GigaOM’s recent RoadMap conference in San Francisco featured a number of thought-provoking speakers on the topic of the future of technology, including Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, venture investor Mike Moritz and former Sun Microsystems founder Andy Bechtolsheim. While many views were expressed, one thread that ran through many of the different presentations, from mobile and design to health and communication, was the idea that successful technology involves making the computer invisible to the user, even as it becomes more powerful.

I took a look at this idea in a recent article for GigaOM Pro (subscription required). Dorsey, for example, said that the power of an information network like Twitter doesn’t have anything to do with the technology behind it. It doesn’t matter, for example, that the service is now processing more than 250 million tweets a day. Dorsey said that for him, the most powerful aspect of the service is how it can help connect us to others in far-flung parts of the world, as it did earlier this year during the demonstrations in Iran.

via The future of technology means making the computer disappear — Tech News and Analysis.

Technologists will become the next drug dealers, administering narcotics through brain stimulation, according to Rohit Talwar, the founder of Fast Future Research, speaking at Intelligence Squared’s If conference.

Talwar was charged by the government to investigate the drugs landscape over the next 20 years, exploring scenarios going beyond the traditional model of gangs producing and shipping drugs around the world.

read  Digital Narcotics May Be the Future of Drugs | Wired Science | Wired.com.

A lack of progress for battery technology is (arguably) the single biggest barrier for gadgets, electric vehicles and the power grid. But there continues to be innovation, like last week researchers at Northwestern University unveiled technology that can boost gadget battery life by ten and charge a battery in minutes instead of hours. And there’s hundreds of researchers, entrepreneurs, universities and large companies working on battery breakthroughs. Here’s 25 you should know about:

read 25 battery breakthroughs for gadgets, electric cars & the grid — Cleantech News and Analysis.

Most publishers have at least a vague sense that HTML5 is an important content technology, but what does that content actually look like? What can it do? The following excerpt from the free ebook “HTML5 for Publishers” shows how a simple finger painting canvas can be added to an HTML5-based book.

Doing animations on the HTML5 Canvas is cool, but what’s even cooler is letting the user draw on the Canvas herself. With the advent of touchscreen phones, tablets, and ereaders, this becomes even more compelling, as the user can draw directly on the screen with her finger, rather than using a mouse or trackpad. In this section, we’ll look at how to implement a simple “finger painting” app in the Canvas, which would be a nice fit for a children’s ebook—for example, a story that lets kids draw their own illustrations to accompany the text, or a preschool textbook that uses the finger painting to teach colors and shapes.

via HTML5 for publishers: Drawing on the screen – O’Reilly Radar.

HP has announced a Project Moonshot, which encompasses a new development platform, a discovery lab and an industry ecosystem that will enable HP’s partners to bring cost and energy savings to large-scale, data-intensive computing.

The expected improvements are dramatic, notes HP Fellow Partha Ranganathan. “Our research suggests that for the kinds of workloads and applications that we’re now seeing in hyper-scale environments, we ought to be able to reduce energy consumption by 89%, use 94% less space and see costs that are 63% lower compared to traditional systems,” he says.

via HP project Moonshot for new architecture for extreme low-energy computing.

Social payments are taking a giant leap forward. PayPal has unveiled a Facebook app that lets you send money to friends.

The app, simply titled Send Money, is just as straightforward as its name. You have the choice to send either an ecard with money or just money with no card. You select a card, choose a friend to send it to and then select how much money to send.

“The PayPal and Facebook infrastructure have now merged,” PayPal’s Anuj Nayar says. “This is another way to personalize the act of giving money.”

via PayPal Launches Facebook App for Sending Money to Friends [EXCLUSIVE].

Apple has raised bludgeoning competitors with patents on key technologies to a fine art. (Just ask Samsung.) And now it may have a new blunt object to wield.

A reissue of a patent originally dating back to 1998 — and that Apple got from Xerox — has delivered into CEO Tim Cook’s hands some serious, and scary, potential control over location-based services. If you thought that Google, Samsung, HTC, and others were already depressed over the legal success Apple has had in fighting Android, it’s now officially worse.

via Look out! Here comes Apple’s killer location-services patent | Apple – CNET News.

With 100 million active users and as many as 6,000 tweets per second, Twitter contains a huge trove of valuable data.DataSift helps companies analyze and make sense of that data.The company just launched its service to the public after a beta-testing period, moved its headquarters to San Francisco, and hired a new CEO, Rob Bailey. Bailey was at mobile location service SimpleGeo, which just sold to Urban Airship a couple weeks ago.Quite a week.

via The Future Of Twitter Is In Data, Not Advertising, Says New DataSift CEO.