Last weekend I had the honor of giving the keynote address at Sacred Hearts’ 16th Annual Science Symposium.  My speech focused on the technological advances we’ve seen over the last 2 decades and highlighted some of the innovative things we can expect 20 years from now.

Predicting the future is hard enough.  But you can imagine how tough it was to come up with a funny yet g-rated opening joke for the several hundred parents, girls and school officials in attendance?  (You can get the joke here: http://su.pr/2KUSHX.  It worked!)

Your business, like mine, is volatile to change.  Technological advances can undermine seemingly robust industries overnight.

As business owners, we must be vigilant about protecting market share and profit margins. At the same time, we have to be willing to introduce products and services which could cannibalize our cash cows.  After all, if we don’t create the perfect competitor, our competitors certainly will.

With this unique mix of paranoia and opportunity, we must look towards the future and anticipate change:

• Attachments are so old school. Many of us are still send and receiving attachments. These range from Word files to PDFs.  The world is rapidly moving toward ‘cloud’ computing.  This means your applications and your files will be stored entirely online.  The upside:  You and your colleagues can collaborate real-time.  All you need is internet access.  Storage and security will be managed by the cloud provider.

• Computers will ultimately fix themselves. Remember the scene in The Iron Giant (wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Giant) , where the robot explodes into a gazillion pieces and then the pieces automatically crawl back to the epicenter so the robot can reassemble itself.  At the very least, twenty years from now, computers will be simpler and less prone to failure.  Either way, we can expect better yield and longer life spans.  Think of your car or your fridge.  The newer models are already full of computing techonologies,  yet we consumers dont have to pay much attention to them.  They work.  Period.

• We can say goodbye to the mouse. The big thing at the recent Computer Electronics Show was natural interfaces.  We currently use a mouse to command the standard desktop computer and we use the painfully inept TV remote to change channels. Future technology will do a better job of sensing or knowing the users intentions.  This will be accomplished by reading gestures, eye movement and facial expressions.

• Display technological will go real. The ultimate goal is a picture so real and so lifelike it’s indistinguishable from reality.  It will look 3 dimensional and emulate all the shading and lighting in the immediate surroundings.  Education, medicine and – of course – entertainment, will benefit tremendously.

• Electronics will be biodegradable. The first manufacturer to successfully integrate green components will surely enjoy a windfall in business. The amount of e-waste we’re dumping into the ground will eventually reaching a tipping point, galvanizing the industry and policy makers to adopt environmentally friendly solutions.

But the best inventions need not be so complex.  Often the most elegant solutions are the simplest.  And sometimes the biggest problems we face, like diarrhea in the developing world, are easy to solve.  I challenged the girls to create products like the Pee Poo bag (Peepoople.com) ,  for areas of the world where there’s poor sanitation. Or my favorite, the LifeStraw (LifeStraw.com), an inexpensive device which filters harmful bacteria from water, rendering even the Ala Wai safe to drink.

One of my favorite tenets: Companies do not destroy companies.  Instead, companies destroy themselves.  If we are to stay viable as a business, we must always keep a watchful eye on the horizon.

I earned my engineering degree 20 years ago. After graduating from college I headed straight to Tokyo to work for Sony in their R&D Planning and Corporate Strategy Group. Our job was to identify promising technologies on 10-year horizons and help turn them into products.

After seven years in Japan and another 12 here in Hawaii starting various businesses, I have learned to love the rapid and ever-changing landscape of the tech industry. At the same time, as a business person, I have developed a deeper appreciation for what works – regardless of how boring the winning solution may be.

Here are some of the lessons I’ve learned:

Early adopters pay the price. We first started making digital cameras at Sony 20 years ago. The first few generations were built by hand and we produced only 15 cameras per month. We lovingly referred to the new cameras as ‘bleeding edge’ technology. As a manufacturer, the cameras were very expensive to make. For the consumer, digital cameras were very expensive to own and operate, too. Bottom line: Early adopters of technology pay more for their toys than the rest of us. And thank goodness! Someone’s got to pay for all that R&D.

Late adopters pay, too. Does your dad still own a pair of corduroys? Well, it may be painful to watch him wear those around town. But it’s very expensive if he maintains the equivalent in technology at home or at the office. I’m a strong advocate for using something until it dies. I love the new netbooks and I would take a new 3GS iPhone any day, but the stuff I have now works well so I will just keep things as-is until my Fujitsu LifeBook and older iPhone call it quits. However, when the cost of ownership of the older solutions exceeds the cost of ownership of the newer solutions, I would be silly to hang onto the old like a dog with a newspaper in its mouth. Lesson: Legacy hardware and software will kill your bottom line.

