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It may not be too long before you will be powering your home using electricity generated by ocean waves.

AquaBuOY 3.0 is a product of Finavera Renewables (Stock Ticker FNVRF.PK), a small Canadian company which started in 2005.  It is a floating buoy structure, about 40 tons in weight and 75 feet long. Once placed in the ocean, water collects inside the buoy and is pressurized. The pressurized water is passed through a turbine and the electricity generated is sent to shore through a standard underwater cable.

Finavera CEO Jason Bak is a member of the Clinton Global Initiative, the former US president’s coalition of world and business leaders. As part of the initiative, Finavera Renewables has committed to developing a 20MW wave energy project in South Africa.

In December 2007, California’s Pacific Gas & Electricty Company signed North America’s first wave energy power purchase agreement with Finavera. Through this, they will receive close to 4000 MWh of clean, renewable electricity.

The World Energy Council recently released estimates showing how ocean energy could supply twice as much electricity that the world now consumes. Basically, a combination of Hydro, Nuclear, Natural Gas, Oil, Coal, and Renewables can produce 17,500 Terawatts, whereas Wave power has the potential to produce twice that amount, almost 35,000 Terawatts.

 Watch this Video to see how AquaBuOY works!

Tomorrow’s technology here today? The video says it all.

If you’re curious as to what advantages this technology has, here’s a partial list from the inventors Jatech ,LLC, based in South California, USA.

• Access to occupant and/or their escape greatly enhanced in serious crash situations.
• Moving doors will stop and reverse if foreign object detected.
• Vehicle floor and belly pan form a box-like structure which greatly enhances body stiffness and strength.
• Cannot be ‘parked in’.
• Side mirrors remain in place when door is opened enabling continued observation of traffic from behind.
• No door ‘dings’.
• Less parking space required.
• 2, 3, 4, and 5-door applications possible for sedans, coupes, wagons, hatchbacks, convertibles, crossover vehicles, SUV’s, trucks, and vans, whether equipped with front, rear or all-wheel drive.
• Converted vehicles for the physically challenged.  

And here’s one of my own: No more finger jams!

Ian Pearson is Britain’s leading thinker on the future. In this article written by David Smith, Technology Correspondent at The Observer, he offers an amazing vision of how our lives could be like in the year 2050.  One of Ian’s predictions is that if you are rich enough by then, you will be able to download your mind onto a machine, “so when you die it’s not a major career problem”!

Click Here to read the full article.

Terreform, a non profit organization for philanthropic architecture, urban and ecologic design presents smart mobility vehicles for cities. The one pictured here is an “athlete” class car that uses articulated motion and linked dual control cockpits for a new kind of motion experience. 

That sounds and looks unbelievable, although thats what people probably said when the legendary Ford Model T was first assembled in 1908.

frog design, a strategic-creative consulting firm, shares a future design concept for personal health, bringing together traditional healing methods with cutting-edge technology, and is in two words - truly remarkable.

Click Here To Read About It

The “Singularity” is the technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence (read AI).  While watching some very interesting videos of Ray Kurzweil (guru of Singularity) giving a key note address at the Singularity Summit, separately I also came across this funny one that I thought was worth sharing.

Soon you will be able to have a cell phone conversation without saying a word.

A company called Ambient (www.theaudeo.com) has demonstrated the World’s First Live Voiceless Phone Call earlier this month at a Texas conference (see video). It takes signals from the brain and translates that into speech! And the best part - your secret thoughts are safe, just the ones you want to communicate wordlessly will be picked up by the “Audeo” neckband.

When you’re talking on a cell phone, other people don’t always need to hear you. With this technology, you have the option to speak and also well, not to speak! If you choose not to speak, and you’re wearing Audeo, you can carry on that conversation without saying a word.

By the end of 2008 the Audeo will be available for people with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease where nerve cells don’t function properly enough to allow a person to speak. The company’s mission is to improve the quality of life for people with disabilities through utilization of the mind and advanced communication. More power to them!

