Not all breakthroughs are created equal. Some arrive
more or less as usable things; others mainly set the stage for
innovations that emerge later, and we have to estimate when that will
be. But we’d bet that every one of the milestones on this list will be
worth following in the coming years.
-The Editors
A couple of the technologies:
Megascale Desalination
The world’s largest and cheapest reverse-osmosis desalination plant is up and running in Israel.
Availability: now
Breakthrough
Demonstrating that seawater desalination can cost-effectively provide a substantial portion of a nation’s water supply.
Why It Matters
The world’s supplies of fresh water are inadequate to meet the needs of a growing population.
Key Players
- IDE Technologies
- Poseidon Water
- Desalitech
- Evoqua
On a Mediterranean beach 10 miles south of Tel Aviv,
Israel, a vast new industrial facility hums around the clock. It is the
world’s largest modern seawater desalination plant, providing 20 percent
of the water consumed by the country’s households. Built for the
Israeli government by Israel Desalination Enterprises, or IDE
Technologies, at a cost of around $500 million, it uses a conventional
desalination technology called reverse osmosis (RO). Thanks to a series
of engineering and materials advances, however, it produces clean water
from the sea cheaply and at a scale never before achieved....
MORE
Apple Pay
A clever combination of technologies makes it faster and more secure to buy things with a wave of your phone.
Availability: now
Breakthrough
A service that makes it practical to use your smartphone as a wallet in everyday situations.
Why It Matters
Credit card fraud damages the economy by raising the costs of goods and services.
Key Players
- Apple
- Visa
- MasterCard
- Google
When Apple Pay was announced in September, Osama
Bedier was unimpressed. A longtime PayPal executive who now runs a
payment startup called Poynt, Bedier had spent more than two years
leading Google’s mobile wallet service, which lets people use their
phones to pay for things at checkout counters. It used some of the same
technologies as Apple Pay and failed to catch on widely. So despite
Apple Pay’s appealing promise—safe payment with just the press of a
thumb on your iPhone—there was good reason to be skeptical of its
chances, too....
MORE
Breakthrough Technologies 2015
HT: We saw the water post drop out of one of the feedreaders last week but didn't realize it was time for "Breakthrough Technologies" until
The Big Picture linked to the Intro.
