12 crackpot tech ideas that might just work

Technologies that push the envelope of the plausible capture our curiosity – almost as quickly as the crackpots who dare to concoct them become targets of our derision.

Tinkering along the fringe of possibility, hoping to solve the impossible or apply another’s discovery to a real-world problem, these free thinkers navigate a razor-thin edge between crackpot and visionary. They transform our suspicion into admiration when their ideas are authenticated with technical advances that reshape how we view and interact with the world.

IT is no stranger to this spirit of experimentation. An industry in constant flux, IT is pushed forward by innovative ideas that yield advantage when applied to real-world scenarios. We take a level-headed look at 12 out-there technologies that have a history of raising eyebrows and suspicions. We assess the potential each has for transforming the future of the tech world.


1. Artificial intelligence

Few terms carry as much emotional and technical baggage as AI (artificial intelligence). And while science-fiction authors probe AI’s metaphysical boundaries, researchers are producing practical results. We may not have a robot for every task, but we do have cell phones that respond to our voice, data-mining tools that optimise vast industries, and thousands of other measurable ways AI-influenced computing enhances how the enterprise gets work done.

That said, AI itself remains elusive, and the measure of AI’s position on the enterprise crackpot scale depends wholly on where you set the goals. Restricted to applying templates and well-defined theorems to sets of data with precise definitions, computers are, after all, becoming very adept at using statistics to make educated guesses about the world. And though speech-recognition software, for example, may not hear the actual message, whatever that means, it does know that a certain pattern of sounds and frequencies almost always corresponds to a particular word.

Greg Hager, a professor of computer science researching machine vision at Johns Hopkins University, says: "For a long time, people thought that the way you would solve those problems was to understand how people would solve those things and then write a program that would do what people do."

That approach has yet to produce much success, but as Hager points out, less sophisticated, more statistical algorithms that take educated guesses are becoming increasingly accurate. Some of the best algorithms for recognising objects in images, for instance, look for salient features, waiting until enough key points are recognised. Such an algorithm could recognise a Ford sedan from multiple angles but wouldn’t be smart enough to use that experience to recognise a Chevrolet.

"It’s a paper-thin notion of intelligence," Hager says, but one that’s still useful in many basic cases. Expect to benefit from similar AI-inspired computing paradigms and technologies in the very near future.
Peter Wayner


2. E-books

Remember the paperless office? If so, you may recall a close cousin: the e-book, which promised access to entire libraries of documents in easily readable formats -- an obvious boon to the worker on the go. As did many ideas debuting midway through the dot-com boom, it failed spectacularly.

And yet a visit to Sony’s Connect eBooks suggests that rumours of the e-book’s demise have been exaggerated. For a cool US$350, you can pick up the Sony Reader and start collecting from more than 11,000 titles.

But what does a shelf’s worth of Michael Crichton in your pocket have to do with business? Not unlike the path to adoption taken by many devices permeating today’s mobile market, the e-book’s "proof of concept" phase will play out on the consumer stage. And it may just be copyright protection and distribution -- rather than any paper vs LCD debate -- that determines the technology’s long-term prospects.

"Another issue, besides the prohibitive cost and cumbersome nature of e-documents, concerns the vast portion of the contracts that were signed and agreed upon before e-books came onto the scene," says litigation lawyer Esther Lim. "That raises questions not just in terms of what rights the user has, but what rights the publisher has vis-a-vis the copyright holder."

If these issues aren’t resolved, the e-book market may fail to attract the kind of vendor investment necessary to overcome the technology’s lingering cost and usability concerns.

So, until e-books have their day in court, the jury remains out on their commercial viability.
Richard Gincel


3. Autonomic computing

A data centre with a mind of its own -- or more accurately, a brain stem of its own -- that would regulate the data centre equivalents of heart rate, body temperature and so on. That’s the wacky notion IBM proposed when it unveiled its autonomic computing initiative in 2001.

Of the initiative’s four pillars, which included self-configuration, self-optimisation, and self-protection, it was self-healing -- the idea that hardware or software could detect problems and fix itself -- that created the most buzz. The idea was that IBM would sprinkle autonomic-computing fairy dust on a host of products, which would then work together to reduce maintenance costs and optimise data centre utilisation without human intervention.

Ask IBM today, and it will hotly deny that autonomic computing is dead. Instead it will point to this product enhancement (DB2, WebSphere, Tivoli) or that standard (Web Services Distributed Management, IT Service Management). But look closely, and you’ll note that products such as IBM’s Log and Trace Analyzer have been grandfathered in. How autonomic is that?

