Morgan Stanley has released the 2010 edition of State of the Internet (pdf) report. The report primarily highlights the exponential growth of the mobile web in coming years. It hints that Mobile Will Be Bigger Than Desktop Internet in 5 Years and then takes a deep dive into mobile internet. The report shares deep analysis of the following:
1.Wealth Creation / Destruction is Material in New Computing Cycles – Now in Early Innings of Mobile Internet Cycle, the 5th Cycle of Last Half Century. 2.Mobile Ramping Faster than Desktop Internet Did and Will Be Bigger Than Most Think – 5 Trends Converging (3G + Social Networking + Video + VoIP + Impressive Mobile Devices). 3.Apple Leading in Mobile Innovation + Impact, for Now – Depth of App Ecosystems + User Experience + Pricing Will Determine Long-Term Winners. 4.Game-Changing Communications / Commerce Platforms (Social Networking + Mobile) Emerging Very Rapidly. 5.Massive Data Growth Driving Carrier / Equipment Transitions. 6.Growth / Monetization Roadmaps Provided by Japan Mobile + Desktop Internet.
The report is authored by Mary Meeker, Scott Devitt and Liang Wu and more is available about the report on GigaOm
The gap between technological innovation and its integration in our daily lives is shrinking at a rate much faster than we can keep pace with—consider the number of unique Web applications you signed up for in the past year alone. This has resulted in a very fragmented experience of the Web. While running several different browsers, with all sorts of plug-ins, you might also be running multiple standalone applications to manage feeds, social media accounts and music playlists.
Even though we may be adept at switching from one tab or window to another, we should be working towards a more holistic Web experience, one that seamlessly integrates all of the functionality we need in the simplest and most contextual way. With this in mind, let’s review four trends that designers and developers would be wise to observe and integrate into their work so as to pave the way for a more holistic Web browsing experience:
Pew Internet has released a new report The Internet’s impact on Institutions of the Future which shows that innovative forms of online cooperation could result in more efficient and responsive for-profit firms, non-profit organizations, and government agencies by the year 2020.
* “By 2020, innovative forms of online cooperation will result in significantly more efficient and responsive governments, business, non-profits, and other mainstream institutions.”
Some 26% agreed with the opposite statement, which posited:
* ”By 2020, governments, businesses, non-profits and other mainstream institutions will primarily retain familiar 20th century models for conduct of relationships with citizens and consumers online and offline.”
While their overall assessment anticipates that humans’ use of the internet will prompt institutional change, many elaborated with written explanations that expressed significant concerns over organization’s resistance to change. They cited fears that bureaucracies of all stripes – especially government agencies – can resist outside encouragement to evolve. Some wrote that the level of change will affect different kinds of institutions at different times. The consensus among them was that businesses will transform themselves much more quickly than public and non-profit agencies.
Many selected the “change” option, but said they were not sure drastic change will occur in organizations by the 2020 time frame. They said the most significant impact of the internet on institutions will occur after that. Some noted this change will cause tension and disruption.
The respondents who addressed the issue of “innovative forms of online cooperation” sometimes referred to activities between people and institutions that were post-bureaucratic. They argued that people could use the internet and cell phones to create alternative, un-bureaucratic structures to solve problems through network-structured communities.
Andrew Webster on Arstechnica suggests that the future of gaming is cloud computing. Interesting read on the past relations between the cloud and the gaming world and how it is shaping up for the future :
Many non-gamers and casual gamers who’ve heard the cloud computing hype might be surprised to learn that the cloud is actually changing the way we play games. From the ever-evolving Steam and Impulse to upcoming services like OnLive, the cloud has already had a serious impact on the games industry, and with a slew of new services on tap for later this year and next, that impact is slated to grow enormously. This shift to the cloud has implications far beyond the gaming experience—every aspect of the multibillion dollar business of gaming will be affected, from distribution and sales to quality assurance to anti-piracy controls….
"Kevin Kelly writes that researchers at the Social Computing Lab at HP Labs in Palo Alto have found that social media content can predict real world outcomes. In their study, the researchers built a model that used chatter from Twitter to predict accurately the box-office revenues of upcoming movies weeks before the movies were released. When the sentiment of the tweet was factored in (how favorable it was toward the new movie), the prediction was even more exact. To quantify the sentiments in 3 million tweets, the team used anonymous workers from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to rate a sample of tweets, and then trained an algorithmic classifier to derive a rating for the rest. But predicting box office receipts may be only the beginning. ‘This method can be extended to a large panoply of topics [PDF], ranging from the future rating of products to agenda setting and election outcomes,’ the researchers write. ‘At a deeper level, this work shows how social media expresses a collective wisdom which, when properly tapped, can yield an extremely powerful and accurate indicator of future outcomes.’"
