A Conversation with Dan Bricklin

I spent an afternoon at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston yesterday and had a conversation with Dan Bricklin about SocialCalc a social spreadsheet which was released to public beta yesterday (see http://danbricklin.com/log/ or http://ross.typepad.com for more info).

I worte a year ago here about the advent and benefits of social spreadsheets and this is the culmination of effort between Dan and SocialText.

I liked what they were demo-ing and can see that it will be a great productivity enhancer anytime more than 1 person needs to collaborate on a spreadsheet.

Knowing that Dan is one of the industry’s original visionaries (for those of you who are younger than me, he invented VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet to run on a PC and became the killer app that allowed PCs to move from a hobbyist’s toy to a real business tool).  I asked him what would be the key innovations he saw happening in 5 years.  He did not hesitate to mention vastly the next generation of human computer interfaces.  He says that there will be devices under $100 that will be able to read 3-D gestures and that prototypes will be available in about a year. He will publish his ideas next week, so check his Blog in about a week to see what he says.

It will be very interesting.  I am looking forward to being able to use 3-D gestures with 3-D displays, now that will awesome.

Tags: dan bricklin, e2.0, gestural UI, social spreadhseets, socialcalc, socialtext, UI