The fact is that virtualisation has stolen much of the initiative’s value-prop thunder: resource optimisation and efficient virtual server management. True, that still involves humans. But would any enterprise really want a data centre with reptilian rule over itself?
Eric Knorr


4. Desktop web applications

When asked whether a full-featured desktop app can be delivered via the web, most people picture standard HTML forms, possibly with Java or JavaScript thrown in for aesthetics and minimal functionality, and laugh the idea off. But the full-scale apps being built for the browser using scripting languages and Adobe’s Flash and Shockwave development tools will soon prove them wrong.

Flash apps started out as rudimentary games with lacklustre input methods and a cartoon-like look and feel. More and more, however, they resemble native apps. Take Gliffy, for instance -- a very attractive, stable Flash app that drives like Microsoft Visio, providing full diagramming capabilities in the browser with nothing more than Flash 7 required on the client side.

Another worthwhile example is EyeOS, which looks like a Flash app but is built on PHP and JavaScript and runs off a standard Apache web server. The array of options and eye candy in EyeOS is staggering for such a new project, clearly pushing the envelope of what such apps can do.

These projects, and others popping up all over the net, represent the next step in web app delivery, one that will break free of the HTML form and into interfaces that resemble fat apps. Vendors such as Scalent are already writing their UIs in Flash -- and are reaping the benefits of a simpler deployment, arguably greater cross-platform support than Java, and a more seamless, attractive user experience to boot.

As the options diversify and improve, it’s a safe bet that web-based desktop apps are here to stay.
Paul Venezia


5. Semantic web

Originally designed for document distribution, the web has yet to realise its full potential for distributing data. XML has done its part. Yet every XML document requires an XML Schema -- and relating them isn’t easy. Until a viable means for surfacing and linking data is established and adopted, humans will remain the web’s core categorising agents.

Enter the semantic web, an effort spearheaded by Tim Berners-Lee in 1999 to extend the web to enable machines to take this mantle. At the outset, the idea of transforming the web into something machines can readily analyse seemed hopelessly academic. Yet with significant public data sets surfacing in semantic web form, the once crazy notion now stands to revolutionise how enterprise IT accesses and disseminates data via the web.

RDF (Resource Description Framework) -- the semantic web’s standard format for data interchange -- extends the URI linking structure of the web beyond naming the two ends of a link, allowing relationships among all manner of resources to be delineated. But the key to the semantic web -- and where most people’s eyes glaze over -- is its use of ontologies. If specialised communities can successfully create ontologies for classifying data within their domains of expertise, the semantic web can knit together these ontologies, which are written using RDF Schemas, SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organisation System), and OWL (Web Ontology Language), thereby facilitating machine-based discovery and distribution of data.

Buy-in is essential to the success of the semantic web. And if it continues to show promise, that buy-in seems likely.
Martin Heller


6. Solid-state drives

Solid-state storage devices -- both RAM-based and NAND (Not And) flash-based -- have held promise as worthwhile alternatives to conventional disk drives for some time, despite the healthy dose of scepticism they inspire. By no means new, their integration into IT will only happen when the technologies fulfil their potential and go mainstream.

Volatility and cost have been the Achilles’ heel of external RAM-based devices for the past decade. Most come equipped with standard DIMMs, batteries and possibly hard drives, all connected to a SCSI bus. And the more advanced models can run without power long enough to move data residing on the RAM to the internal disks, ensuring nothing is lost. Extremely expensive, the devices promise speed advantages that, until recently, were losing ground to faster SCSI and SAS drives. Recent advances, however, suggest RAM-based storage devices may pay off eventually.

As for flash-based solid-state devices, early problems -- such as slow write speeds and a finite number of writes per sector -- persist. Advances in flash technology, though, have reduced these negatives. NAND-based devices are now being introduced in sizes that make them feasible for use in high-end laptops and, presumably, servers. Samsung’s latest offerings include 32GB and 64GB SSD (solid-state disk) drives with IDE and SATA interfaces. At US$1800 for the 32GB version, they’re certainly not cheap, but as volume increases, pricing will come down. These drives aren’t nearly the speed demons their RAM-based counterparts are, but their read latency is significantly faster than that of standard hard drives.

The state of the solid-state art may not be ready for widespread enterprise adoption yet, but it’s certainly closer than sceptics think.
Paul Venezia