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Interviews Corn Flakes Will Be Online Wouldn't it be great if the jewelry you chose to wear each morning could communicate information about that special someone while you traveled far from home and office? That's exactly what Peter Cochrane envisions. He's chief technologist at British Telecom and author of "108 Tips for Time Travellers." By extruding the developing technology behind video simulation, traveling pros could interact with 3-D versions of family, friends and colleagues. This is one example of how far technology could go. Cochrane and two other industry execs offered their views when asked about the future of mobile computing. Mobile Computing Talking about wireless, where are we in this field? What is emerging as the frontrunner for ubiquitous computing? Ian Widger It can't be ubiquitous until you solve the problem that the database is your personality. The Internet intersects with communication. What environmental advantages does it bring? You can have simply a "page" that looks rather like a Windows OS [screen], but instead it's your communications operating system. You could put in who you are and define who you are on your Web page. Say someone offers you a new cell phone. This will suck down your relevant personality into that new device; the buttons and memory will be known to you. It will be like coming home to your device. Your favorites and all your others will come with you. MC When do you see it happening in full force? Peter Cochrane Thirty percent of all traffic that my company moves is between machines. By 2010, 95 percent of communication will be between machines and not people. Everything will be online, and most things will be wireless and online. That means your car, your camera, your mobile phone, of course, your jewelry, your handbag, your trousers, everything. Here's one of the biggest impacts: Corn flakes will be online. Think in terms of getting rid of the bar code, and think in terms of a transponder on every item that you buy. The impact of that is you can get rid of the checkout. You wouldn't have to do any swiping. You throw all your goods into the truck and you go out of the store. You're identified, the goods are identified, the money is taken out of your bank account, and you go home, no checkout. When you do that, the operating costs of a retail store might drop by about 20 percent. Is there any money anymore? The answer, by and large, is no. No money changes hands, as it's in databases now. MC How will mobile computing products develop to offer seamless communication? Phil Hester Pretty much wherever you are, you're going to have access to a feasible wireless communication rate. The challenge is going to be figuring out what it is that you as an individual care about. That's likely something that's going to have to be personalized for you. Probably the applications that we know today don't go away. But more and more, the PC starts acting as your agent to go out and find stuff that you care about through wireless technologies that send that [information] to the mobile devices that you carry around with you. You as an individual are going to want these devices to be as self-discovering and self-configuring as possible. You are not going to want to have to set up TCP/IP addresses. MC Do you think people will wear computing equipment in their clothing? Cochrane Without doubt! We're talking about something that's slightly bigger than a grain of brown sugar. So you could embed it in the gear label in the back of your shirt. It's not very fun to sit there and sort all the clothes and program the washing machine and come back and have a look at it. There's an opportunity there. What could you do with that time? I want to outsource all the things I don't really want to do and don't have to do so that I can get on with doing the most important things in life: the prime time that you need with the family, and work time and education/experience time. We are working harder and faster, but without more intelligent machines, without more effective computing environments, it's going to get increasingly difficult. MC If people do adopt this type of technology, how will it change our perceptions of personal space? Cochrane About five years ago, I came up with the notion of a chip implant [where] I would carry my passport under my skin and my bank balance and my medical record. Some people are outraged by that. There are now millions of people with artificial bits and pieces inside their bodies — pacemakers or artificial hearts or cochlear implants. This is not going to be a compulsory thing. I think the turning point comes when people are forced to have it done. We may have to wait for a generation of people to die. It's as simple and stark as that. The time at which we become worried is when all this starts to make decisions on its own and starts to look humanoid. |