Picked up Doc Searls from his hotel in Regents Park last night en route to G&S in Soho (where I would later meet Stowe Boyd, Phil Wolf, and some other fine people I've previously met) and no sooner was he sitting in the passenger seat than he whipped out his not inconsiderably sized widescreen Powerbook and set about firing up his Macstumbler app to scan the route for WiFi hotspots. It was great to chat and share stories, Steven Wright jokes and various other stories from the tech frontline. Both my and Doc's social networks have been converging in one way or another for about 4 years, initially on outer fringes via the Cluetrain mailing list in 2000, then in low earth orbit via our blogrolls and posts and now in good old fashioned facetime - we first met face to face back in May but never got a good opportunity to chat with him properly. I never cease to be amazed and I delight at the way technology influences my life like this.
But I was totally impressed with James Cox's throw-away comment which totally popped my reality valve; with a perfectly serious facial expression and tone, James blurted out "and I can now synchronize my VoodooPad Wiki notes with my iPod." Roll back ten years, nay five even, and such pub talk would have been considered absolutely interplanetary in nature and origin. OK, maybe that sentence is still interplanetary to 99.9% of the population, but 0.1% of seven billion is still a big number. Awesome.
I also smirked when the discussion about RFID cited an example in Bulgaria (I think) where an RFID trial involved having an embedded chip in your upper arm, facilitating automatic payment for goods (presumably just by waving your arm about), but I did wonder how long it would be before people had RFID chips on their shoulders, and would people with RFID chips on their shoulders actually be resentful about the fact whilst simultaneously enjoying their new found consumer freedom?
But I was totally impressed with James Cox's throw-away comment which totally popped my reality valve; with a perfectly serious facial expression and tone, James blurted out "and I can now synchronize my VoodooPad Wiki notes with my iPod." Roll back ten years, nay five even, and such pub talk would have been considered absolutely interplanetary in nature and origin. OK, maybe that sentence is still interplanetary to 99.9% of the population, but 0.1% of seven billion is still a big number. Awesome.
I also smirked when the discussion about RFID cited an example in Bulgaria (I think) where an RFID trial involved having an embedded chip in your upper arm, facilitating automatic payment for goods (presumably just by waving your arm about), but I did wonder how long it would be before people had RFID chips on their shoulders, and would people with RFID chips on their shoulders actually be resentful about the fact whilst simultaneously enjoying their new found consumer freedom?