The headlines were unequivocal – Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had announced that email is dead. The truth however was a little more prosaic. At the launch of the social network’s new messaging platform, he had said “we don’t think a modern messaging system is going to be email”, and that the new system was “not email”.

Mr Zuckerberg wasn’t the first to suggest that email is obsolete, and neither has he been the last.

Today email is ubiquitous. Technology market researchers Radicati see the number of email accounts worldwide growing from 3.1bn in 2011 to nearly 4.1bn by 2015.  Email use is lower among teenagers – but whether this changes when they start work is unknown.

So just how likely is it that the creaking inboxes that haunt many of us will soon be replaced?

One man with more reason than most to have an opinion on the matter is email specialist Mimecast’s chief scientist Nathaniel Borenstein, co-creator of the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) protocol.  This is the internet standard that lays down how messages are formatted. It lets your email contain different characters, have attachments, and contain other types of files, among other things.  Mr Borenstein says it is used more than a trillion times a day.  He says:

“Email is still growing.  There’s no real sign that social is making a major dent in it.  For the most part I think they fill different functions, but that they connect with each other. I think they’re symbiotic. I’m reluctant to cast them into opposition.”

Not everyone is as sunny as Mr Borenstein when it comes to the future of email, however.  Lee Bryant is co-founder of Headshift, the world’s biggest social business consultancy. He believes email’s dominance over business communications is coming to an end:

“When email was first developed it was an excellent point-to-point communication tool when nothing else existed.  I think we’ve reached the stage where email as means of communicating is overloaded. I think we will see what happens on email today transitioning towards various kinds of both internal and consumer facing social tools.”  ”

I think fundamentally one of the biggest problems is that social tools communicate slightly more in the open, they create ambient knowledge and ambient awareness for others who are not even in the conversation.  Email doesn’t do that, it’s quite a lonely medium.  You receive a series of messages, you hold them in the inbox and have to move, delete or act on every one. Whereas with flow tools the flow moves past you whether or not you actually open the messages.”

What do you think?  Is email on its death bed?

If there’s one big problem with the Internet, it’s that you can’t be on it all day, every day, without interruption.  No, sometimes you must take your eyes away from the screen.  Those are sad times, but they will soon be in the past.  Researchers have made progress toward interactive contact lens displays.  Here’s the future envisioned by the developers:

They envisage hundreds more pixels could be embedded in the flexible lens to produce complex holographic images.

For example, drivers could wear them to see journey directions or their vehicle’s speed projected onto the windscreen.

Similarly, the lenses could take the virtual world of video gaming to a new level.

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While speaking at the “Silicon Valley Comes to Cambridge” event in the UK, Joswiak shared what he believes to be the four keys to Apple’s success with the Wall Street Journal about what make’s Apple so unique as a business.  Four things:

• Focus
• Simplicity
• Courage
• Best

Did you see this news story?  Air bags for the iPad?

First off, Apple has come up with a solution for keeping the glass on the back of your iDevice from breaking in the event of a fall. Obviously, the simplest solution would be to avoid glass screens altogether, but if glass is going to stay, it should be made more resilient.

Apple dreamed up a tunable shock mount that would sit between the glass and the body of the device. This shock mount would inflate when the device’s accelerometer senses that the phone or tablet is falling. An actuator within the device would suck in the cover glass as it accelerates toward earth, protecting it from damage. This technology could also be used to provide a water-tight seal.