My personal choice of Ten Really Useful Bits of Technology that may change your life (or that of your cat) in 2008…
1. Personal mobile phone jammers – here now, works perfectly in the UK. Size of a packet of ciggies, and probably based on a Chinese interpretation of the Wavebubble.
2. Small lightweight £220 laptops – end of 2007 in the UK. Linux for now, a special Windows version may be on the horizon.
3. Windows Vista service pack 1 – currently in beta, out in early 2008, yours for a teeny-weeny 900mb download. Are Microsoft going to offer it as a torrent?
4. Electric bicycles – here now, at a price.
5. Desktop book ripper – available now, a proper book scanner that does print-to-PDF for £900. A worthy investment for scholars with specialist personal libraries that they want to make searchable. You can then read them on your new Kindle ebook reader; Amazon’s own ebook hardware.
6. Catcams – tiny webcams on cat collars, feeding live to the web – it’s here in prototype, although you can also buy one. ‘Let a thousand moggies roam’; possibly inventing a new photographic aesthetic along the way.
7. Clearspace – location-aware phone tracking shows where other people are not, and then plots a satnav path that helps your walk avoid as many mobile phone users as possible – maybe 2008? Let’s hope.
8. Inline British-dictionary spellchecking for IE7 – it’s here.
9. Electroluminescent yarn cycling jackets – in development.
10. Free city-wide wi-fi – somewhere over the rainbow…
