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Data boxes

Are extremely useful because with one you know where everything is. It isn’t a new product; it is just a different way of thinking about information, like spreadsheets were a new way of thinking about columns and rows of numbers. But just as they changed the way we do accounts this has the power to change the way we use data.

One day, instead of a separate diary, resume, shopping list etc almost everyone will have a life long personal data box with all that that entails. Some data will be fixed, some private and some dynamic. There will be virtual and physical databoxes. We are moving that way already. How many people do you know who say their life is kept within their mobile phones? Some changes are foreseeable. We just make better cheaper phones that record more data and let us do more things. Other databoxes will take over from books videos and films and need a different structure and language from present technology. Maybe, with your help, this could be one of the first physical databoxes here?

Some will worry about the civil liberty aspect of this data, others will dash towards it. It is inevitable. We need to control not when it happens but how. Have your say here.