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Gallery

Whatever happened to...

Posted on 18 Jun 2009 at 17:13

Micropayments

Micropayments have long been the holy grail of internet publishing. "Users should be willing to pay, say, one cent per web page in return for getting quality content and an optimal user experience with less-intrusive ads," web-usability guru, Jakob Nielsen wrote back in 1998. "I predict that most sites that are not financed through traditional product sales will move to micropayments in less than two years." But nobody has yet managed to crack the nut.

No micropayment company has ever managed to get more than a handful of sites to sign up. Publishers have a hard enough job persuading readers to pay for content; they're inevitably doomed to fail if people have to sign up for a different system on every site.

The best hope, ironically, lies with a company as pervasive as Google, which has the clout to persuade people to join such a scheme. But Google's Checkout service isn't yet tailored for micropayments (it charges 20p per transaction plus 3.4% commission), while PayPal's so-called micropayment system also levies $0.05 on every purchase, as well as taking a 5% cut. The hunt continues.

Wearable computers

The idea of wearable computers has been about since the early 1990s, when researchers began looking at ways to free people from their monolithic desktop PCs. An MIT document outlining the research described the concept as "hoping to shatter the myth of how a computer should be used. A person's computer should be worn, much as eyeglasses or clothing are worn, and interact with the user based on the situation."

The concept is still very much alive and kicking, and MIT labs recently demonstrated a pair of sunglasses that can recognise when you're staring at a book, hunt for reviews online, and use a projector to display them on the book's cover. The US army is spending thousands of dollars creating personal HUDs as part of its soldier modernisation programme, and university research labs continue to tout devices they hope will one day redefine the way we interact with the world.

Origami

In 2005, the tech world was abuzz with rumours that Microsoft was ready to enter the hardware fray with Project Origami... whatever that was. As the frenzy reached fever pitch, reports pegged it as an iPod killer, portable gaming console, or some sort of general media device. Rather disappointingly, it was none of these things. Even more disappointingly, Microsoft wasn't even building it. Origami turned out to be the underpowered Samsung Q1 - an ultra mobile personal computer built to demonstrate the Redmond Giant's view of the future.

In Microsoft's vision a UMPC is a device smaller than a laptop, but larger than a smartphone and capable of doing anything a fully featured computer can. In reality, UMPCs were too big for your pocket and not as useful as a laptop, a halfway house that nobody was particularly interested in. This high-profile marketing failure wouldn't stop Intel trying the same trick with the Mobile Internet Device at its developer forum in 2007, though. As with UMPCs, you'd struggle to find a person in the street who could explain what one was, although Intel seems to believe you only qualify with an Atom inside. Thankfully, at the same forum it was also touting the term netbook, which has proved to have a bit more grip. One out of two isn't bad.

WiMAX

Intel has been telling anyone and everyone that WiMAX would be the future of high-speed wireless broadband for years, even going so far as to build support for the standard into Centrino 2. But, with Wi-Fi delivering fast, short-range access and 3G broadband speeds growing ever faster, there's precious little evidence that the chip maker is backing the right horse.