CAPE TOWN- 30 September 2015 - The geeks amongst us have been waiting for this moment for years. Quite simply the day when Virtual Reality becomes indistinguishable from “real” reality! As some would say, the only difference between Virtual Reality and Reality is the amount of data we experience.

The focus of the talk was on Virtual Worlds

Google's new online tool allows people to embody a cartoonish online avatar and have text-based conversations with other Internet users in virtual chat rooms.
By BRAD STONE

T-Mobile will soon launch its US$10 landline phone service across the U.S., the company planned to announce Wednesday.

The future is here and now. It is all around us, as pervasive as the oxygen we breathe, enabling those in the know with instant communication to the abundant resource of information and interconnection we call the Internet. The Internet is all around us, pervasive, intelligent and invisible, not confined to the narrow boundaries of a computer screen which is burned into our minds. The promises made in the early years of the Internet will finally reach fruition now that the Internet has become ubiquitous, having forever merged the physical and wireless Internet worlds.

For more than 100 years people had to be content with the practice of getting an arbitrary number for their telephone. The advent of cellular phones did not alter this practice, and telephone numbers proliferated. The mindset however shifted from linking a number with a physical location to a mindset of linking a number to a person. One key factor however stayed constant: It is the telephone company which ultimately decides which identifier should be used to link a person into the global telephony network. This is a mindset that belongs in the 20th century, and is about to undergo a dramatic change.

“Survival dictates that human beings develop and ethics and aesthetics that favour exploiting fully those resource that exist in abundance, and economizing on items that are in short supply”

- Taichi Sakaiya, Japanese Futurist

Nature is far more adapt at harnessing complexity than linear, predictive systems. Maybe we need to borrow a page or two from her book when the status quo is challenged and a new ecosystem winks.

PERSONAL TECHNOLOGY
By WALTER S. MOSSBERG
June 12, 2008;
The parade of iPhone lookalikes continues. Soon after Apple announced the first iPhone a year ago, factories in Asia, at the behest of U.S. phone carriers, were asked to respond to the sleek, touch-screen device. Some already have reached America; more are coming.

Previous generations of disrupters were singular giants that swept established players from the game board with a foul sweep. The Amazon giant disrupted bookstores, the Apple iTunes giant (and a few buddies) took down CD stores and the Gang of Four (Google / Apple / Microsoft / Facebook) have negated telecoms to be nothing more than dumb pipes. In these industries, the Great Disruption has already occurred; we are simply waiting for the aftermath to unfold.

Pieter Geldenhuys recently visited Technology and Innovation Exibitions and Workshops in Hong Kong and China