In just 20 years, the
internet has fundamentally changed the way we live, learn, do business and
entertain ourselves. what makes the internet so revolutionary is that it
provides a standard way for people to connect anywhere around the world. Now,
the internet is entering a new generation of Seamless Mobility, thanks to
affordable mobile devices that take advantage of new options and increased
coverage for wireless connectivity. Standards-based wireless technologies and
infrastructure are growing at a rate that promises to completely remove all
remaining barriers to truly seamless personal interaction and knowledge
transfer. But even a ubiquitous wireless internet isn’t the complete fulfllment
of the Seamless Mobility revolution. today’s internet connects people to
people, providing information in text, video, sound and other formats intended
for use by people. The next step is to internet-enable physical objects —
connecting people with things and even things with things. The extended
internet, or X-internet, will enable connectivity not just between people and
their computing devices, but between actual, everyday things like windows,
highways, bananas, pets, appliances and more.
By enabling connectivity for virtually any physical object that can
potentially offer a message, the X-internet will affect every aspect of life
and business in ways that used to be the realm of fantasy — or even beyond
fantasy.
Twenty years ago, it
was almost unimaginable how the brick-sized cell phone device that some
top-level businesspeople were using would soon change our lives. a few years
later, when e-mail was introduced, it was hard to imagine all the information,
entertainment, convenience and communication that today’s internet would bring.
Similarly, the X-internet can be difficult for people to “get” upon first
hearing about it.
But, without a doubt,
the X-internet will transform lives and businesses in much more powerful ways
than the PC or even today’s internet itself. Today’s internet connects people
to people. Oftentimes it’s not a direct connection, but thinks about it: retail
sites, databases, games, content, search engines and more are all ultimately
created by people, using display formats that make sense to people, with the
sole purpose of serving other people. The X-internet goes much further: it adds
connectivity for physical objects, creating a wealth of new opportunities for
intelligent interaction between people and things, and even between things and
other things.
Like pieces of a
puzzle, many of the enabling technologies and early implementations are already
in place. inexpensive radio frequency identification (rFiD) tags are being
placed in parts, products, access cards and more to uniquely identify each
item. these passive tags are tiny, inexpensive and require no battery power.
Devices designed to read these rFiD tags can be placed in doorways, turnstiles,
and other portals to track objects entering and leaving the area.
By adding small,
inexpensive, battery-powered radios to rFiD tags, it becomes possible to deploy
more sophisticated tracking applications that cover a much larger area — for
example, tracking people and items throughout an entire building. In active
rFiD systems, rFiD tags broadcast their own signals rather than echoing a
signal broadcast by the rFiD reader. This allows deployment of fewer, simpler,
and more affordable readers, while also enabling more sophisticated
applications.
The next step in rFiD-based technology
is tags that incorporate environmental sensing, intelligence and two-way
communications. these can be incorporated today in sensor networks, mesh
networks and ad hoc networks for a variety of purposes. the ZigBee alliance is
working on standards for this type of networking, and standards-based products
and solutions are beginning to become available. These solutions are growing
out of existing internet, wireless and remote sensing capabilities. The
X-internet will build on these technologies with new innovations that provide
ever-increasing connectivity for new kinds of applications. this revolution
will soon spread from industrial and governmental implementations to enterprise
applications and even the home and everyday life.
X systems are
naturally heterogeneous. Data and function must be distributable across a
variety of devices. This is growing in importance as our society becomes far
more mobile. For example, over 300 million camera phones were sold in 2005
alone. According to Hewlett-Packard, worldwide penetration is estimated at more
than a billion. Tim Kindberg is a senior researcher at HP Labs in the United
Kingdom. Kindberg and his associates imagine the camera phone operating like a
computer mouse, making the camera phone easier to access mobile content.
HP Labs created a camera-based
code reader. Similar to scanners at the grocery store, this software enables
the camera to read data-rich codes. When scanned, the codes trigger a variety
of services. For example, they can open Web content, send text messages, access
help lines, or download discounts. The codes themselves can be located in
newspapers, magazines, signs in stores, or even on billboards. Dedicated
plug-and-play appliances are also getting some traction in this X-enabled world
scene. In 2005, a niche technology called the XML acceleration appliance began
to pique everyone’s interest. This technology moves the load of XML processing
from an application server to a dedicated plug-and-play piece of hardware. X,
it seems, is going to come in a variety of flavors.
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