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The term evernet hasn't caught on. It means:
and
It'll be one thing when the shrink-wrapped food tells your microwave how to cook it. It'll be a whole other thing when your PC is in your shoe and your monitor is on your glasses and your keyboard stays in your pocket. Useful search phrases are "embedded systems", "information appliances", and "always-on Internet".
Personally, I'm interested in the always-on future of ...
paper
organizations
information
books
libraries and bookstores
publishing
education
Computers will ...
... interact with us. They will understand human speech and respond in ways that we can understand.
... automate repetitive human tasks. They will help us save time and increase human efficiency.
... facilitate human collaboration. They will link humans together across space and time to allow for increased productivity.
... offer easy customization. They will adapt to our individual preferences instead of the reverse.
Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing
| web
by Adam Greenfield
Everyware is an attempt to describe the form
computing will take in the next few years. Specifically, it’s about a vision of
processing power so distributed throughout the environment that computers per se
effectively disappear. It’s about the enormous consequences this disappearance
has for the kinds of tasks computers are applied to, for the way we use them,
and for what we understand them to be.
Although aspects of this vision have been called a variety of names—ubiquitous
computing, pervasive computing, physical computing, tangible media, and so on—I
think of each as a facet of one coherent paradigm of interaction that I call
everyware.
In everyware, all the information we now look to our phones or Web browsers to
provide becomes accessible from just about anywhere, at any time, and is
delivered in a manner appropriate to our location and context.
In everyware, the garment, the room and the street become sites of processing
and mediation. Household objects from shower stalls to coffee pots are
reimagined as places where facts about the world can be gathered, considered,
and acted upon. And all the familiar rituals of daily life, things as
fundamental as the way we wake up in the morning, get to work, or shop for our
groceries, are remade as an intricate dance of information about ourselves, the
state of the external world, and the options available to us at any given
moment.
In all of these scenarios, there are powerful informatics underlying the
apparent simplicity of the experience, but they never breach the surface of
awareness: things Just Work. Rather than being filtered through the clumsy
arcana of applications and files and sites, interactions with everyware feel
natural, spontaneous, human. Ordinary people finally get to benefit from the
full power of information technology, without having to absorb the esoteric
bodies of knowledge on which it depends. And the sensation of use—even while
managing an unceasing and torrential flow of data—is one of calm, of relaxed
mastery.
This, anyway, is the promise.
Life After
DoDth or: How the Evernet Changes Everything
by Thomas P.M. Barnet
The U.S. Naval Institute, May 2000
The defining achievement of the New Economy in the
globalization era will be the Evernet, a downstream expression of today's
Internet, which most of us still access almost exclusively through bulky desktop
personal computers. ... Over the next ten or so years, this notion of being
"online" versus "offline" will completely disappear, because of: ...
> The breaking up of the desktop computer's functions into a myriad of tiny
gadgetry that humans will wear or have embedded throughout their living spaces
and work environments—and ultimately even their bodies via nanotechnology
> The maturation of ultra wideband wireless technologies that link all of these
sensors, gadgets, satellites, computers, and grids
> The continued development and extension of the earth-based portion of the
Global Information Infrastructure (GII), especially the so-called last mile ...
The rise of the Evernet will be humanity's greatest achievement to date and will
be universally recognized as our most valued planetary asset or collective good.
Downtime, or loss of connectivity, becomes the standard, time-sensitive
definition of a national security crisis, and protection of the Evernet becomes
the preeminent security task of governments around the world. Ruling elites will
rise and fall based on their security policies toward, and the political record
on, the care and feeding of the Evernet, whose health will be treated by mass
media as having the same broad human interest and import as the weather
(inevitably eclipsing even that).
Eventually, the Evernet and the Pentagon will collide, with the most likely
trigger being some electronic Pearl Harbor, where DoD is unmasked as almost
completely irrelevant to the international security environment at hand.
Three levels to discuss the Evernet
Life on the Internet -- the social interactions it enables, the economy, the society
Webtop applications and services -- the products and services that enable the interactions, the businesses and organizations
Frameworks -- the architecture and plumbing that enable the products and services to enable the interactions
AT&T sponsors research at Cambridge University in England that is prototyping one way the Evernet will work.
Sentient Computing
Using sensors and resource status data to maintain a model of the world which is
shared between users and applications.
Shared Perceptions
What could we do if computer programs could see a model of the world? By acting
within the world, we would be interacting with programs via the model. It would
seem to us as though the whole world were a user interface.
Take a stroll! Gawk at what's out and about. The Boardwalk neighborhood gives you a sense of the early beginnings of society online. Learn more about online communities, especially the Net Culture page.
The economy online, the "new" economy went through its Gold Rush phase, I surely hope, at the end of the 1990's. Now comes the hard part.
