Today English. Tomorrow Chinese
R&D and the Future
by Greg Welsh
It’s
time for predictions, resolutions, and unashamed borrowing,
with attribution, from leading sources of information about
new developments. By the time technology news hits the big
time it’s already been hanging about, sometimes for
years, in the research labs and in write-ups in publications
such as MIT’s Technology Review or Scientific American.
And even then, if you were inclined to focus on smaller, niche-oriented
newsletters, you could obtain the news about the “next
big thing” even sooner – an open invitation to
make investments that might push your risk indicator right
off the scale, but that also might make you a very wealthy
investor.
Despite
the dot-com flameout, there will always be opportunity for
savvy investors who do their homework. So whether you’re
investing in core technologies with the profits your small
business has brought you, or you’re plowing your profits
back into your business and looking for the next innovations
that will bring you competitive advantage, it’s a good
idea to keep an eye on the future; thinking beyond the next
few months and the annual audit.
So what
new stuff is on the horizon? Whenever we look at all the neat
developments, before getting too excited it’s useful
to remember that the late Rob Kling cautioned against “technological
utopianism,” an underlying belief that technology could
solve “the problem,” whatever that problem might
be. All too often, those who write about new technologies
have a bias toward the technology that may color their judgment;
in some cases, the author(s) may have investments in companies
seeking to commercial their inventions. So be careful to screen
the source of your information. That said, what’s the
next new thing, and what predictions are being made this year?
Here are three to watch:
1. Speech-to-speech
translation.
Yes, even before text-to-text translation has entered the
mainstream. Today Yahoo or EBay will translate web pages into
different languages, but try to render this article into German
or French, and you’ll see how quickly the promise of
text translation breaks down. Submit a letter to your lover
to text translation and you may be looking for a new significant
other. But researchers are hard at work taking spoken English,
rendering it as text, translating it to Mandarin Chinese text,
and then transforming the Chinese text into computer-generated
speech. I confess I love it, not least because anyone hoping
to capitalize on the next generation of web commerce has to
consider the immense size of the Chinese market. According
to the MIT article, researchers at IBM who have built the
first prototype chose English and Mandarin because so many
people speak each language, and because of the uniqueness
of the underlying linguistic problems.
2. Spamkillers.
Look for a mathematical algorithm to solve your email spam
problem. Never mind US legislative attempts to outlaw spam
and make “poster-boys” of spammers – the
internet is too global for parochial domestic attempts to
round up a posse and hunt the spammers down. Don’t look
for an effective approach through the United Nations or world
trade agreements either. Hence the elegance of mathematical
approaches such as the one thought up by Cynthia Dwork, now
under development at Microsoft Research center. When each
email has to be certified by the sending computer (which involves
solving a particular mathematical problem and sending the
results along with the message) before the receiving computer
will accept it, spammers will incur such a heavy processing
load that their ability to deliver countless messages will
be curtailed – thank you very much. Let’s hope
this one works, and that Cynthia, after ten years of work
on the problem, becomes an overnight success.
3. Here’s
my sole prediction.
Hold onto it for ten years and see if I was onto something.
Microsoft’s entrance into solving the spam problem,
welcome because so much of the email is hosted or transported
by Microsoft-based software, sends another signal for the
next bane of computing today: antivirus protection. Dominated
today by Network Associates/McAfee and Symantec/Norton, look
for software makers such as Microsoft to begin building antivirus
protection directly into their products. End of the line for
antivirus vendors? No, but unless they own underlying intellectual
property that they can license to Microsoft and others, their
market share will dwindle and they may go under. Those who
can license the fruits of their research and software patents
will survive on a reduced diet of licensing fees. Good news
for individuals and small businesses who do not buy premium
support packages from the antivirus vendors – and who
are thereby consigned to faceless, nameless, email support
and canned responses.
I encourage
you to contact me with your questions and suggestions for
future columns, and welcome the opportunity to help you build
your business through your interest in the Small Business
Advisor. You may contact me via email at greg@gregwelsh.net.
