My prediction is coming true! The Pondering Primate: Physical World Connection Helps Combat Counterfeiting describes a system from Aegate for marking individual pharmaceutical bottles so that cellphone cameras can read them and check their website for authenticity. It is not too unlike the Semapedia.
I predicted soda cans with individual websites as standard in 2034 in a roleplaying campaign. It is nice to see that we are getting to the future faster.
Of course, my idea was to actually have a little chip transponder in the can rather than store the can's website on the company server. We already have matchhead webservers, RFID chips and I'm pretty optimistic about low-power plastic electronics in packaging. So the main question will be whether the utility of having a local device that could measure heating and handling, run animated decorations and function independently of the Net is greater than the ease of scanning with a phone and the minor cost of the device.
The biggest irony is that when looking for a picture for this post, I discovered that CCC is actually putting phones and GPS into some cans. We are all living in hyperreality these days.
Posted by Anders3 at March 14, 2007 07:26 PM