Welcome to
the Always-On World
by Philip E. Agre
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, December 29, 2000
As the culture digests these technologies, people will
invent new always-on cultural forms that depend on each party to a relationship
having access to large amounts of continually updated information about the
other.
In this way, we will have freedom of association in a radical sense;
increasingly freed from geographic constraints and equipped with powerful search
tools, we will be able to pick out exactly the people we want to associate with,
and we will be able to associate with them whenever we want. We won't devolve
into disembodied brains, of course, and geographic proximity will always play an
important role in our lives. The point, rather, is that we can maintain more
continual relationships with whomever we associate with, near or far. ...
The opposite extreme from an always-on world is feudalism, in which everyone
assumes that all relationships are fixed, static, permanent, and God-given, so
that everyone knows their place and fully expects to spend their lives
maneuvering within a specific, small, stable repertoire of relationships.
Feudalism has its virtues: if the relationships are good ones, then they can
acquire a depth and comfort that comes from the confidence that they will always
be around. The problem with feudalism, of course, is that most of the
relationships aren't good ones, so that everyone is trapped in the relational
world they were born with.
The always-on world has the opposite problem. It is a world of freedom, but it
is also a world of anonymous global forces that ceaselessly rearrange all
relationships to their liking. We don't understand this world very well, but we
will soon have plenty of opportunity to study it first-hand.
commons?
The
Unfinished Revolution
by Michael Dertouzos
Several colleagues from the MIT Laboratory for Computer
Science and I are flying to Taiwan. I have been trying for three hours to make
my new laptop work with one of these "smart cards" that plug into the
machine and download my personal calendar. When the card software is happy, the
operating system complains, and vice versa.
Irritated, I turn to Tim Berners-Lee, sitting next to me, who graciously offers
to assist. After an hour the inventor of the Web admits that the task is beyond
his capabilities. I turn to Ron Rivest, inventor of RSA public key cryptography,
and ask him to help. He declines, exhibiting his wisdom.
A young faculty member behind us speaks up: "You guys are too old. Let me
do it." He gives up after an hour and a half.
So I go back to my "expert" approach of typing random entries into the
various wizards and lizards that keep popping up on the screen. After two more
hours, and two batteries, I make it work, by sheer accident and without
remembering how.
Tomorrow
Never Looked So Cool
by Farhad Manjoo
Wired News, June 22, 2001
Hewlett Packard's CoolTown and IBM's research center put the future on display. Just wait until you get a load of IBM's 'tricky pixel.'
Roadtripping
in Search Of the Technological Future
by Eryn Brown
Fortune, June 24, 2002
33 days, 8 campuses, 127 kids, and an infinity of gizmos.
...
Larry Smarr, who heads up Cal-(IT)2, ... believes firmly that the
fruits of idle curiosity are what generate the best new technologies. The really
good stuff percolates up to popularity. ... "The business community thinks
startups are where innovation is. But startups are late-phase," Smarr says.
"A lot of people in the business world don't understand how critical the
university system is for sorting through all the possibilities for the future
and homing in on the ones that are really cool."
If the network is always on everywhere, we will spend more time "online" though we may not take any more notice of it -- our information supply -- anymore than we now take notice of our light supply or heat supply.
What will we do online?
As the network becomes the computer, we will access our information from many devices, not just a standalone desktop. It's sometimes called the Webtop as a bridge from desktop, and that's where our application programs like word processors and spreadsheets will be stored and maintained.
It's interesting to look back several years to compare what these folks saw coming with what is actually here: Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, Digg, et al.
What
the H*ck Are Web Services?
by Brian Caulfield
Business 2.0, April 2002
The name is boring. The acronyms are tedious. The
explanations are usually confusing. But a few smart businesses are already using
Web services to save a lot of time and money. ...
Despite all the off-putting jargon and hype, however, Web services really are
the future. The term "Web services" is used to describe a collection
of technologies -- an alphabet soup of technical standards and communication
protocols -- that together use the Net to get computer programs to talk to one
another. That may not seem like such a big deal, but in 2001, U.S. firms spent
$4.5 billion on enterprise-integration software designed to do much the same
thing. Within a few years, Web services may make this task much easier, cheaper,
and more flexible. In the meantime, BEA Systems (BEAS), IBM (IBM), Microsoft
(MSFT), Oracle (ORCL), and Sun Microsystems (SUNW) are revamping their products
to take advantage of the transition to Web services standards.
Business 2.0's Web Guide to Web Services: Issues & Commentary
What else?
Enfish's Onespace
Blox.com - applications that live online
eRoom.net - project collaboration software
Build
the Virtual Meeting Place
by Garrett Michael Hayes
Internet Week, February 26, 2001
OfficeClip.com - virtual office online
Appcity - Develop Web and Wireless applications, overnight, without programmers.
ThinkFree - Access your applications and files from any computer with a browser, anywhere you are.
Radio - Streams news from authoritative publications.
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