Scala Digital Signage Web

David Strom from ITNews.com.au writes an interesting piece on 5 technologies he thinks we should keep an eye on during 2007, including a few of my personal favorites: RFID, advanced graphics, and server virtualization. Do they have the potential to be disruptive?

Let's get back to basics and discuss disruptive technology, or really, disruptive innovation. This is a term dating back to 1997 when Clayton Christensen wrote "The Innovator's Dilemma". Disruptive technology, according to Wikipedia, refers to a "technological innovation, product, or service that eventually overturns the existing dominant technology or product in the market."

Christensen eventully realized that technologies aren't inherently disruptive and so shifted his terminology to "disruptive innovation" - disruption depends in large part on how things play out in the market which includes strategy, funding, etc.

RFID is seen by many as a potentially disruptive innovation that would displace barcodes. It's already happening in warehouses and shipping, with Walmart being an oft-cited example.

RFID could also find its way into some scheme that interacts with digital signage. Strom talks about the new generation of graphics hardware that can actually take significant loads off a CPU in certain cases, but when I think of graphics as disruptive, I think of digital signage. This medium is spreading like wildfire and is making inroads anywhere you can see a physical paper sign now. And with the advent of ePaper, plastic circuits, and tiny projectors, you can easily see how disruptive digital signage might be. As adoption increases and hardware costs come down, along with awesome new form factors, we're sitting on the cutting edge of a highly disruptive wave of innovation.

Flexible, low-cost epaper could be used one day wallpaper a house! Forget bumper stickers or waving your arms outside the car - lightweight flexible displays on your car could tell people what you really think. Labels on store shelves can update themselves automatically when a new product is placed over top of them (another RFID application). And as we now know, perhaps one day your fast food restaurant tray might be an endless source of entertainment.

I need to do a bit of thinking yet about server virtualization with regards to its disruptiveness. My experiences with it have been very positive so far with modern hardware underneath it. No more hours of babysitting Ghost operations - a 5-minute "snapshot" will suffice and then you can copy your entire machine snapshot while the VM hums along undisturbed. Need to bring a new web application live very quickly? Chances are, someone's made a "virtual appliance" that you can download for free, customize and then secure relatively fast. Have backup copies on warm standby that you can bring live within minutes of a disaster. Afraid of what might happen with the next round of Windows updates? Take a snapshot so you can roll back you system effortlessly. And so on...
Tags: digital signage | narrowcasting | Scala