I watched this brilliant speech some time back, by Matt Ridley on TED.com titled “When ideas have sex” (embedded above). What amazing insight into the progress of the human species. During his talk, around the 8:21 mark, he says “we’re all working for each other”. That sentence stuck in my mind and I’ve been pondering over it for a few weeks now. This one sentence, has the ability to change your entire perspective once you grasp the enormity of this simple thought.

Matt quotes Leonard E. Read, an economist from the 1950s, wrote his famous essay “I, Pencil: My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Read” in 1958. The essay focuses on the fact that no one person in the world knows how to make a seemingly simple object, a pencil, from beginning to end. In reality, millions of people have a hand in the making of that pencil, many without even knowing it. From the people who mine the graphite, to the lumberjacks who cut the trees for wood, to the people who make the rubber for the eraser, everyone contributes to the process.

Once you think about this deeply and realize that everything you do is a contribution to the human race and the world at large, there is no greater motivator to strive for excellence, no matter how small the job at hand. It is difficult to work at all times with a global mindset, but look around you and observe how many people are working for you – the millions of people who had a hand in building the computer on which you’re reading this article, the policeman directing traffic so that you can get to work, the waiter at the restaurant you ate at last week, the author of the book you are reading – everyone is working for you. You owe them excellent work in return. You owe it to me. And I owe it to you.

P.S. – Thanks to Fuzzimo for their excellent work on the pencil graphic which I used in this post.

Another common technology we take for granted these days, the ATM, was inspired by a chocolate dispenser. John Shepherd-Barron, credited as the inventor of the ATM, was frustrated about not being able to have access to his money, after he reached the bank a minute late on a saturday in 1965. As he lay in his bath that night, the idea of the chocolate dispenser hit him. He just had to replace the chocolate with cash. In 1967 the first of ATMs was installed at a Barclays bank branch in North London.

Breakthrough ideas and products rarely if at all, come from the same industry. Revolutionary ideas come from metaphors. Metaphors from nature like the burrs that inspired Velcro or metaphors from other industries like chocolate dispenser inspired ATMs. The best way for entrepreneurs and inventors to create the next velcro or ATM is to maintain awareness and observe other industries to see how they have solved their problems. TED.com is one of the most amazing resources to do so. TED is a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. Originally a conference bringing together people in Technology, Entertainment, and Design (TED), it has now expanded to include speakers from all industries. These speakers are inventors, thinkers, and thought leaders, from various industries and walks of life, sharing their experiences, visions, discoveries, and inventions with the world. TED.com features a new talk every week and all the talks are viewable online for free. So go to TED.com and soak up some inspiration. Take the help of all these amazing thinkers to look at things with a different perspective.

Nature is also a great source of inspiration. Nature has solutions for some of the most mind-boggling problems. One need look no further than the complex processes involved in cross pollination by bees. The answers and the metaphors are all around us. All that is needed is awareness. To Think Outside the Box, you have to Look Outside the Box.

The most interesting aspects of this system are:

• The robots will have their own network of corridors underneath the hospital.
• The staff will have handheld PDAs to summon the robots.
• The robots will have dedicated service lifts by which they will come up, perform their tasks and go back.
• The robots will follow pre-programmed routes using a series of laser beams that will guide them.
• Computers on the robots along with sensors will enable the robots to open doors as well as stop if anything or anyone is in their way.
• Infections can be controlled by robots doing either clean jobs or dirty jobs. Some robots will be dedicated to dirty tasks such as clearing dirty linen and clinical waste and some will be dedicated to clean tasks such as bring meals. They will even have separate lifts to prevent them crossing paths.
• The pharmacy will be automated, with robots dispensing, labelling and packaging drugs.

Humans, don’t worry. Your jobs will not be replaced by robots. Hospital managers say that this will allow human workers to spend more time with patients and at the very least humans will be needed to be on standby incase robots go down.

Questions that popped up in my mind – I hope they have been tested really well. Are they prone to viruses? What security measures have been put in place to prevent software sabotage?

Problems will arise. No software is bug-free. But this is definitely the future. We just have to respond efficiently and learn from our mistakes (or the robot’s mistakes) quickly.

This, is in an age where the browser is the focal point of internet consumption. See the video below.

The current generation is going to grow up using mobile devices primarily. Already, in many developing countries, more people access the internet through phones than computers. How do mobile devices change things?

