Most great scientists know many important problems.
    They have something between 10 and 20 important
    problems for which they are looking for an attack.
    And when they see a new idea come up, one hears them
    say "Well that bears on this problem." They drop all
    the other things and get after it.

    ...

    The great scientists, when an opportunity opens up,
    get after it and they pursue it. They drop all other
    things. They get rid of other things and they get
    after an idea because they had already thought the
    thing through. Their minds are prepared; they see
    the opportunity and they go after it. Now of course
    lots of times it doesn't work out, but you don't have
    to hit many of them to do some great science. It's
    kind of easy. One of the chief tricks is to live a
    long time!

SSDs have been a big speed improvement - have they enabled new developments?

- Email 2.0 (Wave was a good experiment but we need more)

- Online Dating (still broken)

- Online job search (could be improved a lot)

- Search 2.0: A Knowledge Engine that understands the question and finds you the answer.

An example is the readiness of markets. Many successful web 2.0 companies were re-implementations of old dot-com ideas, with the technology being the same (bar frameworks that minimized development time) but with a more ready user market and refined implementations.

For example: XDrive - Dropbox, Friendster, theGlobe.com etc. - Facebook, Yahoo bookmarks - delicious, boo.com - etsy, etc., webvan - amazon delivery, etc. etc.

Further, many of the technologies cited are old (GPS is almost 40 years old). It is economies of scale that resulting from market acceptance that make these technologies more viable. Most software products do not require bleeding edge technology, which is often a curse (ie. using HTML5 today when 80% of browsers do not support it).

If you think about what made YouTube, Facebook et al successful, it wasn't some magic new technology, it was the right implementation and market acceptance.

This bit has been done to death, but what is different today is:

* It is faster to develop apps because developer time is more efficient and scalable because of tools, but there is nothing in RoR, Django etc. that couldn't have been done 5 years ago with PHP (and I mean that in the end result, not how it is done).

* Broadband penetration (especially globally)

* Browser penetration (IE5 introduced xmlhttprequest in 98, but it took 7 years to reach a decent use base for Ajax apps to be viable)

If you went by the advice here and intoduced a bleeding-edge Ajax app that was bandwidth heave would have failed in 2000 (and they did, we would use xmlhttprequest for intranets only).

The risk with this advice is entrepreneurs betting on new over better and becoming complacent in believing that what they have as better and 'previously not possible' should win.

(edit: so I guess you could say 'build what had previously not gained market but would today because of tech penetration')

I would have put that as the right implementation at the right time

many implementations will fail simply because of being too much ahead of time

the "right time" imho is not only about market acceptance or market penetration it's also about "when people are ready to accept it".

Before google decided to use xmlhttprequest for gmail, nobody would want to use it because it was considered "IE only", but once google used it, it gave xmlhttprequest a certain credibility and then suddenly everyone started to use it and then the word "Ajax" was created.

In another context, take smartphone publishing their location in foursquare or whatever, it's not only because they have the technology to do it (GPS), it's also related to social acceptance, after people got used to display their personnal infos on facebook, myspace, etc. then it is just a little jump to accept to display their geolocation.

I do believe in "build what had previously not been possible" but it's not only because of technology or market penetration, there is also a big "social acceptance at the right time" parameter.

I wouldn't put all of these as some sort of future stack building blocks, but there were enough things there that made something possible, that wasn't possible before: easy video sharing.

1- broadband in the home 2- emergence of flash, so no codecs required 3- proliferation of digital cameras 4- cheap hosting 5- one click upload 6- ability to share embed

Do you advise this from the perspective of being (1) in US or (2) in Europe/Asia? It doesn't make sense either way, and people from other places might feel excluded anyway.

    > people from other places might feel excluded anyway.

: If 9/11 happened in 2010, how much different would it have been? It took forever to know what was going on as the channels of TV and Radio weren’t fast enough. The web wasn’t ubiquitous and the ability to publish as fast as today was not there

I was watching it on TV and hanging around on the Ars Technica forum, but I can't really imagine my life would have been much different if I hadn't heard about it for a month.

Similarly, location based services - there seems a huge limit to what kinds of software could be much improved by being location aware.

Is this me being unimaginative or are you just picking interesting sounding things and saying they must be futurestack components because they exist?

