How Singapore Could Become the Most Important City in the Emerging World. I am standing in a living-room-of-the-future.
You can navigate the TV using hand movements, instantly swishing and touching to get subtitles to any international programming. Yes, a la Minority Report – but from across the room. Doesn’t every good living-room-of-the-future have a nod to Minority Report? (cc: Qwiki) Meanwhile, on the patio-of-the-future, just off the living-room-of-the-future, a hologram of a lady tells me that the glass-sided windows of this loft are coated with a self-cleaning glass.
This isn’t Tomorrowland. Elsewhere on the FUTUROPOLIS (sorry, it’s almost impossible to type that word without caps) demo floor, we see advertising that can detect if you are male or female and serve ads accordingly. To be fair to Futuropolis there are some potentially commercial– and life altering– applications like the hospital linens that detect when someone has been lying in the same spot too long and send a flashing BED SORE ALERT! New Indonesia Law Will Leave Tech Industry In Ruins. It wouldn’t be Indonesia without another new bizarre and surprising law from the government drawing anger from those that may be affected.
In an attempt to consolidate all the technology oriented laws, the government is drafting a convergence law (Rancangan Undang Undang Konvergensi Telematika in Bahasa Indonesia) that will unify laws governing technology businesses, covering all aspects of ‘telematics’. What is this thing called ‘telematics’, you ask. The draft defines telematics as the combination of technology and the value chain of the provision of telecommunication services, information technology, internet protocol based broadcasting, and content. It also defines telematics applications as any kind of application which uses the internet to transmit voice, images, data, content based services, e-commerce, as well as other services provided through applications.
So, pretty broad. This follows the massive explosion of companies in Indonesia’s technology and internet sector. Social Media's Southeast Asia Growing Faster Than U.S. In days of yore when it was believed the Earth was the center of the Universe, it was a harsh reality when we learned we were only one of many planets that circled the sun.
Today, the same could be said for the U.S. and Americans' belief that we generate more interaction on social media channels than the rest of the world. Fact is, while the U.S. is one of the world's top Twitter nations garnering 25 percent of the world's tweets, it falls significantly below Asia as a region. According to a recent Semiocast study, users in Asia, mainly located in Japan, Indonesia and South Korea account for 37 percent of all tweets out of 2.9 million messages tracked.
And while Asia is showing growth from March to June in 2010, North America as an aggregate is declining. The figures broken down by regions are: Asia 37% up from 31.5% three months ago, North America 31% down from 36%, South America stable at 15%, Europe 14% down from 15%, Africa 1.5% up from 1%, Oceania stable at 1.5%.