Making a tidy sum from all fears

Environmental concerns and contamination fears are likely to generate big business for technology firms.

It’s tough to make predictions, it was once said, especially about the future. The quotation is variously attributed to Mark Twain, Albert Einstein and the famed US baseball player, Yogi Berra. Undaunted, I offer Old Woody’s year-end predictions about the key vendor technologies likely to emerge over the next decade.

Expect a feeding frenzy among IT vendors around water and energy metering in the home and tracking car usage and freight movements on the roads. In the home, meters raise awareness of one’s scandalous profligacy. On the dashboard, they are supposed to help price people off the highways and on to our esteemed system of public transport.

Of course, Sir Rod Eddington, whose new report announces that transport is “one of the UK’s greatest strengths”, believes that road-pricing technologies are full of uncertainties and risks. Nevertheless, Capita and EDS will soon endorse his view.

Second, the Russians have confirmed a trend: detecting contaminants looks likely to inspire another feeding frenzy on the part of IT suppliers. In 2006, Cadbury had problems with salmonella and the purity of Pepsi and Coke was impugned in India. With the Litvinenko affair, it’s probable that lab-on-a-chip devices for detecting foreign elements will be in huge demand. Just think of the opportunities around the 2012 Olympics. After all, if culture secretary Tessa Jowell can put aside £400m for a body whose job it is to control the cost of the Games, surely home secretary John Reid can find £4bn for IT designed to sniff out Al Qaeda-supporting spectators, poison-tipped javelins and all the rest.

Third, what’s true of chemicals and radioactive materials will also be true of electromagnetic waves. Already, schools in Wales have set an example to the nation by ripping out Wi-Fi systems. So it may not be long before iPods become available in new, forensic versions – designed to track down nasty vibes rather than play nice ones.

Finally, someone will make a device to turn off all machines left on standby in a workplace at night. In the realm of consumer electronics, TV remote control units are poised to merge with mobile phones; so why not make a magic IT wand to demobilise every other piece of IT that’s in sight and still on after 6pm? After all, The Lib Dems want the Christmas lights in Oxford Street turned off.

The best bit about such a wand is that it would rid irresponsible energy-wasters of their unsaved documents, and lead to the changes in user behaviour that upstanding folk want to see.

Anyway, have a low-energy, stationary, risk-free, impurity-free and disciplined Christmas.