A lot is happening in the tech world and will continue to happen for the next decade. It may come as a surprise to those outside the tech world that technological inventions were predicted as far back as the mid-1800s by none other than Jules Verne. 

Jules influenced science fiction into present-day reality with his extraordinary gift of envisioning a future well beyond his time. He believed in the power of the human brain to create things that were considered in his time to be preposterous and even heretic. Besides his most famous book “Around the World in Eighty Days” (do get a copy if you haven’t already), there was one concise yet astonishingly accurate piece he wrote that to this very day keeps me marveling at his literary abilities; “In the Year 2889” a short story written by Jules and published with the help of his son Michel. It speaks about the advancement of human life eight centuries from now. I daresay, some of the aspects he mentions about computers and cutting time in more than half are already happening. 

We see teleconference services and webinars like Skype ease communication in real time between different time zones. Landlines are being phased off for more convenient portable handsets that are themselves evolving into smartphones. Verne predicted wider roads and sky-scrapers, infrastructure that we already see today. 

And yet new inventions keep cropping up every single day, especially at night. Young tech geeks work into the late of the night trying to find that one big product that will be the world’s first love. Funny enough, society is changing just as rapidly. What people loved three years ago is being replaced with newer addictions. Myspace was the biggest thing, until Facebook showed up at it’s door, then Twitter, then Instagram, an app based platform and then, for the developing countries, Whatsapp became the King of Social Media. Whether it will supersede the dominance span of it’s parent company is yet to be determined. However, it is safe to say that the Whatsapp developers really invested time into their product to make sure it was the one that gave them and the world of communication the big break.

Everyone wants cheaper talk and texting time. It’s like email for the youth, except better. The only problem is its apparent addiction. One wonders whether time could be spent more constructively rather than burning minutes turned into hours texting away on your mobile. 

The interesting aspect about it all is the interrelation between the inventions that preceded the innovations. For without a smart phone, apps would not find their platform; without computers, smartphones would not have been birthed as handier devices to carry out the same tasks; without electricity, creating these electronic devices would never have happened. And let us not forget about the internet. One invention led to an innovation that sparked a one-billion-dollar idea in a tech enthusiast. 

And now for the billion-dollar question. If you ask me, the next big thing is definitely going to be slashing time in half to achieve twice as much. Speed. It’s what human beings want right now. Anyone creating anything that saves time drastically at a base price is in the right playing field. Yes, smartphone applications will survive well into five decades – most probably even evolve, but the ultimate winner will be the technology that gives human beings the power over time.

Every day people complain about the lack of time to complete a task, or start on a new one, the overwhelming pressure to get things done ON time. And the general remark is “If only I had more time”, “If only there were more hours in a day”. I am not sure whether the hours in a day can be increased, and I highly doubt that doing so would be a great idea. But I do know that getting more done efficiently and faster is becoming a reality. People want to be in control of time in order to do the things they love. Think about it. Think motion. Think Speed.