The HP’s Social Computing Lab focuses on methods for harvesting the collective intelligence of groups of people in order to realize greater value from the interaction between users and information. Their research includes collective intelligence (“wisdom of the crowd”), incentive design for accessing resources, social networks and their implications for information dissemination and collective attention.
ESA’s Technology Observatory has come up with a study that highlights online games as key future technology. The study, Online Game Technology for Space Education and System Analysis, looks at potential applications of different online game-playing technologies from the simplest content-oriented games through to Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) virtual worlds. The study suggests that immersive environments based on these technologies could enhance collaborative working of project scientists and engineers. It also recognized that exciting online games could prove an excellent tool for promoting space and supporting the teaching of science, technology, engineering and maths.
Jonathan Zittrain is a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Couple of years back he had authored the book "The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It ". His book is now available for download (pdf). At this time unfortunately Zittrain is in hospital and wish him swift and smooth recovery. About the book:
This extraordinary book explains the engine that has catapulted the Internet from backwater to ubiquity—and reveals that it is sputtering precisely because of its runaway success. With the unwitting help of its users, the generative Internet is on a path to a lockdown, ending its cycle of innovation—and facilitating unsettling new kinds of control.
IPods, iPhones, Xboxes, and TiVos represent the first wave of Internet-centered products that can’t be easily modified by anyone except their vendors or selected partners. These “tethered appliances” have already been used in remarkable but little-known ways: car GPS systems have been reconfigured at the demand of law enforcement to eavesdrop on the occupants at all times, and digital video recorders have been ordered to self-destruct thanks to a lawsuit against the manufacturer thousands of miles away. New Web 2.0 platforms like Google mash-ups and Facebook are rightly touted—but their applications can be similarly monitored and eliminated from a central source. As tethered appliances and applications eclipse the PC, the very nature of the Internet—its “generativity,” or innovative character—is at risk.
The Internet’s current trajectory is one of lost opportunity. Its salvation, Zittrain argues, lies in the hands of its millions of users. Drawing on generative technologies like Wikipedia that have so far survived their own successes, this book shows how to develop new technologies and social structures that allow users to work creatively and collaboratively, participate in solutions, and become true “netizens.”
TED: Ideas worth spreading : Games like World of Warcraft give players the means to save worlds, and incentive to learn the habits of heroes. What if we could harness this gamer power to solve real-world problems? Jane McGonigal says we can, and explains how.
Doc searls informs about The Future of the Internet IV, the study conducted by Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and Elon University. Survey respondents shared thousands of issues-exposing predictive statements tied to five "tension pairs" projecting their attitudes about the likely state of things in 2020. Experts were asked about the Internet and the evolution of: intelligence; reading and the rendering of knowledge; identity and authentication; gadgets and applications; and the core values of the Internet. The 45-page briefing as a PDF is available for downloaded here. In this report, you will find experts’ thoughts on the following issues:
1. Will Google make us stupid? 2. Will we live in the cloud or the desktop? 3. Will social relations get better? 4. Will the state of reading and writing be improved? 5. Will those in GenY share as much information about themselves as they age? 6. Will our relationship to key institutions change? 7. Will online anonymity still be prevalent? 8. Will the Semantic Web have an impact? 9. Are the next takeoff technologies evident now? 10. Will the Internet still be dominated by the end-to-end principle?
I am a big fan Slashdot.org, the original mob destination for nerds and what else can be the better way to start this blog by posting my submission which was accepted there.
santosh maharshi passes along an article on Edge by David Gelernter, the man who (according to the introduction) predicted the Web and first described cloud computing; he’s also a Unabomber survivor. Gelernter makes 35 predictions and assertions, some brilliant, some dubious.
“6. We know that the Internet creates ‘information overload,’ a problem with two parts: increasing number of information sources and increasing information flow per source. The first part is harder: it’s more difficult to understand five people speaking simultaneously than one person talking fast — especially if you can tell the one person to stop temporarily, or go back and repeat. Integrating multiple information sources is crucial to solving information overload. Blogs and other anthology-sites integrate information from many sources. But we won’t be able to solve the overload problem until each Internet user can choose for himself what sources to integrate, and can add to this mix the most important source of all: his own personal information — his email and other messages, reminders and documents of all sorts. To accomplish this, we merely need to turn the whole Cybersphere on its side, so that time instead of space is the main axis. … 14. The structure called a cyberstream or lifestream is better suited to the Internet than a conventional website because it shows information-in-motion, a rushing flow of fresh information instead of a stagnant pool.”
Morgan Stanley has released the 2010 edition of State of the Internet (pdf) report. The report primarily highlights the exponential growth of the mobile web in coming years. It hints that Mobile Will Be Bigger Than Desktop Internet in 5 Years and then takes a deep dive into mobile internet. The report shares deep analysis of the following:
