The Column
Motto: My own personal Jarvis
I read a fascinating article this morning making predictions about Google’s upcoming developer conference: Google I/O. At this conference each year Google talks to its partners about what they can expect to see coming from Google for the coming year. Naturally, its an event I always pay close attention to. I would imagine 30 days from now, when I/O is officially over, I will be walking around lost in a sea of the eventual possibilities floating around in my head. Honestly, that is where I already am. You’ll see soon enough.
I scheduled a flight to see my girlfriend in Indiana in a month. She is the head hancho of music at a camp for populations of various disabilities. This is right up her alleyway and she’s awesome at what she does. They are lucky to have her… as am I.
It will be the first time I’ve flown by myself.
I’ll be living in Lawrence pretty soon. I think it will be good for me.
Well, the Top 5 is going to be huge, so I’ll end this with a picture of my EDC (thus completing my recent fascination with it/writing about it).
Top 5: Predictions for the direction of Google
- Google+ will continue to the top dog in terms of Google’s focus. The underlying social connection between all of Google’s products will continue to expand, bring in more real users, and integrate further with Android and the rest of Google existing and soon-to-exist lineup of services.
- Google Assistant will be announced formally at Google I/O, will be come out on select Android devices before the end of the year. It will be a direct competitor with Apple’s “Siri” and will likely surpass Siri (at least in her current state) on all fronts. The assistant will have better voice recognition, better text-to-speech (almost human-grade TTS), will natively be capable of more than Siri is currently, and will have a developer API allowing it to be integrated with any/all functions developers can choose. Google Assistant will be huge.
- There will be (in all of technology, I think) a grand unification of devices. Things that used to be separate entities will merge into the different functions of something better. This has already happened some… for example- phones, GPS units, PDAs, still cameras, video cameras, and MP3 players used to be four separate devices. Now I carry around all four of those things in one pocket. Google (and other firms) are already working on including (and, arguably have already included) Television, Computers, Home Audio, Video Game Consoles, and other such devises. Soon, I imagine all your media needs will be controllable from a single device.
- Google Glass - the smart eyewear will continue to be developed. It will probably (probably) not catch on from a mass-consumer standpoint, but will be seen in more specialized situations. Doctors, policemen, and many other people could benefit from the technology as I see it. If they are made available to the public, I would consider them.
- Life in the cloud… We are amidst a great paradigm shift. Google Drive, Google Play, and every other competitor (Apple has one, DropBox, the soon-to-be-rebranded Windows Live, and many others) have ushered in a new technological era. Gadgets used to be a local storage spot for all your pictures, music, documents, and videos. If you wanted to listen to a song on your computer, you had better have synced it with your iPod recently or you were S.O.L. Now, every song I own I have stored in Google’s Music Cloud. I can listen to any track in my collection without wasting precious local storage space. Essentially, the 58MB Google Music app on my phone gives me access to my >12GB of music. Every photo I have is with me at all times via Picasa and the Google+ photos feature. I read Fight Club via Google Play on my phone, tablet, and on the web. When I had time I’d read a few chapters on my phone. Later that night, when I opened up my tablet to read a few more, it would put me just where I had left off with my phone.
Quote:
“DROIIIID” - My Galaxy Nexus’s throwback notification tone