Avoid proprietary solutions. Proprietary solutions are custom solutions. They are typically designed specifically for a particular client or a specific industry. Try to avoid those. All proprietary solutions are expensive. They also seldom end well. After 2 to 3 years of using a custom solution, for example, your company will essentially become ‘married’ to the provider. And when the provider decides to raise pricing and skimp on the customer service, you will be wishing you went with someone else. As much as possible, use off-the-shelf solutions which can be easily supported by anyone.

Don’t neglect proper care and feeding. Tech is complex. Unlike nature, technology doesn’t yet have self-correcting and rejuvenate abilities. This means we have to take care of our systems like we take care of our children. Hardware and software need regular and ongoing maintenance – just like everything else. Be sure to steward the health and wellness of your equipment, or you will pay a bigger price for it later.

In the end, it’s gotta work. If you think about it, there’s probably no other device in our home or office which is more difficult to understand and use than the computer. The toaster is easy. The fridge is easy. Even the air conditioner is easy. But the computer is a headache. Whichever solution you choose, try to make it transparent to the user. For example, the break in my car works well. I use when I need it; it gets the job done well. I don’t need to think too much about it. That’s the way computers should be. Useful.

I really like this quote from Einstein: Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler. That’s the approach we should take towards technology. Focus on the benefits of the solution. Choose the one that works best. You will be happier in the long run.

James Kerr is Chief Geek at SuperGeeks. He can be reached at (808) 531-GEEK and www.supergeeks.net. You can also follow him on Twitter: SuperGeeks.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs is not expected at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference, which starts today and runs all week at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. But Apple watchers are betting on an updated iPhone that is faster than the current iPhone 3G and equipped with more memory, a better camera, video recording capabilities and a compass.

Or we may see a couple of models introduced, possibly a more basic unit that sells at a lower price point.

Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, will deliver a speech today in place of Jobs, who is scheduled to return from a health-related absence at the end of the month. Schiller is expected to talk about the upcoming iPhone OS 3.0 operating system as well as Mac OS X Snow Leopard, the next operating system for Mac computers.

They say the best things in life are free…But on the internet, ‘free’ is a whole different world.

With hackers always searching for new ways to con the innocent, ‘free’ on the web usually means ‘potentially dangerous.’  It’s no secret that free downloads of music and video, for example, often contain malicious software secretly embedded inside.

However, when it comes to Microsoft and the fierce battles to gain market share, free can mean access to a pretty darn good product.  As you may know, Google Docs is a suite of online tools that can do just about everything Microsoft Office can do.  Google Docs is free.  The idea is to offer the software for free so everyone will jettison Microsoft Office and migrate to Google Docs.

Zoho (www.Zoho.com ) is another player in this market space.  They, too, offer a set of free online tools for a wide range of applications.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been playing with their Wiki and I must say I like Zoho a lot.  It’s intuitive, user friendly and useful for both home and business.

One of the challenges we face as a company is how can we efficiently capture and disseminate knowledge.  Standard operating proceedures are critical to ensuring quality of service and smooth operations.

In the old days, we would have created a 3-ringed binder describing how to do specific tasks.  New and veteran employees would reference the manual as-needed.

Using Zoho Wiki now as an internal, password protected handbook, we’re able to accomplish everything we need plus two new benefits:

1. It’s readily available anytime/anywhere online
2. Anyone can contribute to it anytime, so the content is fresh and relevant.

We also use Zoho for our corporate clients.  Instead of having each employee send troubleshooting request to us via email, we have employees post action items on on an internal, Zoho-based bulletin board.  They can now assign levels of urgency, management can help prioritize requests, and the SuperGeeks can post messages next to each action item.  The bottom line:  The whole support process is now infinitely more effective and efficient.

To learn more about Zoho and how it may fit into your home or office, see:

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoho

Tools for teachers: http://zohochallenge.com/OnlineTest/Candidate.do

Gadgets for geeks: http://gadgets.zoho.com/zc/index.do

CRM for business: http://crm.zoho.com/crm/login.sas

Planner for families: http://planner.zoho.com/login

Have fun exploring Zoho.  I am confident you will be pleasantly surpised.

Google is harnessing the collective wisdom of its users to find tips on how to save money.

The new site is called “Tip Jar”. It allows users to submit money-saving tips from finance and travel to food and shopping.

Check it out here:  http://moderator.appspot.com/#16/e=3cfc

The site uses Google Moderator, which is a crowdsourcing tool.  Read more about crowdsourcing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing

Users can vote on the tips they like; over time, the most popular and useful ones float to the top of the list.