Hi everyone,

As the readers of this blog know, I am currently in the process of launching a new company and product, eSCRIBE (http://www.escribecorporate.com/) with my business partner. This is an exciting time, of course, but it is also opening my eyes to some newish technology which is, I believe, entirely disruptive. There is a great deal of interest with eSCRIBE customers in leveraging iPad or Android tablets in place of both laptops and, that favorite old standby, paper.

Let me take a step back. One of my favorite authors, the late great Sir Arthur C. Clarke, was very skilled at introducing concepts which would later come very close to how reality unfolded. He managed to predict, at a very minimum the Communications Satellite, Internet and Skype for free long distance international communication. While he also got a number of things wrong, he also had predictions which now boarder on the realized. One of them which I find intriguing is the soft screen.

Imagine, if you will, a flexible rollup LCD TV which you could deploy anywhere and which can access any and all information available to it. It could have an adhesive or magnetic back which would allow it to be posted on the refrigerator, a wall, in your living room or bedroom - wherever. It would have access to global data networks and have an intelligent user interface. While we don't have this technology yet, we do have something very close to it...

I was smoking some ribs and chicken for a family dinner a couple of weeks back and needed to come up with a recipe for Barbecue Sauce. I did some searching on our family iPad and found an appropriate concoction on the Internet and, propping the device on a small stand next to the stove, I proceeded to make the sauce reading from the iPad and working on the stove. After dinner, I was discussing doing this with the WGG and suddenly I had a "Ah-ha!" moment. Clarke's vision of the soft screen was all there - except for the "soft" part. The screen is big enough to actually easily read, it goes anywhere, you can use it for everything from reading books to accessing the entire body of knowledge of the Internet, it has a highly intuitive user interface and it is relatively affordable. Further, everything you can do with the iPad, you can do with its Android based cousin tablets.

The difference between tablets and smart phones has got to be the screen size - the functionality of the devices beyond that is not really significant. Further, with Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity, next generation tablets will also be able to serve as video and audio communications devices.

So, why do I consider them disruptive technologies? Well, tablets can replace:

• Paper
• Books
• Magazines
• Telephones
• Televisions
• Laptops

They can access and output any kind of audio, video or written material - they are true multimedia devices. With the growth of cloud computing and on line storage, they don't need to have the power of laptops, but that is also coming. Moore's law takes care of both performance and cost and as the technology gets lighter, smaller and perhaps "softer", Sir Arthur might get a further chuckle from the grave in there and those who don't want to give up their paper will end up with a device that is effectively indistinguishable from it in terms of function.

Back again with you soon!

Paul