Bigger than the Industrial Revolution!

To make the best out of the technological tools available today in our lives we need to adapt and change. I need to motivate you to adopt a lot of radical techniques in several areas of your life. It's going to take a lot of effort and time, so if you are not convinced and you are going to quit half way through, it's going to be a real waste. But once you've changed your methods it's going to pay back immensely. It's going to give you back you time with plenty of interests, it's going to save you money, perhaps make you earn more money, make your life safer, make you healthier, and perhaps happier.

Can you imagine doing your current job without e-mail, Google, or Wikipedia? You were able to do it 10 years ago. Today you are 10 times more productive. You productivity 10 years ago was nothing compared to what it is today. And now it's not a choice to go back. Everything is revolving so fast around us, that if we were to be so unproductive as in the ages without Google, it would be like going out to hunt for food instead of getting it at the supermarket. 

Well, in a year from now, you'll be 10 times as productive as today, and if technology keeps evolving at the current pace, I cannot start to imagine how it's going to be in 10 years. "It's going to be a wild ride", as John Cohn from IBM says in the video posted below. Watch it, it's short and has plenty of technical terms in there, but this guy know what he is talking about.

We are experiencing a transient. Technology is evolving too fast and the adaptation of society to this evolution is lagging behind. You can catch up today and profit early. Here are a few thing that will be part of the roller-coaster that I'll be talking about:


The age of paper is over - Get yourself a scanner, digitize all your documents and throw the paper away. It might not be obvious to you, but this can have the greatest impact on your productivity today. It will save you from a lot of headaches and you'll start loving it very quickly.


Get a smartphone - If you don't have one, when you are on-the-go, you are not living the digital life anymore. The Digital Life is not something you can turn on or off or run away from. The only time you are allowed to stay away from it is when you are asleep or at a beach in the Caribbean.


Store your stuff in the Cloud, not your hard disk - Don't loose your precious documents even if a meteorite strikes your city and be able to access them anywhere. Once you have this set up and running, you won't even notice that they are stored far away from you.


Do you still use a paper planner? - How is your paper planner going to tell you that you have an important appointment next week? The on-line planner is probably the most important online tool that you'll be using in the digital life era. It's not just a place to write down appointments, it's an intelligent system that can manage priorities, detect potential conflicts, proactively alert you of important upcoming events, arrange activities with other people, and more.


Are you using a GPS-based navigation system in your car? - Oh, perhaps you know your way well, but do you know the fastest way today at 6 pm? The GPS alone will only tell you where you are. A GPS receiver connected to the internet is a scary toy. Your phone most probably has a built-in one already.


Your TV is going to get a lot smarter - Forget about DVD or BLU-RAY. Media is on the Internet or your PC (not for long though). Your TV connects directly to the Internet and you can watch whatever you want, any time you want, including your own family recordings.


Email attachments are obsolete - Start keeping your documents in the cloud and sharing them. The age of collaboration has arrived!


Get ready for the Internet of Things - Oh yes, even your microwave oven will be connected to the internet, so it will know when you are almost out of pizza and will order more for you. Your smart kitchen will be taking care of your healthy diet.


Become a high-performance digital student - Just one more application of the digital life. Combined free, monster-size, searchable, interactive, hyperlinked encyclopedias, with graphical and interactive demonstrations, specialized software, online workgroup software, and file sharing change the whole student panorama.


Security, privacy and Identity - Doing things on your computer and the Internet is safer than face-to-face or on paper. Fact, not opinion.


Social Networks - People that socialize over the phone, 15%? People that go to clubs, 25%? People going to community activities, 25%? Those inviting friends over on Friday nights, 35%? What about people on Facebook? You might not like it, but it's the way it's done today.


Are you ready for this?

Welcome to LiveDigitally

Many of us have seen tremendous technological changes that have had great impact on our lives. Even for the tech-savvy and early technology adopters, like myself. I'm not talking about the invention of television, the microwave oven, or even cell phones. That's old stuff. Even the invention of the Internet is old stuff now. I'm talking about what's happened after the Internet 2.0 revolution, about 5 years ago. I'm not going to go into what Internet 2.0 is. You can read about that elsewhere. It's what has happened after that, which doesn't even have a name, that's so big. It's happened so fast that many don't even realize it's here. But it's here, believe me, and the change has been so big and radical that it's going to take a while until most of us catch up.


I went to the gym today and started on the treadmill. It had a large touchscreen display, USB, and iPod connectivity. I didn't have much time to explore all the functionality built into that machine then, so I just used the "speed up" and the "speed down" buttons to tailor my workout. During those 20 minutes, just by looking at the options on the main screen I realized that I could have designed my workout on the Internet, saved it on a pen drive, and loaded it into the machine. When my routine was complete, after I hit the STOP button, the treadmill asked if I wanted to record my exercise data into a pen drive, which of course I didn't because I don't usually carry my sweat-resistant pen drive with me.


What if I had done all these nerdy tech stuff? The machine and my pen drive would now know a lot about me. My exercise routine including speed and inclination second by second. Would also know at what time of the day I exercised, how much I weigh today and my heart rate at specific times during the exercise. From this data, it can trivially tell how much energy I dissipated, or said otherwise, how many calories I burned, and how fit and healthy I am after looking at my heart rate in response to exercise. This is just the beginning. What if the machine could compare the data from several workout sessions, and even to that of other people all around the world, and draw conclusion and recommendations after that. Too much imagination, you'd say. Well, I was keeping this for the end. It actually does.


This blog will treat these matters through articles and tutorials written mostly by myself. My objective is to give people an early understanding of the phenomenon, where it came from and where it's going. Through tutorials, I'm aiming to give you some insight on how to make the best out of this new reality, in our personal life, our social lives, our profession, our studies, and more.


I'm an Electrical Engineer born in Chile in the late 1970's. Perhaps my first close contact with modern technology was the Atari 800XL computer I was given one birthday. I must have been about 10 years old then. I decided later to become an Engineer, which led me to work at a large multi-national research institution. I've quit my job now, and I'm a full-time Ph.D. student at the Georgia Institute of Technology, in Atlanta. Since the Atari, I saw the birth of the cell phone, cable television, digital cameras, the Internet, cheap GPS navigation systems, flash storage (pen drives), WIFI, secure online commerce, instant messaging (chat), and several others. A lot of other technology has become very cheap too, so now we can all have personal computers, scanners, printers, internet-access cell phones, etc. I believe I've grown up at the exact right time, have had the interests and had the education, that have allowed me to see "the big picture" in this matter.


I hope you enjoy and find these essays useful.