To accomplish this, it helps to keep a list of important problems that haven't been solved yet. As you hear about incremental improvements, it may suddenly be within reach, when popular knowledge says otherwise. Online video was obviously going to be a killer app: one Victoria's Secret Live fashion show brought the Internet to its knees several years before Youtube existed. There just wasn't a way to do it well before the cards fell into place: Flash video cut through the Gordian Knot of browser video plugins, and low-cost server infrastructures finally became cheap enough to store petabytes of video. The casual observer may miss the events, and many may jump in too early, but it helps to know what problems need to be solved.
In mobile robotics you can record data on the move without worrying about damaging the disk or enduring sudden massive write latencies. So you get more interesting datasets using SSDs than you could with traditional disks.
