I was interested to read stats from comScore this week which showed that as of December 2008, the global Internet audience has now surged past the one billion mark, fuelled by users in China. With 180 million Internet users, China represents nearly 18% of the total worldwide Internet audience, followed by the US (16.2%), Japan (6%), Germany (3.7%) and the UK (3.6%). When you consider that Tim Berners-Lee wrote the World Wide Web server in 1990, and the web did not really become commercialised until 1998, the figure is just astounding – particularly in light of the fact that half of the world’s population is impoverished.
Undoubtedly, the Internet has been a major agent of change in the life of just about everyone in the industrialised world. Most of us are now only just becoming used to the idea of the next incarnation of the Internet, the mobile web. However few of us are prepared for the third and most revolutionary phase of the Internet which is just around the corner – the Internet of Things. According to some futurists, sometime between now and 2010 the Internet is poised to reach beyond virtual space and take root in the physical world. Almost every object has the potential to be connected to the Internet – everyday items like domestic appliances, clothes, books and cars may one day be assigned a unique IP address to enable them to talk to one another.
Recently, a coalition of big technology companies, Cisco, Ericsson and Sun Microsystems among them, formed the Ipso (IP for smart objects) Alliance, www.ipso-alliance.org, with the aim of shaping a set of standards for the coming Internet of Things.
Imagine IP enabled lights that can switch off as someone walks along a corridor or rooms that are only heated when some one is in them, or smoke detectors capable of turning off gas appliances.
Few experts doubt that the Internet of Things will have a profound effect on the world but many have fears about a world where “the environment is the Web”, a phrase coined by Kevin Kelly of Wired magazine. Will we become enslaved to our devices or use the technology to improve our quality of life? There is no doubt that this next phase of the Internet will gradually enter our lives over the coming years, in fact some say it is already here. It will be interesting to revisit this post in a couple of years to see how humanity has coped with the change.
