5 technologies that will change your world

Filed in archive Technology on June 11, 2004

You know when it's five it's Fast Company - 10 technologies would have come from Technology Review. But you don't have to fear you have missed something big that will change your world. The fifth is actually interesting:

"The glass door of the dressing room at Prada's Epicenter store in SoHo slides shut.

I hang a $450 gray patterned shirt on a rack inside, and suddenly, a color flat-screen display on the wall lights up. The dressing room has "recognized" the item I've brought in, then suggests other sizes and materials that it comes in and even shows a picture of a much-better-looking-than-me model wearing the shirt in a Prada fashion show.

Attached to the shirt, along with the stratospheric price tag, is a piece of clear plastic the size of a business card. Embedded in the plastic is a coil of bronze microchip circuitry, which contains information about the shirt and conveys it to a reader built into the dressing room. This is a smart tag (or RFID tag, for radio-frequency identification), made by Texas Instruments and sold for about $3. It can be made much smaller -- about the size of a fleck in a snow globe -- and for as little as 10 cents."

This is pretty much the vision shown in "Minority Report". I feel cheap RFIDs, ubiquitous broadband and flat-screens will shape the world in industrialized countries in the next 15 years much more than expected now. All these new technologies are about to break trough and combined they will make you see the world differently...

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