Top Five Mobile Internet Innovations We Want to See Through

Flying cars? Clones? Colonies on the moon? Other geeks and science fiction fans look for ward to these futures with stars in their eyes, but we work in tech gadgets. So our ambitions are going to be a little closer to home, a little more realistic, and a whole lot more practical. Here's the developments in the mobile Internet field which show so much promise, if they don't get fully realized soon, we'll hold our breaths and turn Blackberry blue.

Worldwide Wifi

Why is it that for the past 40 years you can get broadcast television anywhere in the world, even really dumpy places, and yet you can still go to a major city and still not find a hotspot? Television is supported by advertisements; and revenue from Internet advertising rivals that of TV, so we know it's not the money. Surely, having Google on tap from anywhere in the world beats a rerun of the "Beverly Hillbillies", so we know there's demand. We know better than to ask "What's the hold-up?" - spectrum assignments, reach, security, and channel pollution, we've heard it all before. But there has to be an eventual solution somewhere, hasn't there?

GPS and maps

We're already solving the Global Positioning Satellite problem; the solution is to just keep launching satellites. But now there's the problem of map-making and land-surveying. Too many stories are cropping up of drivers who were directed by the mapping software to dead ends as a result of faulty map data. We know that Internet services such as MapQuest and Google Earth are chipping away at this problem, but what if we helped the process along with the Wikipedia approach? Imagine if you could correct the map on the spot, at the moment you discover it's wrong, and then just like with Wikipedia's editors, a surveyor could come along later to double-check your correction and make it official. It could work!

Self-piloting vehicles

That's the next step after the mapping. Worldwide, 12 million people are killed every year in automobile accidents. Meanwhile, the military sector is testing out and even deploying self-piloting vehicles, including autonomous tanks and aircraft. So when is this going to trickle down into the private sector? We could eliminate traffic accident fatalities completely, simply by removing the only cause - pilot error. Vehicle systems are already using a great deal of technology to protect against accidents - but the next step would simply be having all the cars on a network. You'd hop in and dial your destination and away you go. At least in the city, this would be very practical. It's hard to argue with saving 12 million lives per year.

A word about input methods...

We're all happy with our styluses and handwriting recognition, and we understand that a QWERTY keyboard and a handheld device just isn't a match made in Heaven. That's why we look at stonographer's keyboards and wonder "What if?" Stenographers - court reporters in the United States - use a stenotype machine which has just 22 keys to take dictation at the speed of speech. The computer interprets the shorthand, and out comes perfect English. Could it work on a handheld? We just thought we'd put the inspiration out there. If blind users can use a PDA that uses just ten keys to type in Braille, maybe somebody out there could look into this.

Government

True, politics is a sore spot with many gadget geeks - and vice versa, it seems. But we can't help but notice that while our countries' populations advance into wired, tech-savvy, hip individuals and our businesses are falling all over themselves to embrace technology solutions, our governments just seem stuck in the era of powdered wigs and quill pens. Why, exactly, do we in democratic countries have to go somewhere special to vote? Why aren't our government officials blogging what they do? Why isn't the law-making process in G8 countries more open? We understand there's a hotbed of political debate about the pitfalls of direct democracy; we're not proposing anything that radical. But is it too much to ask that the guy or gal who's running for President or Prime Minister at least not act like he's afraid the computer is going to explode when he stands next to it for the photo-op?

Filed Under: Mobile Internet