Look Beyond Facebook

Imagine waking up on a Monday morning in the year 2025 to the sweet voice of your digital assistant called Leyla. Leyla already woke you up 10 minutes early as she just learned from the Google Connected living home black box that syncs her with the outside world and all the devices at home that the M25 (the orbital ring road in London that some also call the city’s largest car park) is slow on junctions 10 and 11 due to an accident. As you walk into the shower, the bathroom mirror displays your day’s schedule and reminds you to have your daily nutrients, as well as not to forget the blood pressure pill, as the sensor in the seat-belt of your car yesterday measured your blood pressure on the high side. As you walk through the house, everything is ubiquitously connected, smart and intelligent. The coffee machine is ready to make your espresso; the fridge is displaying you are running out of milk; the laundry was done, as the washer now washes and dries during off peak hours, and the heating set itself to switch off when you left the home. Not to mention your electric car did an automatic over-the-air annual maintenance update and was wirelessly charged to your daily commute, and you could listen to the same music album you played at home as all your entertainment now sits in the cloud. Everything, and I mean everything, around you will be connected in 2025, and all of this is just the start.

Connected Living describes a world in which our homes, work, and city are all seamlessly connected through multiple intelligent devices that integrate video, voice, and data services to provide access and ubiquitous connectivity anytime and anywhere. What this means is that we will have new styles of living and working singularly and collaboratively. We will no longer access work from desktops connected to data centers, but from a virtual user interface with downloadable content from the cloud. Concepts like flexible working, zero holidays (literally means you take holidays...