Oh the possibilities.....

A century ago if you wanted to look into the future, you’d find an old gypsy woman and ask her to look into her crystal ball for you. She would read your cards and divine what lay ahead in the days to come. Now? There is an app for that. There is an app for anything under the sun now and more are launched every day. Businesses can track our purchases and with a disturbing accuracy predict what we will need, where we will buy it, and social media to tell us about the coupon. (Target knew about teen pregnancy before family did)

More of our purchases will be made with our smart phones. We can already email funds to one another, so those I owe yous actually get paid now. With Square’s card reader, small companies who can’t afford a full online register can accept payments directly for a small fee. This will let small companies start up for less capital and help the economy start to grow in new ways. And with most users no more than three feet from their phone, someone being out of touch or unreachable is almost obsolete. Checking in as you arrive at a location or liking a business you frequent will become a conversation you have with friends or customers. The lines between what is “real” and “virtual” will blur and social media will be there to keep us informed.

Google and Apple are both racing to create a glass based product for customers to have a full heads up display in their day to day life. The implications there are unending. Being able to manipulate a document the way Tony Stark does in Ironman, by moving your hands through it and talking to your computer? That could soon be real. We could create personal overlays that alter how we look to logged in users. Our friends on Facebook can like our new virtual shirt while following the link to get their own. The new restaurant we eat at will check us in as we come through the door and ping us with a copy of the menu.

The possibilities are only limited by our imaginations now. Social media will keep us in the know for what is coming and it will become the dialog of a generation.