According to co-founder of Ambient, Michael Callahan, in the future when you’re walking down the street you will be able to do a Google search for the closest bus stop near you just by thinking about it - and get an accurate response in seconds. WOW!

Chances are you’re not a Transhumanist. Neither am I. But close to 5000 people from more than 100 countries are. They are members of WTA or the World Transhumanist Association, which advocates the ethical use of technology to expand human capabilities.

Reading through the list of FAQ’s on their web site www.transhumanism.org makes you say “WOW, this can’t be real!” For example, a posthuman is “a future being whose basic capabilities so radically exceed those of present humans as to be no longer unambiguously human by our current standards”. 

Most transhumanists believe nanotechnology will develop rapidly within the next 25 years, to an extent that we will be able to rearrange atoms and make coal into diamonds if we wanted to.  And maybe remove tumors from healthy tissue.

According to Moore’s Law, computing power doubles every two years as chip manufacturers figure out how to squeeze more components onto a chip. There will soon be a point in time when computers will compute as fast as our human brains do, at about 1014 instructions per second.  Add to this some software that uses a progressed version of computational neuroscience and creates a brain-computer interface, and the result is superintelligence.

The potential of the combination of nanotechnology and superintelligence is what transhumanists are all excited about, because then you will have the tools to make yourself mentally and physically far, far stronger than you are now, live disease free and not age if you did’nt want to. Whether it will happen or not, we don’t know. But if it does, there is a chance that by the year 2050, the WTA membership numbers will increase by say, a billion?

In the movie “Minority Report” the year is 2054 and you don’t have to buy train or bus tickets anymore because identification is done through eye scanning. If your eyes match what the system has on record for you, you’re in.

Guess what, we’re not so far away from that scenario! 

Fujitsu’s ‘PalmSecure’ reads your hand vein pattern and confirms whether you are in fact, you.  This way, if you were in a hurry to get to work, you can walk into your secure office door or log onto to your laptop in no time at all. The technology is quick, very accurate and already being used by governments, private and public sector enterprises.

I’ve been using the inbuilt fingerprint sensor to log on to my work laptop for over two years now. But its kind of annoying. When I move my finger across it at a particular angle and past a certain speed, or if my finger is slightly damp, it won’t work.

PalmSecure sounds like its the next level of convenience, and has a lot more applications. Either ways, I’m glad we’re moving away from having to remember any more passwords!

What’s exciting to think about is where this technology will be in 42 years i.e in the year 2050.  Who knows, maybe we won’t even need recognition anymore.

What will the future of education look like for our children? 

The US based KnowledgeWorks Foundation and the Institute for the Future have put together an online 2006 - 2016 “map” of the future of education. It is created by experts in various fields, and shows the forces that can affect future learning. The online map really has a “Wow” factor to it because it is so well made and looks really cool. And makes a lot of sense too.

The map is divided into six vertical areas or drivers of trends that intersect five horizontal areas of activities where major trends are revealed. In each box that this vertical and horizontal intersection creates is always an emerging trend, sometimes accompanied with a Hot Spot i.e. trends with a bigger impact or Dilemmas that require new strategic thinking.

An interesting example is the Dilemma created by the intersection of the “End of Cyberspace”  and “Educators and Learning”.  The map describes that as places and objects become increasingly embedded with digital information and linked through connective media into social networks, the result is the end of the distinction between cyberspace and real space. This creates a challenge for the integration of “Digital Natives” with “Digital Immigrants”. Digital Natives are youth who “like to parallel process and multi-task, like to receive information very fast, are fluent with the language of computers, video games and the internet, prefer graphics to text, like to random access and function best when networked. They thrive on instant gratification and frequent rewards”. Compare them to Digital Immigrants - adults, teachers and those youth without access to digital anything, and you’ve got yourself a Dilemma.

This discussion provoking and education strategy driving map is available at http://www.kwfdn.org/map/