Tom Purves – Product Management, Fintech & AI

ATTENTION NEW VENUE: Canadian Corps Association Hall 201 Niagara Street Toronto

Introducing Lift@Home Toronto and DemoCamp 2019 [ticket link]

LIFT Conference is an international tech conference based out of Geneva, with events in Switzerland, France and Korea. For the first time this year, Toronto has been invited to participate as part of the Lift@Home. Lift is not your usual tech conference in that it tends to mash up web tech with arts with humanism and futurism. Cool stuff

To give this event a special Toronto flavor we’ve teamed up with the Toronto DemoCamp community. But, there’s a catch! We want to see demos only of things you can’t build today. We want to see demos from the near-medium future of 2019. Predict the future one decade out. This is DemoCamp 2019.

Our presenters have a fairly open ended but challenging design brief. We’ve tasked them with imagining a future state of the world, to make a bet on what might happen to the earth, technology, society in the next decade, and then present to you what will be the killer demo in the year 2019. So unlike normal demos, we don’t want to see working code. We want to see stuff that would be impossible or hopelessly impractical today, but could be the killer app in just a decade more.

Each presenter will have a hard limit 12 minutes to present their visionary design, and you the audience will have several minutes to question, to critique and discuss. (But what’s your revenue model?! and so forth…)

There will be a couple special guest presenters as well as 3-4 open slots. There will also be good prizes for the best demo in the open category.

If you, and/or your handpicked team of future-visionary design all-stars would like to sign up to be a presenter contact me for watch for further instructions (application form coming soon).

DATE: November 17th, 2009
TIME: 6:30pm, doors at 6:00pm
VENUE: Drake Hotel Canadian Corps Association
LINK: GET YOUR TICKET HERE to LIFT@Home Toronto

^{Lift@Home Toronto is being organized by: Francesca Birks, Mark Kuznicki, Michele Perras, Milena Vujanovic and Thomas Purves}

What might the Future hold? Inspiration for our presenters

UPDATE: Sign up here if you would like to present!

Resources
19x20x21.org 19 cities with 20 million people in the 21 century
gap minder Great for extrapolating demographic and economic trends, will the U.S. and English still dominate the web in 2019?
The paleofuture blog (guess what, in 2019 we still won’t have jetpacks)
Climate Change forecasts (google)
Demographics Trends (google)
Globalization Trends (google)

Technological Enabling factors
Ubiquitous connectivity – wireless broadband may be the dominant form of connectivity by 2019
Falling costs of telecom – The long-run cost of bits trends to zero
Moore’s law, It’s hard to underestimate the exponential nature of moore’s law. every 18 months silicon gets by a factor of 2 (choose any combination of) cheaper, faster, half the size, better battery life
A globalized internet – e.g. there are currently 7 new undersea cable projects heading for Africa. People around the world now get a full featured netbook for a few hundred dollars, a mobile phone for much less. They are only getting cheaper
Biotech, civil, chemical, materials, environmental & genetic engineering – What progress will be made, what will advances in these fields enable?

Disabling factors?
Environmental decay
The cost of energy
The cost of green energy
Global conflict
Pandemics
Death of Journalism
Economic stagnation
Religion, fundamentalism, homeopathy, or other anti-science superstitions

Context – What is possible in a decade?
How far we’ve come, Killer Products/demos of 1999:
– Napster launches
– The first candy-colored apple iBook is introduced (“the first laptop for ordinary people” says Apple)
– Blogger, livejournal launched (the seeds of web 2.0)
– Online banking starts to go mainstream
– MSN Messenger launches
– Internet explorer 5
– IEEE proposes new wireless standard called 802.11b aka “wifi”
– Intel Pentium III reaches 10 million transistors in a desktop CPU (fyi: in 2009 intel announces chips with 3 billion transistors)
– GM cancels the EV1 setting back electric car development for a decade
– George Bush announces he will run for nomination for the Republican Party