If you are reading this and thinking ‘that guy’s just an old-fuddy-duddy’ (which, to be fair, no young person today would ever actually say), and you are also patting yourself on the back because YOU are a great multitasker, go take a break from this piece, google ‘multitasking myths’ (or just read this) and then come on back.  Bummer, eh?

And it’s not just about getting stuff done, as that, too, is just massively overrated.  It’s about a lack of peace and calmness. When do we take time anymore just to do nothing?  Even standing in line for a coffee (which is, of course, a take-out coffee, since there’s no time to just sit in a cafe and enjoy a hot cup of coffee in a real cup) everyone’s on their phones, doing stuff.  The human brain actually needs time, every day, just to do nothing and process all of the events that are transpiring (great article here on ‘doing nothing’).

I couldn’t agree with him more — real time has its benefits and it is great. But there is a time when everything doesn’t need to be instantaneous. I have been trying to do the same: the email, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram apps have moved off the front screen to the second screen of my iPhone. But that’s still a Band-Aid. As Nova Spivack once said in a conversation:

“With the real-time web, the amount of information we have to handle is changing the Now,’ he said. ‘Now is becoming a lot denser. There’s a lot more information in a per unit of Now. The Now is getting shorter. The horizon is getting narrower. Now has gone from days to hours to seconds.’”

Some might say — turn off the notifications and exercise some self control. I have tried that, but the behavior of constantly reaching for my iPhone has become too ingrained in my mind. You take out your phone to take a photo or send a text message and the next thing you are doing is checking emails, liking photos on Instagram, using Foursquare and reading the latest tweets.

There are some apps that give you some control over real-time: Tweetbot, for instance, has a sleep option, which I religiously use. I have removed the Facebook app and use their website when I need to, so it has made the process a little bit slower than before. My colleague Mathew Ingram brought up the real human challenges of the realtime in a brilliant post over two years ago.

As a result, our lives are becoming more “real-time,” whether we like it or not. Just as Google and Microsoft’s Bing are upgrading their search indexes to make them more real time by capturing things as they occur, instead of hours or even days later, we are being forced to upgrade our internal processes to do the same thing. But doing that isn’t quite as simple as tinkering with a search algorithm — we have to find ways of managing the real-time demands placed on us while still maintaining something approaching a healthy personal life, something Stacey wrote about a little while ago. How do we handle the demands of our our spouses, our children, our relatives and friends? How do we maintain our health when we are always on, always available, in real time?

If apps like SnapChat and Highlight are any indication, then the realtime nature of the internet isn’t going away and, in fact, it is going to become more pervasive. What would be really cool is an individual “off switch” for these real time apps. In one simple toggle of a virtual button, email is off — like my stereo when I power it down. A flick of the switch turns off Twitter. You get the idea. Why? Because I do like to use these real-time apps during parts of the day, especially when I am working. However, I don’t want to deal with them at night or, say, when I am hanging out with friends or at dinner.

I don’t know about others, but I would welcome that off switch. Turn off tweets till the dinner is done and switch them on when I’m ready to jump into the real-time information stream again. I think taking that break is becoming more and more essential.

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BRZTech is a three-month old investment vehicle backed by a number of private investors in Europe and South America, including Portuguese conglomerate The Ongoing Group. Realtime CEO André Parreira (pictured above) explained that the company plans to use 60 percent of the money on R&D and hiring new people with the remaining 40 percent going toward marketing and launching the technology in the U.S.

So what is this technology that deserves so much investment? Parreira explains that it is a line of code that developers can insert into their web sites to create an open pathway direct to their servers. The net effect of doing this is that where this code is implemented suddenly has real-time access to the server. Think of it like an IM connection for elements of your web server.

Parreira calls the technology ORTC (Open Real-time Connectivity). It uses xRTML, extensive Realtime multiplatform language, a standards-based way to turn existing HTML code into something that works with the ORTC framework. It can be implemented in a range of APIs for NODE.js, Javascript, ASP.net, Java, PHP, and other server-side and web languages. It also can be implemented on iOS, Android and Windows Phone. From the company’s release:

The ORTC (Open Real-time Connectivity) is a highly scalable, cloud-hosted, many-to-many messaging system for Web and mobile apps. Due to its bidirectional permanent link between server and connected user, ORTC allows a web application to broadcast (push) data to a single user or to every connected upon demand. This is a huge improvement over needing to refresh a browser. This important change increases the speed of message delivery (low latency) and saves bandwidth costs, allowing the development of Web applications that until now would be too slow to be effective or too expensive to operate.

The underpinnings of this system are a series of virtual appliances hosted in a variety of clouds, including Amazon Web Services and Rackspace data centers, and a software overlay that organizes the flow of information back and forth between the servers and the web sites.

“The Internet used to be just like a walkie-talkie,” says Parreira. “But in the modern era everything will be live and directly connected to the source of information.”

Realtime charges developers by the number of messages sent using the system, and so far Parreira won’t disclose what customers might be using the site. He did say that the platform is already seeing 750,000 messages every second with more than 120 millions users in a 24-hour period. The most likely initial customers are those that need real-time access to information, such as an e-commerce site sharing inventory.

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