A couple of days ago, I learnt that two of my close friends, Arindam and Deepan got a reason to be very excited. Arindam was my neighbour a decade ago and has 2+ yrs of experience in C/C++ on UNIX, while Deepan was my college classmate and has about a yr of experience using Java.

Arindam, who works for HCL Infotech, Bangalore got posted to the New York office and he is very excited experiencing the USA adventure inspite of 10+ hrs of daily work. Deepan, who works for a small outsourcing firm in Coimbatore developing web applications using Struts, has finally got internet connection in office which is now available to all employees of the firm.

While Arindam is not sleeping in the city that never sleeps, Deepan is busy with his first blog, checking out blogger and the other likes of being online. Its interesting how these two software engineers have had recent advancements in their lives, and yet such a large gap in the difference in advancement, even though both are in the IT industry and just a difference of about a yr in experience.

Today is our 60th Independence Day Anniversary and India is one of the fastest Emerging-Economy countries today, with job opportunities rising by the day and infrastructure expanding rapidly. But it seems so obvious that only the organizations that are backed by foreign funding are really accelerating advancement, others are still yet to provide even basic facilities. I'm not just judging this based on my two friend's experiences - this is noticeable pretty clearly to people in the IT industry. Foreign investment helps in boosting our economy and one of the main factors governing this is that the value of the Rupee is very low when compared to US Dollar, UK Pound etc. Inspite of being an "emerging" country, we do not see a major drop in the poverty line. Organizations responsible for charity & humanitarian work are still ongoing just like before and obviously much better, but do we see some major boom like we do in technology world ? These are two oceans moving in opposite different directions.

In the future most Indians would make a fortune when compared to our lifestyles a decade ago and be in parallel to the western world but the slum dwellers would the same as ever. But aren't you afraid that situation could worsen so much that the rate at which the poverty line decreasing would be so slow when compared to the rest of us emerging as Elois, that, a Hitler would be reincarnated to eradicate the Morlocks ?

If you're reading this, I would suggest you rather not try debugging this post as I finished composing this in the early hours of our 61st year since independence.

Today we call it Shoplifting - tomorrow it'll be just called Shopping ! A lot of people have already envisioned what the future would be like based on the current trends in technology. Here, is what shopping could be like in the very-near-future: Person goes to a shop in a mall and takes the stuff off the rack that he wants (to buy). He walks out of the shop taking the items with him, not checking in at the counter because there is no counter ! Its the future payment system that we're looking at. Sensors in the shop detect who you are and what what you've taken from the shop. The advanced computerised system will then use this information to track down the person's bank account details and debit the amount from his or her account. This concept may sound too simple to narrate but we all know this is no joke to implement. The level of sophistication for a system this complex can only be semi-dreamed of today but implausible till the next decade or so. Obviously, this and many other 'next-gen' ideas will work once motion detectors become more detectable. With the advent of image recognition techniques - Google's Neven Vision, Riya's Visual Search, Microsoft's Photosynth and many others, the next gigantic project would be to detect 3D objects in motion in real-time. Even though researchers are onto this for quite some time now and probably in most companies' R&D centers, it'll be a while before coorporates start getting them into their organization for their commercial use. Business Week has already captioned their news item How Google's Neven Vision could track our lives. So I guess this is something people of the next generation would expect as a result of new technology trends.