Fairfax Tech Talk Column

It is not often that I see a member of the Gen Z cohort lost for words but I recently experienced this rare spectacle. A long-term client had made a purchase and handed over a cheque as payment. They left the store and my Gen Z staff member asked about the strange piece of paper the client had handed over. I pulled out the cheque and gave it to the staff member to inspect. They turned it over a few times in their hands and were none the wiser. I explained that a client simply wrote out an am ..

Over the holidays I have been introducing my kids to some classic TV shows, including Gilligan’s Island. I still haven’t worked out why five passengers took so many bags of luggage on a ‘three hour tour’ and surely Thurston Howell III, with a net wealth of over US$2 billion (according to the Forbes Fictional Rich List), would not take his wife on a cheap tour on a small boat with three strangers. He would have just bought a boat! As for the three others, I don’t ..

It is a familiar scene in our household. Early each morning our Maltese Poodle and Toy Poodle scratch at the front door to alert the humans in the house that they are ready to go outside. Very obligingly, a human slides out of bed and lets the two dogs out to play. With impeccably perfect timing, just as said human is back in bed and about to doze off again, the dogs decide that they have had enough of the outside world and alert their servants inside the house that they are now ready to ret ..

This will be the year that…how many times do we hear a prediction that finally, after a few false starts or stalled attempts, the BIG change is about to happen. It might be about the performance of an individual in sport or in relation to an election result. Technology has a history of making overly ambitious promises and then working hard to deliver. It was 1878 when Thomas Edison promised to light up a square mile of Manhattan “any day now.” Edison’s team did manag ..

As a technology futurist, I perform my research and gather my data and use my experience to predict what medium and long-term trends we will see in the technology space. But somewhat like a Climate Change scientist can tell you the long-term effects of global warming, but can’t tell you if it is going to rain tomorrow, short term technology predictions are much harder. I am a sucker for punishment though. Each year I can’t help myself. I will make some estimations of how the tech ..

Throughout the year I have talked technology across the airwaves with over three hundred radio segments and written over fifty technology columns. What were my technology highlights from talking and writing about technology throughout the year? My overall highlight? Adaptability. The world as we knew it changed dramatically over a very short time frame. Technology had to be adapted to a new world. And, by association, people had to adapt. If ever we doubted the resilience and flexibility ..