Prediction series: December 2007

There are a few trends forming in our lives which might be coming true within the next 10 years. As a believer of my own judgments about the future of our world, I decided to adjust my life accordingly. I’ll start with the least crazy of all these predictions. Based on statistics of my predicting ability in the stock market, please take into account the fact that my predictions usually takes about 6 months longer to realize than what I originally thought.

Groceries:

Walmart groceries. I did a quick check of staple grocery items between Loblaws and Walmart and found that Walmart’s offers are generally cheaper than the giant grocery store except for fresh produces which Walmart doesn’t offer. Loblaw’s stock has been declining and I doubt their distribution network can be as cheap as Walmart’s. Walmart is also showing a lot of intelligence in selecting the produces that they wish to compete with.

Connected life:

With Google’s online storage option only few months from release and the current trend of extremely cheap and basic laptops for $200 (eee PC for example). My dream of a mobile and connected life from a small and portable terminal laptop can soon come true. I’ve also started using Google Notebook for most of my online needs, replacing word, bookmarks, small personal diary, reminders and to do list. Once I get my hands on an eee PC and hook up my skype, account, I will be selling my cell phone and switching my calendar to google. I do suggest holding off on uploading any copyrighted material on google for now. Wait a bit and see who’s suing who. Google will be the Microsoft of tomorrow, but with a better conscious. They haven’t pissed me off in anyway so far. I am also freezing my project of turning MyBookWorld into a small server for now since reviving the hardware will take a significant amount of time (usually involves spending a whole weekend by myself, which I am really not looking forward to).

Switch to 3d movies:

The future lies in downloadable movies as home theaters become mainstream and equipment costs decrease. I recently browsed online for equipments and realized that it will only take about $1000 to setup a home theater. But going out to movies as a social activity will never die. It will simply be replaced with something that we can’t have at home: IMAX. If you haven’t seen the recent Beowulf movie, I suggest you do that now. The bottleneck of 3d movies used to the equipments needed to film them. Now that we’ve proven close to real life films are possible to create digitally and make profit, that bottleneck has lifted. This is a game changer.

Design focus:

Unless the 3d initiative kicks in, the computing power will be able to generate contents closer and closer to real world. The industry is less about new features that was previously impossible due to computer limitations and moving towards the territory of whether or not the consumers will pick it up after a short demo. This is where design and user friendliness reign as the major factor of a purchase.

Blog Libel in full effect:

Enough people will sue for defamation that we’ll all start watching what we say or taking the blog private. Enough with the junk already.

Chinese as the official language:

I still have the dream of “teach chinese overseas” as a job to get paid and explore the world at the same time.