* The tragedy would have been the same. By no means (and i don't think you are implying that I am either) saying tech today would have prevented it. * The zero delay of information flow would have made things a lot less hectic for everyone. At the time the towers fell there was a massive panic of finding where everyone was and if they were okay. I could imagine a popular hashtag emerging such as: #imokay . It wasn't possible to broadcast to all of your friends in a matter of seconds if you were okay in 2001.

*I think we've scratched the surface of how locational context can improve most things. If we can organize and provide context to information in the real world, the same way we have to the digital world, that will be big.

Were this to happen in 2010, you'd see the exact same results. It might be a bit better, because more people would be using VOIP and the land-based Internet didn't go down, but that wouldn't have solved the issue.

I think you're vastly overestimating the true popularity of twitter. If I where to tweet #imokay very few would see it, and those who did would have no idea how to contact my family to let them know that I was in fact OK. If I told many of my friends to "tweet the hashtag #imokay" they'd just look at me and only be vaguely aware of what I was talking about. Even in 2010 the best and quickest way for most people to let people know that they are OK is to make a phone call.

I checked cnn and bbc news for information (both of which went down several times that day I might add)

But I really doubt twitter would stay up if a 9/11-scale event happened today. Even facebook I'm not sure about. If the CNN site couldn't handle the traffic I can only imagine what that spike looked like.

"It wasn't possible to broadcast to all of your friends in a matter of seconds if you were okay in 2001."

well, there was - cell phones and SMS. Those networks went down too (source: http://www.continuitycentral.com/feature0153.htm )

If I had wanted to let someone know I was okay, I probably would have tried SMS, found it didn't work, and then made a note of letting some blabbermouth know once I found a landline or netcafé. 'course, I didn't live in the US, so this is pretty hypothetical.

The point is, I got news (and could discuss with friends) faster back then than I probably would today.

This reads like a list of stuff that has been possible for a lot longer than 12-18 months:

  Direct Access To Customers
  Anything as a Service
  Always Connected
  Zero Barrier Distribution
  Social Context
  Assume The Device Is Portable
  Location Aware...

How do you build the previously impossible without knowing the real extent to what is possible, or not possible? It's one thing to see trends, but quite another to take in depth domain specific knowledge across multiple interconnected topics and form a picture out of them. I can sit here and talk about trends in a lot of industries, but questions like sustainability, future growth require that picture. You need to get it.

It takes a lot of time to do that and there really is no way to escape it. (It's pretty awesome if you fail though, at least you learn something out of it)

However, what happens if you're in a crunch and you're trying to enter an unknown field? You can't assimilate information at a reasonably fast pace, and what you do learn will have a greater probability attached to being inaccurate/flawed. Importantly, you won't have the complete means to detect it.

I am asking this because pretty often I find that most of the overlooked problems lie in the intersections of things, and I've realized that it's really important to know how to bridge that gap before jumping in.

This shifts the problem from the difficult (predict the future) to the straightforward (applying building blocks). It's not an automatic business plan or a bullet-proof vest, but the unwritten assumption is that by looking for the opportunities in the changing tide, anything you create will already have a first-mover advantage by default.

P.S. Great post.

kthxbye

Standard of living, sure. Quality of life... not so much.

I would curious to see more insight into the history of SMS, technology behind it,etc. Wikipedia does an okay job. Correct me if I'm wrong, but SMS does not use the data network? I have been able to send sms messages with no data service before.

I would argue they still are–especially on the mobile web. I was talking about this with a co-worker ... unless you want to give Apple 30% of an in-app purchase, it seems there's no easy way to sell an item or subscription on your phone. People don't want to enter their billing information–especially on a 3" screen.

Until we have some sort of secure/universal/mobile "ONE-CLICK" purchase solution that doesn't include usurious rates, microtransactions will continue to be a pain.

Facebook and Amazon are the only ones I could see pulling it off–though maybe it shouldn't be a single corporation doing it.

https://micropayments.paypal-labs.com/

Note: this is the third time I've posted this link on HN in about 5 months, but each time people have thanked me for it so at risk of looking like a shill, here we go again...

Sort it out, Baptiste!

In landscape mode, put your thumb on the screen and hold it there. Then move it slightly to the left and stop. The page continued shifting despite the fact that I'm not dragging anymore and eventually it just shunts itself off the screen entirely.