Yeah, I have been reading every blog I can to get a glimpse of the future.  Tech Crunch, Engadget, & even news aggregators are my friend in this journey to discover future trends and lifestyle changes caused by tech advancements.   I’ve saw Yahoo and Microsoft making moves as Google shadows Apple with a team of tech guru’s.  Yahoo is interested in Geo-Tagging or knowing where users are located by GPS.  Sounds normal until you mix the fact that advertising runs most the web and social networking has an undeniable force in future technologies.  With this said, your friends have the ability to track you if you want or you can walk into the local Wal-mart and instantly know what’s on sale.  Or even walk into a restaurant and your cell phone recieves a message about the poor rating of that shop.  This leads us to Microsoft (their best friend since short merger contract developed).  Microsoft has been exploring a “bar code-like” software program that links your cell phone camera to recognize Microsofts custom bar code.  The code is a 2d, weird looking image, and when scanned, it pulls details about the code.

microsoft-tag

So now imagine a cereal box that has this code above the original UPC.  You scan it with your phone and the nutritional facts are displayed on your iPhone.  A current program is educational related, whereas students can tag things on an adventure of learning with help of sponsored schools.  This tagging may be interesting in the future, if everyone embraces the MS code.

See the Tags within the Advert?

Bill Gates has also been eyeing Google Map functions such as StreetView, but they allow search of an object within the 360 images of a specific location.  This allows a person to get information about the location, building, business, and more, just from clicking on it within the “Street View” map.  With all these features, we are looking at the Matrix movie even more closer as it mirrors some future trends.  If every item has data attached to it, then knowledge of items will be much more availabe, businesses will have to try harder to satisfy consumers, and could lead to many more devices or software to encourage this growth.

We have a large part of society that loves learning new info and others who love the visual side of things.  This drives video game makers to push the boundaries and web companies to eye every device that displays data.  Google has played in every arena and becoming successful in establishing a new browser (chrome), a new smartphone with Apps Technology, and social networking tool (Google Wave) …plus many more that’s just sitting in their vault waiting to compete.  Apple is a solid company, but faces it’s toughest challenges yet.  They picked on Microsoft when they were doing bad, now have a swarm of people trying to off the giant.  Verizon vs ATT is not any help, Google is mad they reject a great App, and Microsoft is on every playing field it created.

Watch out Apple!  I read an article of Steve Jobs getting upset, even calling Adobe, lazy.  This is the future, the battle of the tech/info giants as well as the devices/connections that support them.  We’ll see how long it is before we live in a Google Matrix, tagging every item we know to receive instant search results for product description, support, or rating.  Have fun!

******* VIEW MICROSOFT TAG :  Video & ways to create your own!