive LEDs from Sensitivity also measure things like pollution or snow fall. At Newark Airport they even watch passengers and alert security if there’s trouble. Creepy.
• Self-Watering Parks: Sensors in Barcelona’s parks monitor soil moisture and turn on the water only when it’s dry.
• Air-Purifying Billboards: Ultra-polluted Lima, Peru, recently introduced a billboard that sucks in air and purifies it, and pumps it out, upping the air quality for a five-block radius.
• Traffic Monitors: LA commute times dropped by more than 12% thanks to the city’s new traffic control system. It uses pattern analysis and vehicles detectors in the road to shift signal lights for speedier flow.
• Permeable Pavement: New paving surfaces let rainwater through to the ground, lessening the load on drainage systems and restoring aquifers.
• Cool Roofs: Reflective paint bounces away the sun, cooling buildings and saving energy.
• Graffiti-Busting Drones: The Deutsche Bahn, Germany’s railroad, is testing drones to see if they deter graffiti artists, after taggers did $9 million in damage to its railway cars.
• And my personal favorite: Robotic Sewer Rats: Red Zone Robotics makes a compact autonomous robot Solo that uses a 360-degree camera and lasers to inspect city sewers.

Pretty cool stuff, don’t you think?

Here are even more examples of what is happening out there:

• Body Tracker: Developed by Microsoft’s Xbox division, the device turns your body into a human controller for video games.
• Personal Photo Archivist: New company Clarifal is developing a new search technique so that you can find your photos as quickly as possible by indexing the photos on your phone.
• Smarter News Feeds: From Facebook, this is designed to find things faster (by improving speech and image recognition) and allow you to find the viral videos you’ll find funny or photos of your friends--all based on your personal taste.
• The Self-Driving Car: This has had so much hype we've already gotten used to the idea enough to be yawning before it becomes an every day reality, which is in itself an interesting phenomena.
•  The Universal Translator from Skype: This translator will allow you to talk to anyone, any time, while translating in real time. Yikes! Since my son is fluent in Japanese and looking to use that skill to parlay a new job, this one scares the heck out of me!

In addtion to being very cool, these examples open our minds to how much new and innovative thinking is going out in the world. Things are happening so quickly that most of us can’t keep up with what we are working with right now--never mind looking towards the future.

Time-to-market is more important now than it has ever been, which bodes very well for board shops that can provide customers with PCBs in a matter of days, hell, in a matter of hours. The same holds for those companies that can provide a complete package of design, fabrication, and assembly in just a matter of days. These are truly the capabilities of the future available today. There's no doubt the companies that can provide these services will be the true success stories of tomorrow. It’s only common sense.