In the end it is people that makes all the difference.

It is strange. I feel like I have heard the term "the development is going almost too fast" my entire life.

What happened was that people didn't manage to keep up to date with the changes that took place. There were more buttons to push, more potential hidden in the equipment, more information available, more options. From being passive receipients of information, people were simply forced to make conscious choices of what the wanted to look for.

It was probably most noticeable when the term "audience" became obsolete. All of a sudden we started talking about "users" instead. I guess there isn't any strange there is a huge generation gap between those over and under the mid-thirties.

But despite all this, I still feel everything is going too slowly. Back when 10 MB disks were the state of the art, I wated for 100 MB disks. When 100 MB disks were the hottest thing since Kylie Minogue sang "I should be so lucky", I waited for 1 TB disks. It took much longer than anticipated to get TFT screens commercialized and down to an acceptable price. And now I am waiting for large OLED screens, ePaper solutions you can create on your inkjet, 3D printers, mobile phones harvesting resourcers through cloud technology - the list goes on.

But these are pieces of a much bigger jigsaw puzzle. What shapes our future is not what kind of equipment that is availabe - it is *how* it is being used. The internet is very good example of this. Internet in itself is just a network using the TCP/IP protocol. But then some researches working at CERN thought it might be a good idea to create a hypertext markup language so it become possible to link documents to eachother. And suddenly something that later was christened to world wide web evolved. Very few people could have foreseen this development, but things did not stop there. Soon it became necessary with more advanced tags in the markup language, scripting languages slowly became a part of the user experience - and before you knew what happened, webbrowsers became one of the most important programs on your computer.

Fast forward and you will see that the same changes are continously taking place today. I do not think many people will dispute that Google may be one of the single most important and interesting players on the market today. Not because they are in a dominant market position on the net, but because they have somehow managed to harvest the best ideas from their employees and turn some of those into products that are freely available to other users. You may perhaps be somewhat surprised to hear what I believe are Googles most useful solutions. No, it is not Gmail. No, it is not really their spiders or search engine - even if it is probably the most important part of their businessplan. It are three things; their map solution, their positioning service, and their trend analysis tool.

There are so many things that will shape our future - nanotechnology, energydistribution, computer technology, transportationmethods. But one thing will stay the same; the need for people to communicate, to relate, to find eachother. And if you look at the world wide web, the mobilephone technology, positioning services and wireless network solutions - it is exactly this that is happening. People can get in touch with eachother.

In an ever changing and increasingly complex world, technology brings people together. Thanks to mobile phones with GPS modules, access to net-based services, and combining mashups based on maps from Google, Tom Tom etc., with friendlists and their position, twitter messages, SMS, MMS, video (and of course audio) we are suddenly available to all our friends - all the time. Then add trend analysis tools to the mix and you will learn where people usually gathers or what routes it normally are best to use. Combine this again with online payment, special offers based on userprofiles that can be downloaded from your mobilephone, specific bluetooth or wibree applications - we get more and more integrated in society.

Frankly, I do not really think anyone expected this to happen. The mantra ever since the industrial revolution had been that technology alienated people, made the society grow cold and made people indifferent to eachothers needs. You are still hearing about how awful things are going to be in the future - but people are not blaming it on technology anymore. Which is pretty interesting.

So how will we use technology and gadgets in the near future and how will it shape how we relate to eachother? Ah - that is the topic for my next blog. However, it is worth noting that in the end it is people that makes the real difference - not the technology.