One of our clients came across this yesterday: Bill Gates predicting the future, in a 2005 edition of The Guardian.

“You’ll be able to use the camera to take a picture of a sign in a foreign country and software will send it up to a server and bring it back to your phone fully translated.”

“If you’re in a store and you’re buying a product, you take a photo of the bar code and immediately you’ll be told what a fair price would be and what other products you might consider.”

“…they’ll spend a mere $400 or so buying that tablet device, and the material they hook up to will all be on the wireless internet with animations, timelines and links to deep information. But they’ll be spending less than they would have on text books and have a dramatically better experience.”

“You’ll be walking around in downtown London and be able to see the shops, the stores… not in the flat, 2D interface that we have on the web today, but in a virtual reality walkthrough.”

Having called Word Lens, Red Laser, the iPad and Google Street View, he goes on to predict that Microsoft and News Corp will be the people to make it happen. Ah well – can’t be right all the time.