Technology is changing the world at an ever increasing rate. The exponential jumps in processing power, mobile technologies, storage, and connection speeds are facilitating a whole new suite of possibilities. We are beginning to see the creation and realities of new connected experiences that allow us to capture and document our lives in countless ways. Our memories and experiences can be digitally chronicled and preserved perhaps forever. Where and how do we store our ever-expanding archive of personal history? How will we be able to find, share, or extract what we need, when we need it?
(Fun Fact: The volume of such data already being saved to the cloud is staggering: in Dropbox alone, one billion files are uploaded every 24 hours!)
Enter the era of the personal cloud. According to Gartner’s IT predictions for 2014, personal cloud will solidify the shift from devices to services. So it won’t matter which device captures information or images; you’re personal cloud will be the hub that centralizes everything. You’ll have almost unlimited potential in recording and archiving your life, with easier and faster access. While this notion of “lifestreaming” – i.e., creating a digital diary and archive of one’s life and activities – has been around for years, social media aggregators like Facebook have only begun to address the scope of what it can be.
And this is just the beginning. Imagine what can happen as the march of technology continues to move at an exponential rate – the not-to-distant future will make storage infinite and almost free! Combine this new world of infinite storage with the increased sophistication of wearable computers and the artificial intelligence (AI) space, and you’ll be streaming and storing your life in real time, with analytics that can give you amazing feedback and insights the instant you need them. That may sound like science fiction, but it’s getting closer to science reality as we see companies like Google, Apple, IBM, and others invest heavily in AI and wearable technologies.
Let’s take that a step further. In Rick Smolan’s book “The Human Face of Big Data,” he poses the question – What if you could connect a hard drive to your brain and record what you see and experience each day? That’s not so farfetched. Futurist Ray Kurzweil believes that, one day soon, we may be able to expand our biological brain’s limited capacity with a cloud-based brain-extension app that could potentially double what we’re able to understand, calculate, and envision – or more. That’s mind-blowing! And maybe, we’ll even see it in our lifetime.
The possibilities are limitless. And the cloud is going to facilitate these entirely new kinds of experiences and opportunities in the growing Internet of Everything world. How do you see your life in the cloud? What are you experiencing already? Let us know by joining the dialogue. #CiscoCloud
“the not-to-distant future will make storage infinite and almost free!”
Oh, jeez. How long have we been hearing that one? Remember when Bill Gates said that 640kb should be enough RAM for everyone? Yeah, that lasted. You have to remember that as our technology gets exponentially more advanced (thus driving down the cost of more established tech), our demands of technology also advance. The sheer amount of data used by text messages would stagger older phone networks. The amount of data consumed over 3G would cripple 1X networks. Its simple progress marching on, but don’t think that means storage will be ‘infinite’ (no such thing), or ‘almost free’.
Hi Nathan,
Thanks for your reply to my post. I guess the point is that storage continues to increase in capacity and at the same time the price per bit continues to drop at an ever increasing rate. As the march of technology pushes forward, things that weren’t possible last year may become a reality this year. The point of the blog is that we are reaching an era where technology (storage, network, AI, Mobility) may enable us to digitize and store our lives and to be accessed anywhere, anytime.