An Evening with Vinton Cerf

Vinton Cerf in Singapore, Suntec City.
Thanks for organizing it, The Digital Movement.

Vint spoke about his forecast on the Internet in 2035. Bringing with him a wealth of experience and exposure on the most advanced technologies that has ever discovered and used by DARPA, Vint selects and made us visualise the possibilities of bringing some of those technologies into our everyday lives 27 years down the road. Things that seems new to us were actually much older than we think and Vint knows that.

Special thanks to Alvin for recording the video and streaming it real time to Qik. While waiting from Aaron Koh's video to be out, we can have a peek at lower streaming quality on the interesting bits of this special evening.

Some points I picked up from the session:

• Vinton predicts that the total internet population to grow up to 1,320 million internet users (1.3 billion) in 2035. That is 20% penetration of the world's population. Asia will be the top contributor region to the internet population of the world as the infrastructures in those places gets more developed. Some countries will have beyond 100% of penetration because he saw them using more than 1 device to access to the internet at the same time. It is just like how mobile penetration can get through 100% in Singapore because some of us owns 2 mobile lines.
  
• More and more different types of devices will be part of the internet ecosystem. He estimated that one person will be using 10 devices that can be connected to the internet. Currently the number stands around 3. (I would think that it is probably true for more developed nations.)
  
  
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• Wired and wireless infrastructures will allow business to business (B2B) transactions to flow through different industries seamlessly. This is due to the efforts that will be made for the standardization of transactional structures horizontally. XML and UDDI standards will advance and become more visible into the picture.
  
• Cloud computing will come into play for higher cost-efficiency in the use of internet bandwidth across nations. (Ken from iDA share a good piece of insight with me on cloud computing just before Vint started speaking. To him, Cloud computing is similar to Grid computing.
• The virtual environment will have a greater presence in the internet sphere. Vinton projects the use of holographic technologies in instances like a business conference meetings, not on a screen but a virtual 3 dimensional figure right in front of our eyes. This moves far beyond the current state of use of the virtual environment that we see today in SecondLife and other virtual games. The boundary will be challenged.
  
• Convergence of digital objects and processes will happen. Soon URLs will not exist. There will be a rendevous of the names of digital objects and their internet address. Imagine the breakthough in the level of findability of the information that you are looking for! This really drive me to think more into the usage of tags/ labels in a more standardized way. Probably one day everyone will be tagged with a few standard terms for identity purposes.
  
• Statewide (Nation- wide) database will start to grow. Intelligent databases that unify together to help people see trends of events that are happening around the state. The epidemic prediction example that Vint brought out was just amazing. A country could actually foresee the coming of a communicable disease through reporting trends made possible by such database integration.
  
  
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• Vint shared his views on the socio-economic effects of the Internet in 2035.
  Internet will further transport and display print, video and audio media in more agile and flexible forms to enable interoperability in different mediums or devices.
  
• Internet group interactions will become richer and more mature. We could even see political interactions happening in a more common manner. Videos, opinions and other forms of content will be shared via the internet at greater volume. The current statistics from YouTube states that videos were uploaded by members at the volume of 10 hours per minute - faster than you can finish watching them. Information consumers ARE the producers. A trend in which the wisdom of crowds is gaining higher regards.
  
• Innovation is at its edge. Data-mining mass information makes it a constant possibility.
• Social Networking will take on another identity - Vint pointed out that social interaction can developed in such a way where you do not need to be physically present for your presence to be transmitted. Through robot representatives, you can control how you want them to represent you in a meeting and interact with your attendees rather than having them stare at a flat screen talking to you. Well I'll prefer the personal touch actually. I'm just skeptical on how to the society will become if people do not meet face to face with each other anymore.
• Gaming will definitely see a quantum leap when holographics get more commercialized in game play. We are already seeing the spatial dimension that Wii has challenged and we can expect more. Somehow, the movie "Iron man" suddenly appeared before my eyes again.
• There will be a newly revamped business models due to the dramatic drop in the cost of production and distribution with the use of new technologies. Staying with the same model could cost you more. For some industries, digitization of products, documents gets more common.
  
  
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• On IPTV, Vint shared that downloading and streaming will happen at lightning speed. Look at TiVo! Video streaming will most likely be used only for real time needs.
  
• An interesting perspective that he brought out on product placements in videos in replacement of a 30 second commercial gives advertising a new positioning. Vint argued on the fact that consumers do not like to be disturbed while watching a video, and

  "advertisement interrupts but information is something that users are interested in."

  Thus products be placed in videos and users can mouse over with their cursors and see more information about them. To help you visualize it, it should look something like this but definitely packed with richer amount of product information:
  
  
  
  
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• Mobility and mobiles in 2035: There will be 10 million devices and counting that will be able to access the internet in total.
  
• Remotely controlled services and devices aiding it will rise in popularity. You do not need to be in control. Payment services will tap unto to the convenience once the security issue is seriously looked into.
  
• Haptics will also take center stage as the focus on the human sense of touch gets into the picture when designing innovative interfaces. Microsoft Surfaces is taking a step into it and that step can be widen. Control of devices and commands through touch and voice will deepen user experience in the access of the internet.
• Navigation systems and its technologies -GPS, mobile tower triangulation, building announcements. will see a greater take up rate. People will view it more and more as a utility tool as they integrate their lives with it and find more use of it. Find the nearest supermarket that sells this good. Do they still have inventory for it? (Integration with inventory information of shops, indexing capabilities needed) How many miles, how much time do I need to get there?
  
• Intelligent internet enabled devices could be spotted in more forms than you can think of. Vint was so humorous when he got us to think about an intelligent refrigerator that knows what it contains, recipes that you can use to cook with what is left inside, remind you when you need to restock your groceries, up to the extend of sending an email with a shopping list for your next supermarket trip. I want something like that!
  
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In order for those predictions to materialize, I could see a greater integration of data mining and information creation, as well as network agility and scalability, looking after by tighter security and authentication capabilities. The average internet user's behavior is going to be transformed.

Blown away, satisfied, learned much from this incredible man of our times in just one session. I am truly grateful for his passion to evangelize and to teach the use and the development of internet to anyone who wants to hear about it. He articulated the concepts of the internet so clearly that it is easy for us to connect with his thoughts. An entertaining communicator, not one second with him was unfruitful. Time well spent.

Want to read more about it from others:
Jean did live blogging on the event on her blog
Yuhui consolidated his live tweets here
James Seng was the moderator of the discussion. A lil' of his thoughts here
Ian wrote on the red dot.