Image by Ford

I think we will see cars that connect through your medical devices to give you alerts you might have missed, or connect to the cloud to give you health and wellness guidance.

— Venkatesh Prasad, general manager and senior technical leader of the Ford Silicon Valley Lab.

Full story: Consumer Demands Drive Innovation

I’ve been watching every minute of Curiosity. What excites me is to think that I get to participate in what is really inspiring the next generation of scientists. As a kid, I watched Apollo and “Star Trek.” I wanted to be Captain Kirk. Being part of these missions to Mars is pretty close to being Captain Kirk. It’s a very inspiring thing for me and humanity.

—Mike Deliman, senior technical staff, Wind River 

When the space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) needs to run stress tests or simulations forupgrades and fixes to the OS, Wind River’s Mike Deliman gets the call. In a recent interview, Deliman, a senior member of the technical staff at Wind River, which is owned by Intel, gave a peek at the legacy technology under Curiosity’s hood and recalled the emergency call he got when an earlier Mars mission hit a software snag after liftoff.

When we opened AT&T Park, there were a number of fans that would actually use their cell phone to talk. There was almost this little joke of, “You’re not supposed to be on your cell phone at a sporting event.” Then technology evolved and we saw more people texting. Now, because almost everybody carries a mobile device with them, whether it’s a phone or a tablet, we see a lot more shared experiences. They want to be a part of the action, but they also want to share that with others.

— Bryan Srabian, San Francisco Giants’ director of social media

Full story Giants Engage Fans with Facebook, Twitter

49ers Stadium Exterior on Flickr.

Builders of the San Francisco 49ers’ future stadium in Santa Clara promise unsurpassed connectivity as among its technology features. Photo courtesy of San Francisco 49ers.

Smartphone as Child Toy on Flickr.

13 Uses for an Old Smartphone. Well, the baby probably already thought it was his to begin with.

Data usage in Asia is particularly high compared to the rest of the world and therefore they’re driven to small cells much quicker. We’ve been deploying quite a few networks now in Asia with this new type of technology. Here in Europe it’s relatively slow, but it’s beginning to get underway. There’s almost a complete reversal of what we saw in the deployment of GSM and to some extent also 3G.

Perhaps most interesting is what happens in undeveloped markets. These people don’t have old networks so they can start with a new network that has many times the capacity of the old legacy networks that the developed world has. It’s particularly well-suited to developing countries that don’t have the fixed infrastructure. In African and Latin American countries where there’s no cellular coverage at the moment, they’re being serviced by satellite.

— Chris Gilbert, CEO of Ubiquisys, which has been collaborating with Intel on “smart cells” for 3G, LTE and Wi-Fi access points that can increase processing power and storage at the network edge.

As people have come to rely more on technology and even to expect it, the space between anyone and anywhere has shrunk to a single click. That’s the impact of tech in our daily lives according to Chris Shipley.

Former journalist turned technology visionary sees technology ratcheting up human aspirations in the Q&A: Technology Now an Expectation in Daily Life.

We always were looking at laptops from the perspective of, I have a desktop and this is this device I use in a different kind of scenario. When I’m home or at work, I have the desktop, so how does this thing [laptop] supplement that experience? Today the notebook has become the experience. It’s our primary computer, and we want it to work the way we might have expected our desktops to work 10 or 15 years ago.

We put so much attention on, if these are portable computers I don’t think we even called them laptops. Our portable computers needed to be lighter and more rugged. Yet we recognized that performance would suffer when moving to lighter and smaller. Today I think we don’t expect those compromises at all.

— Chris Shipley, CEO of Guidewire Labs and former technology journalist at Ziff Davis publications.