Apple gets credit for getting this juggernaut rolling with their iPhone coupled with the App Store. Other mobile providers have quickly followed suit – Google has their Android Market, Palm has their Application Store Nokia has their Ovi Store, Blackberry has their App World, Samsung has their Samsung Apps and mobile phone operators are not to be left out, joining forces to form the Wholesale Applications Community – a joint app store between 24 mobile operators worldwide. However, another important factor is the proliferation of APIs, that enable developers to create apps that mix and match various services to create unique applications. APIs enable you to experience the internet through an app instead of the browser. The best example is Twitter. Twitter is consumed more through third party apps built on top of Twitter’s APIs, than through their own website – the majority being mobile apps.

So what’s wrong with the web? Well, it’s the experience. The web standards bodies are slow in standardising new advancements. And then there is the issue of browsers adopting and implementing these new standards, not to mention waiting for users to upgrade their browsers. Just ask @joehewitt who tweeted on April 29th – “I want desperately to be a web developer again, but if I have to wait until 2020 for browsers to do what Cocoa can do in 2010, I won’t wait.“. Some browsers like Safari and Chrome (webkit based) and Mozilla’s Firefox have gone ahead with their own implementations of these advances but Internet Explorer with the majority of browser market share has lagged behind. So there is fragmentation, and developers cannot guarantee their users the same experience on all browsers. Native apps provide capabilities far beyond that of browsers which results in rich experiences that all users of that platform can enjoy. Of course that provides a challenge more daunting for developers – developing for different platforms, programming in different languages, etc.

Another important factor is branding. With apps, services get to reinforce their brand. Why do Read Write Web, Mashable, & Engadget tout their iPhone apps? What’s wrong with the web some ask. After all, they are blog networks, and all they should need is a mobile version of their sites. What advantage to native apps give them? Its all about branding! When you want to read what Engadget has to say, you click on their icon to launch their app. They have just reinforced their brand. Its easier than launching the browser and typing their web address to access their content. What happens when you click on an external link in an article? A webview opens, showing you the external link. When you finish reading, the most obvious thing to do is to click the Back button on top which keeps you in their app. They have just reinforced their brand. This is also the motivation behind iAds. The ads don’t take you away from the app you’re using, infact the ads are more like an app within an app. You interact with it and then get back to the app you’re using. On the browser, publishers don’t have that comfort. If you click on an external link in their article, there is no guarantee you’re going to find your way back to them. Apps extend your brand and gives you more control over the experience you create for your users and in turn get more engagement from them. Read this article from TechCrunch about how Yelp is seeing significantly greater usage through it’s iPhone app than through it’s website

Want more evidence? Apple has sold 2 million iPads in less than 60 days, with over 5000 iPad specific apps being approved for the app store. This is apart from the more than 200,000 apps for the iPhone and iPod touch. But the most telling indication that we are moving towards an app centric web was when Google revealed the Chrome Web Store at Google I/O 2010. A store for web apps. Sound weird? It is. For the world we live in at present. But come the end of this year, when Google finally reveals it’s Chrome OS, it will all make sense. The browser is going to be pushed to the background and apps will get the spotlight. And, I think (pure speculation on my part), there will be a way for web apps to access the hardware capabilities that these Chrome OS devices provide in order to make them feel like native apps.

Google and Apple have been huge supporters of HTML5 and both have made great strides in providing these capabilities within their browsers. Apple has just released an HTML5 showcase to showcase the capabilties of HTML5 with examples that you can use in building your own web apps. They work on Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome browsers, but not on any other browser. That leaves the majority of desktop internet users without the capability to enjoy them. On the mobile front, things look better, with the most popular mobile browsers being webkit based. However, I still think that native apps will outperform web apps. The difference in the experience is obvious on the iPhone. Web apps still lack features such as inertial scrolling and once you’ve used it on a native app its hard to enjoy apps that don’t have it. They feel slow and kludgy. You can install web apps on the iPhone, but its slightly more complicated for the regular user. And if its not in the app store, its going to be difficult to find because the average user is going to go there to find apps.

So what now? Go develop your mobile app. Reinforce your brand. Break your head trying to figure out what devices your users are using and which platforms to build your app for. And just go do it. You should have started last year, but better late than never. If you need help, let us know. We are working on our app too

Need to thank a few people first. Web Designer Depot for their Primo Icons. We used some of the icons for the graphics on the site. @scobleizer through whom we learnt about wibiya. Wibiya provides the bar you see at the bottom of the page. They call it the Wibar and it allows websites to integrate different applications such as the facebook fan page, twitter and google buzz. The best part is your readers don’t have to leave your site. The applications work in their own little window that pops up. Another cool feature is their integration of twitter’s @anywhere. It allows you to hover over any twitter handle on the page and a small popup allows you to view the user’s profile on twitter, follow them right there and even view their latest tweet. Amazing. Try it out on @scobleizer – he’s our favourite tech blogger.

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