The concept of micro-personal micro-grids supports the broader concept of work anywhere. Work anywhere anytime came to be in the early part of the 21st century. There was an explosion in the number of businesses that offer free wi-fi to their patrons. Starbucks famously gave people free wi-fi in exchange for a cup of coffee. Work anywhere stretched one thing beyond its capacity, the battery. If you look at processors for computers, cell phones and tablets they have improved every year to a degree over the last thirty years. Moore’s law used to apply to processors (the speed would double everything 18 months), but that slowed a bit over the past five years. Now it is cell and tablet processors that are doubling every 18 months in capacity.
Batteries on the other hand not so much. Plus if we truly take work anywhere to its ultimate value, that means you can work anywhere. On a boat in the Chesapeake Bay. Deep in the woods of Ohio. Somewhere in the mountains of West Virginia or Oregon perhaps Idaho (I have a friend that loves Idaho). Work anywhere means working anywhere. This combines two themes I’ve been sharing for the past three years (or more). The first is the reality of the micro-personal micro-grid. That being a power grid configured to power the needs of one person. Work anywhere sometimes means you work beyond the existing plugin power-grid. IE, there are currently no public recharge, or privately owned power ports in the forest. Tree’s that offer public charging haven’t grown yet. Maybe, that is a new variety of tree in the future. For now, if you go deep in the woods, you go without power.
The other part of work anywhere is the ability to interoperate with what you receive. I published a post a while ago about the concept of the screen as a service. Many Micro-projectors are light, provide a projection for your laptop, tablet or phone. This allows you to interact with larger information sets such as massive excel files or huge documents you need to read. Even, web conferences can be had in the forest. Just don’t forget that squirrels don’t need invites to leave your camera off! All you need for these small projects is a little shade and a rock to project on. Who would want to be relaxing in the forest all day, and take 20 minutes for a meeting! Ths represents freedom, from Cube world. But also allows people to live, without being forced to be out of touch 10 hours a day in an office.