NASHVILLE, TN - According to Moore??s Law, named after Intel??s cofounder Gordon Moore, computing power doubles every 18 months. At the NACStech closing general session, NACS President and CEO Hank Armour invoked this same law as he announced the doubling in power of NACStech in 2013:
"Next year, the power of NACStech will double as we combine the tech community??s two biggest events into one. NACStech and the annual PCATS Winter Meeting will be combined to deliver more education, more opportunities to connect and less time out of the office for many of you as we merge events. There is only one name that this show could possibly have: The Tech Show."
The Tech Show will occur in May 2013 in Dallas, Texas.
Next up was Michael Rogers, a "practical" futurist and futurist-in-residence for The New York Times, who dazzled the NACStech crowd with an entertaining and common-sense vision of change for the future of business and individuals by blending technology, economics, culture and human nature into his presentation.
He described his job of predicting the future like tacking a sailboat. "You set a point on the horizon," and then let events and data guide you back and forth and you navigate forward. These turns get you to a different place.
He described five key factors that are in motion ?" on the horizon ?" and are driving the virtualization of the world around us:
- Devices everywhere ?" with screens soon to be all around us
- Wireless everywhere ?""One day we??ll have to teach kids what offline means," he stated.
- Intelligence in the cloud
- Digital standards (the semantic web)
- Digital personalities (the social web)
These changes are coming at us at an impressive rate, Rogers stated. In the past, what has slowed tech down was social acceptance by communities and individuals, but now, with the profusion of social media and other devices connecting us all together, the speed at which we will take on technology has increased to an incredible degree. So while Moore??s Law postulates that computing power doubles every 18 months, Metcalfe??s Law states that the value of the network is proportional to the number of connected users in the system. Both of these laws combined means that change is coming at us faster than ever before.
But the goal is to keep your eyes on the horizon, Rogers said: "Don't look at my finger, instead look at where I am pointing."