Can You Sense Me Now?

Below is a Slideshare presentation posted by a friend who is in the process of authoring a new book entitled “The Age of Context”. He’s presenting it today at the Big 3 Conference in San Francisco, where he is one of the keynote speakers. It’s quite high level and somewhat simplistic at this point, but you should be able to get an idea of the direction the book will be taking.

I have long believed we humans are on the road to becoming a race of cyborgs. Nothing that’s happened in the last quarter century has served to dissuade me from this belief, either. At the rate we’re developing and making use of prostheses, and with continuing advancements in Fetal surgery and in utero cardiac procedures, it’s only a matter of time (100 years? 1000 years?) before most humans will have some sort of inorganic component attached or implanted.

I haven’t thought much about this lately, being content to watch as we meandered down this path. However, recently I was made aware that a couple of social media “friends” of mine were writing a book discussing another aspect of this inevitable evolutionary route we’re on. Their current working title is The Age of Context and I am really glad they’re writing it.

What they’re talking about is the newest developments in the fields of mobile technologies, wearable computers, sensing and mapping capabilities, big data residing in “the cloud”, and the apps and services that bring them together. I believe they’re truly on to something.

The book likely won’t be available until sometime next year. However, one of the authors (they are Shel Israel and Robert Scoble) has put together a simple Slideshare presentation that gives some hints of the direction they’re heading in. Since the presentation is available, I thought I would share it to give you a taste of what they’re seeing and thinking. I am hopeful I’ll have a lot more to say about the subject as time goes on. Suffice it to say I’m very excited about their thoughts, including how they mesh with and supplement those I’ve had for several decades now.

Disclosure: At the request for assistance by the authors, I offered to proofread the manuscript for them and they agreed. Here is how Shel tweeted about it a couple of weeks ago.