Technologies To Be

Every so often I have an idea for new technologies that have yet to be created or conceived. I usually forget about them right away, only to see them being sold by some big company a year or two later. Not all of them are revolutionary ideas. Actually, most of them are probably things that lots of people have though about, but no one has taken the time to create. Anyway, here are a few of my ideas...

1. An OpenSource NDMP library, complete with bindings to common scripting languages (Perl, Python, etc.), and client / server packages. The API should be simple to understand and program against, despite NDMP's underlying complexities. This would give other OSS software packages, such as Amanda, the ability to backup various different platforms using a standards based protocol. It would also eliminate the need to purchase outrageously priced client agents from the big-name backup software vendors. I personally think this would be an outstanding project for Google Summer of Code or even a graduate level course in software engineering.
   
   
2. The personal VoIP phone. Much like a cell phone (or possibly even as a feature on a cell phone), this phone has the ability to attach itself to Wifi or LAN networks, register itself with some sort of a public VoIP provider service, and send and receive calls free of charge. For whatever reason, despite the fact that people send email, IMs, and various other forms of digital communication free of charge each and every day, these same people think they have to pay by-the-minute for voice calls. It makes no sense.
   
   
3. A centralized global database for contact information. I know, I know, invasion of privacy, junk email, identity theft, spam, blah blah blah. Get over it people. If someone wants to track you down and/or send you something, they will find your contact information, so why not make this a useful feature. The idea is that someone keeps an online database of contact information for everyone, and companies such as banks, magazine publishers, and utility companies are required to actively monitor this single source for changes in your contact information. If your email address changes, they know it and automatically change it in their systems. If you move to another city, everything gets automatically re-routed. If you're going to be on vacation in France for two months and want all of your snail mail, email, and phone calls to be routed to a different location, you can simply log into a web site for this big database of contact information and enable this. I don't think people or businesses should be required to use the database, but it would benefit both to do so.

Anyway, that's all I have for now. In case you didn't read this, just wait a few years and I'm sure you'll know what it was all about.