What is the quaternary of consumer technology?

Absrtact: What is Ben Thompson doing in the Quaternary of consumer technology? This article divides the Comsumer computing into three eras, namely: PC, Internet age and mobile discipline. We are currently in the mobile age has been walking for nearly 7 years, according to the PC Guix

What is Ben Thompson doing in the Quaternary of consumer technology? This article divides the Comsumer computing into three eras, namely: PC, Internet age and mobile discipline. We've been in mobile for almost 7 years now, and in terms of the age of PC and the Internet, it should be halfway, and Ben even feels like "we're probably going a little faster." So it may not be absurd to think about the Quaternary element that is not far from the future.

Today, on Medium, I saw an article in the context of the "age" written by Christian Hernandez, the VC of white Star Capital, who gave another, more like, quaternary element, and the thinking was interesting, Let's share his thoughts on the Quaternary:

The age of the four era will be the context, which was previously proposed by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel in a book. In this new era, user personal data (such as schedule, mailbox, location information) will be organically combined with public service data (such as traffic data, air quality), application level data (such as Uber taxi prices, walking data recorded by Fitbit), This drives the user to produce an action (such as driving me through a walk to a place instead of a taxi).

This would be a whole new era of sensors and pocket-level computable devices, recording a wide range of data through a sensor, and then extracting valuable information from the data by a computing device, and using machine learning algorithms to automatically return an optimal action drive to the user. In this era, the service of electronic devices will greatly improve our human biological computing power, or improve our behavior.

I agree with this view. If you stand on this node now, you will find that there are some development trends that can lay the groundwork for the future, and once these trends converge, it is easy to derive the result of the Quaternary element.

One of the biggest foreshadowing should be a variety of pocket-size supercomputers. It's a smart phone that represents the mobile age. In addition to mobile phones, there are a variety of wearable equipment, such as Watches (Apple Watch), glasses (Google Glass) and so on. The Internet of Things is another foreshadowing, smartphones and wearable devices provide users with personal data, and the Internet of Things provides the environment with interactive data.

These smart devices not only provide ubiquitous sensors around users, but also provide ubiquitous computing power-but most importantly, these computable devices bring a perfect ecosystem full of all kinds of applications, services and platforms, leaving no corners at all.

Throwing users into such an ecosystem creates a lot of data. And Christian Hernandez that the data is to put these basic equipment and services into the Quaternary element of glue. However, in essence, data is just bits and bytes, and when the cost of data storage is greatly reduced, the data can be used in conjunction with the algorithms and models of advanced analytical processing data, and this analysis and processing must be real-time. In fact, there is a problem, the system must know how to find the relevant data information, and the information into the feedback to the user's action-driven, which depends on the development of machine learning and AI. He paints a few scenes:

In the Quaternary, Starbuck's app works like this: it knows I go out 9:10 A.M. every day, and the coffee is American coffee. When I was walking 5 minutes to the company, sensors on my body--probably from mobile phones, smart watches, glasses, or other wearable devices--can know by location information that I'm close to the Café store, and the whole system knows where I'm going, with my payment information, and so on. These comprehensive data information finally stimulated the launch to drive the system, the system will ask me: "Order a cup of American coffee, now order?" --A few minutes later I had a hot cup of American coffee and I had paid for it. In the Quaternary, Jawbone This app will not only make it easy to record how many steps I've walked, but also to know my personal health information through other computing devices. It'll repeat when I finish my third cup of coffee every 10:20 A.M.. and comparing this value to other healthy users, I concluded that I was in an unhealthy state--and suggested that I stop consuming the third cup of coffee in the form of a reminder.

These two examples are all based on the integrated operation of a complete system. Here, all kinds of data should be combined with each other, all kinds of computing equipment should be organically coordinated, and the system should realize efficient integrated scheduling. One recent example from us may be Google Now. Behind Google Now, there is actually an entire Google system supporting it. Google actually has a lot of information about us: it knows what my job is, because it knows what I'm doing at 9 O ' 7 o'clock every morning, and it knows where my home is because it knows where I am every night. Because of the use of Google Apps, it also knows what my next meeting is.

At present, the age of the era of the requirements of the various subdivision technology, equipment and services are evolving. When each of these "parts" is ready, the problem is how to get everyone to use the same set of standards to develop collaborative systems. Although the road is still long, this long road also means new opportunities everywhere.