Zuckerburg (Photo: Scoble)

Farhad Manjoo has pointed out that for Facebook to maintain its share price, it needs to figure out how to increase its revenue by a factor of ten. Going from $5 per user per year in advertising revenue to $50 per user per year is about as likely as Facebook going from 1 billion users to 10 billion, which I suppose is the other way the company could increase revenue proportionally, even if it requires an alternate Earth's worth of additional human beings.

So! Either this IPO is, as the Wall Street Journal has suggested, the biggest shell game in the history of stock offerings, pushed along by those who want to cash out their shares in the company at the expense of unsophisticated investors who are piling on, or Facebook has a plan.

I don't think Facebook actually has a plan. I think it's the new AOL. But if it did have a plan, this is what it would look like.

Facebook Must Become A Bank

Forget Square, the credit card processing dongle for mobile devices produced by a company headed by Twitter alum Jack Dorsey. What the payments industry needs is a fast follower with serious reach and the desire to vanquish every other player in this space.

Or, as Dan Hon, interactive creative director at Wieden and Kennedy recently told me, "It would be really interesting if Facebook launched a credit card. In fact, it would be terrifying."

Facebook already has a credits system designed to fuel the compulsive addictions that afflict some of its users (and which are otherwise known as games like FarmVille). Tim Carmody did a good job of explaining the possible scenarios for an expanded credits system, but that's not what I'm talking about.

The appropriate analogy is Apple and iTunes.

"iTunes has so much credit card information that if they weren't such a singly focused company you could imagine them taking on the retail banking business, and Apple-ifying it." says Hon.

An Apple-style stunningly easy and simple to use payments system has the potential to take over, but the result would be something that only worked in one way -- as the ghost of Steve Jobs intended it. Facebook's take on this system would probably be a lot less tightly controlled (and not nearly as inspired). There's also the small matter that, unlike Apple and Amazon, Facebook doesn't have your credit card -- yet.

Under Zuckerburg's leadership, Facebook remains a surprisingly nimble company, considering its size. But as Manjoo points out, going public means, inevitably, bowing to the pressures of shareholders, who want their money's worth. Look for Facebook to acquire Square -- or try to kill it. Or, if they're really savvy, make a lateral shift on a scale of Apple's entrance into the phone market.

Disney has a new technology, called Touche, that can turn any object, including the human body, into a touch-sensitive surface that recognizes not only when contact has been made, but what kind of contact it is. Plenty of places have covered the details of how this technology works -- which are fascinating. But I have to admit that what should have been the most exciting part of Disney's presentation on Touché -- the use cases -- left me flat. (It starts at 2:50 in the video above.)

So here are five use cases that could transform this technology from an interesting oddity to something potentially transformative.

1. Goodbye Keyboards

Texting is slow, voice recognition isn't suitable for every context, and if you think a generation raised on iPads is going to know how to touch type, I've got a roomful of "state of the art" computer mice I'd like to sell you.

But what if we could use the Touche technology to replace keyboards with a technology that has for too long been relegated to the backwaters of technology: Chording.

Chorded keyboard allow touch typing without all the carpal tunnel syndrome

Chorded keyboards let you do wacky things, like tap out emails on handlebars while riding a bicycle, which Steve Roberts accomplished as early as 1986. Now imagine that you're entirely liberated from all input devices -- because the input device is your own body.

In a kind of gestural interface, there's no reason you couldn't tap out letters in rapid succession by chording them, fingertips against palm, in your own (empty) hand. Want to write an email? Hook up your augmented reality glasses and go for a walk.

2. Truly Wearable Computing

One use case Disney's video does explore is a limited form of wearable computing. In the example they give, the user is controlling his portable music player via taps and swipes on his own arm. But imagine he had an even richer gestural interface -- there's literally nothing you couldn't do in terms of interfacing with a computer.

The trick, of course, is coming up with a gestural interface that is fast but not error-prone. Would it resemble sign language, but with more touching? Clearly, there's room for someone to invent the QWERTY of touch-based, body-centric gestural interfaces.

3. Sketch Anywhere

A tiny projector in your augmented reality glasses, plus surfaces wired for touch, plus a human body wired for Touché style touch interfaces could turn any surface into a drawing surface.

4. Secure Transactions

Imagine a secret handshake that you share only with the touch pad at any cash register. This unique sequence of swipes, pokes, elbow touches -- whatever -- would be more secure than what we employ in the US now, a signature, which has got to be the most pathetic excuse for security theater going. (Those signatures aren't even used by your bank, which is why in most transactions they've been eliminated.) 

5. Sex

Is there any more obvious application of an interface that requires you to touch yourself, and which could trigger all kinds of events when you touch others?

Got more ideas about how Touché could be used, either in concert with the human body or on surfaces that weren't previously wired for touch? Leave them in the comments.

 Follow @Mims or get in touch

Joi Ito (Photo: Joi Ito)

Steelcase asked 100 thinkers to describe their wish for the next 100 years, and MIT Media Lab director Joichi Ito hit it out of the park with this 150-word bon mot:

One hundred years from now, the role of science and technology will be about becoming part of nature rather than trying to control it.

So much of science and technology has been about pursuing efficiency, scale and “exponential growth” at the expense of our environment and our resources. We have rewarded those who invent technologies that control our triumph over nature in some way. This is clearly not sustainable.

We must understand that we live in a complex system where everything is interrelated and interdependent and that everything we design impacts a larger system.

My dream is that 100 years from now, we will be learning from nature, integrating with nature and using science and technology to bring nature into our lives to make human beings and our artifacts not only zero impact but a positive impact to the natural system that we live in.

Without understanding the density of allusions in Ito's response, it would be easy to dismiss it as some kind of Gaian magical thinking. And Ito is way too positive a thinker to point out that his vision will come true one way or another. Innovation means we can do more with less, and occasionally unlock huge new reserves of a particular resource, but as in every previous century, in this one we will continue to discover and be forced to contend with the boundaries of the vast-but-not-infinite spaceship we inhabit.

On the solutions side, there is an entire book -- or a thousand books -- that could use Ito's response as their starting point. Everywhere I look in the areas that I cover, I see efficiency and renewable energy; lighter, stronger and more capable manufacturing through through organic chemistry; biomimetics; the "Internet of Things" evolving into a responsive global nervous system; and most important of all, a recognition that in a world in which it's difficult to predict which resources will be constrained next, "sustainability" is essential to success.

It's cliche by now to point out that the 21st century could be truly awful, but it's also willful blindness to imagine that it doesn't contain challenges that are qualitatively different from those humanity has faced before. Somewhere between the doomsayers and the Pollyannas, there is a boundary layer where realism and a willingness to experiment intersect. It's where everything that will be consequential for the 21st century is happening. People like Ito, who just get it, represent the kind of thinkers we should be paying attention to.

 Follow @Mims or get in touch