Where are the printers?

We all know what a pain-in-the-*** it is to do last minute searches for a printer before heading to the airport or for that matter the lack of access to printers whenever one needs it. I will never forget the time when the Delhi Airport Security refused to allow me inside the terminal because I did not have a hard-copy of my flight itinerary. Since the number of forgetful passengers like me are on the rise, some airlines in India, such as Jet Airways, generously offered help by providing duplicate ticket print-outs for INR 50. Whether they are charging too much for a trivial task of printing or to make up for the dying business of budget flights is a separate discussion. [Read more: Link]

What if there is a service available, with automated printer kiosks in locations such as, airports, train stations, business destinations, and/or malls, where you could connect to the printer through a website or an app, or even just insert your USB drive to get a print-out at a very reasonable price. Setting up such kiosks without any manual supervision will probably also lower the operations cost substantially (as long as the kiosk doesn't get stolen despite the CCTVs).  

An idea that I've dwelled upon a lot but present day situation has taken a new turn. The printer industry may not remain profitable in the near future. Here's hoping the paperless office that Bill Gates talked about in his '99 book "Business @ the Speed of Thought" becomes a reality soon.

Facebook and facial recognition

Happy Friday readers. As I sit back and enjoy my beer, I'm thinking about all the discussions I had with my friends and colleagues about Facebook's facial recognition technology over the last one week. For the uninitiated, on Dec 15, Facebook launched a feature called Tag Suggestions. It was meant to look at the pictures you upload to your account, scan all the pictures Facebook has in it's database, and use it's facial recognition technology to suggest who the people are in your uploads. Definitely makes the job of tagging people easier.

In case you haven't figured out so far, this technology can be misused. Let's take an example. A pedophile can take pictures of a child, upload the picture on Facebook, and in no time, he'll know all that he needs to know about this child--their likes, dislikes, where they study, who their friends are. On the other hand, there can be ways in which this technology can be very useful. Read this case of an American Marine, who found his long-lost brother using Facebook's technology.

Anyway, now that you are up-to-speed on what all the hue and cry around facial recognition technology is all about, let me get to the point I'm trying to make. Let's envision a world where this technology was used in the right way, and we were able to run scans on CCTVs to locate people. We could have a moving map of every person in the world (as long as they are close to some CCTV) in real time. We could reach a point where no one is ever lost or kidnapped. It's easy to locate criminals at any time. Imagine how many problems this could solve for the world. Of course, this means that the technology should be used only be the government, and in wrong hands, this could have disastrous results. But then, that's for Facebook at the governments around the world to decide.

For now, my recommendation is to use the follow the steps given on this link, and turn off Tag Suggestions in your Facebook account.

Technology To Lower The Cost Of Books

Being an tech enthusiast, I had been thinking about starting up a technology blog for some time now. While there are already a number of blogs on technology out there, I wanted some space to put up my ideas on how I feel technology can be used in a better way to improve lives. Anyway, here's my first attempt.

Two things that I enjoy doing the most are watching movies and reading books in that order. Of course, I am a man of varied interests, and I enjoy doing a lot more, but I'm going to focus on movies and books in this particular post.

I've seen technology changing the way movies have been watched and books have been read over the past decade or so. For movies, I moved from video cassettes, to CDs, to DVDs, to movies stored in Hard Disks that I can play on my PS3, to movies being rented over Netflix. The last part I haven't really experienced yet since Netflix hasn't launched its services in Singapore. I'm also not counting YouTube here since I haven't had a great movie watching experience yet on it.

On the other hand, for books, I have seen technology moving at a slower pace. I have personally moved away from buying paper books, and I do all my reading on my iPad. However, in many cases, I see that the cost of e-books is higher, and even the options I get on Kindle or iBooks (iBooks isn't even launched for Singapore) are not as expensive as I'd get in a brick and mortar store. There's a lot the e-book industry needs to work on to reach a level comparable to the movie industry.

Here's my perspective on what a book distribution company can think of working on. Just the way we have libraries of movies available through Netflix, where users can rent movies, I'd really like to see someone coming up with a library of e-books. e-Books can potentially be rented at 1/10th of the price, and the e-book is available on the device for a week or so. This way, royalty prices can be saved, and there can be a re-distribution model built out for e-books.

Anyway, those were my two cents on how the future may look like for the e-book industry. I shall come back next week with more ideas and more (possible) technology innovations.