the next information technology- a preview of tomorrow’s innovations and challenges-2008

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Nadir Belarbi - 1/5 The Next Information Technology: A Preview of Tomorrow’s Innovations and Challenges Nadir Belarbi, Sr Business & Innovation Manager http://www.linkedin.com/in/nadirbelarbi [email protected] New York, USA – October 2009 Abstract-This article discusses possible future Information Technology innovations based on current trends. We present three concepts that will likely shape future services and impact corporations, markets and societies: Hyper-Connectivity, Social/Semantic Web, Saas/Cloud computing and Micro- eEconomy. I. Signs of Change Trying to predict the future of Information Technology is always an interesting exercise; a real attempt to imagine the next wave of services on the basis of current breakthroughs. Tomorrow’s IT world will mostly be an aggregation of all the innovation and emerging technologies that the current players of the technosphere, are either envisioning or already experimenting. Predicting the future is nevertheless a difficult exercise as innovation’s pace can be influenced by multiple economic and technical factors. The impartial rule of “the time to market” will designate which technology will move from simple prototypes to widely available industrialized solutions. IT technology has reached a maturity but only ten years after the first Internet boom, a second revolution is quietly preparing its coup. In the next 5 to 10 years, technology and innovation will profoundly modify the way we interact with computers and the way we deal with information. I foresee a breaking point in the short term, based on the continuous technological and innovation watch, I have held for so many years now. In parallel with important achievements in nano and biotechnologies, I believe that the following factors will be possibly the greatest change enablers, leading to an upward shift in the trajectory of the information technology evolution. II. Media: Hyper-connectivity through wireless technologies White Space spectrum 1 will intrinsically lead to a sharp decrease of the wireless voice and data subscriptions. From this, we can expect current subscription rates of $80 per month to drop to $20-$30 per month in the next five years. As other wireless operators emerge (Google, Intel,...), phone carriers won’t long be able to resist the pressure brought about by voice over IP applications. A set of proprietary and open source applications, offering a combination of excellent voice and video quality, will likely end nearly a century of long distance billed calls. The move to high definition video transmissions will depend on available bandwidth and the deployment of 4G networks. New advanced compression techniques and the continual increase of processors computational power, will optimize bandwidth use. In the long term, Disruption- Tolerant Networking (DTN 2 ) will most certainly replace pure TCP/IP transmissions, allowing a continuous connectivity, even in poorly covered areas. The result will be a dizzying array of people always connected, always on the move. With web access available from any location, the defining line between the worlds of work and play will effectively vanish, causing profound change in the work/office concept. The consequences of being able to work from anywhere with the same ease afforded by the traditional office will be tangible and immediate. There will be a dramatic increase in the total number of information exchanges taking place in the form of emails, instant messages, approvals, and meetings-on-the-go, all facilitated by the expedited decision making enabled in this environment. Humans will resist these changes but the "Blackberisation" of the collaboration will reach another level, using the human natural compulsion and inclination to use any intelligent device for feeling more secure.

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Page 1: The Next Information Technology-  A Preview of Tomorrow’s Innovations and Challenges-2008

Nadir Belarbi - 1/5

The Next Information Technology: A Preview of Tomorrow’s Innovations and

Challenges

Nadir Belarbi, Sr Business & Innovation Manager

http://www.linkedin.com/in/nadirbelarbi [email protected]

New York, USA – October 2009

Abstract-This article discusses possible future Information Technology innovations based on current trends. We present three concepts that will likely shape future services and impact corporations, markets and societies: Hyper-Connectivity, Social/Semantic Web, Saas/Cloud computing and Micro-eEconomy.

I. Signs of Change Trying to predict the future of Information Technology is always an interesting exercise; a real attempt to imagine the next wave of services on the basis of current breakthroughs. Tomorrow’s IT world will mostly be an aggregation of all the innovation and emerging technologies that the current players of the technosphere, are either envisioning or already experimenting. Predicting the future is nevertheless a difficult exercise as innovation’s pace can be influenced by multiple economic and technical factors. The impartial rule of “the time to market” will designate which technology will move from simple prototypes to widely available industrialized solutions. IT technology has reached a maturity but only ten years after the first Internet boom, a second revolution is quietly preparing its coup. In the next 5 to 10 years, technology and innovation will profoundly modify the way we interact with computers and the way we deal with information. I foresee a breaking point in the short term, based on the continuous technological and innovation watch, I have held for so many years now. In parallel with important achievements in nano and biotechnologies, I believe that the following factors will be possibly the greatest change enablers, leading to an upward shift in the trajectory of the information technology evolution.

II. Media: Hyper-connectivity through wireless technologies

White Space spectrum1 will intrinsically lead to a sharp decrease of the wireless voice and data subscriptions. From this, we can expect current subscription rates of $80 per month to drop to $20-$30 per month in the next five years. As other wireless operators emerge (Google, Intel,...), phone carriers won’t long be able to resist the pressure brought about by voice over IP applications. A set of proprietary and open source applications, offering a combination of excellent voice and video quality, will likely end nearly a century of long distance billed calls. The move to high definition video transmissions will depend on available bandwidth and the deployment of 4G networks. New advanced compression techniques and the continual increase of processors computational power, will optimize bandwidth use. In the long term, Disruption-Tolerant Networking (DTN2) will most certainly replace pure TCP/IP transmissions, allowing a continuous connectivity, even in poorly covered areas. The result will be a dizzying array of people always connected, always on the move. With web access available from any location, the defining line between the worlds of work and play will effectively vanish, causing profound change in the work/office concept. The consequences of being able to work from anywhere with the same ease afforded by the traditional office will be tangible and immediate. There will be a dramatic increase in the total number of information exchanges taking place in the form of emails, instant messages, approvals, and meetings-on-the-go, all facilitated by the expedited decision making enabled in this environment. Humans will resist these changes but the "Blackberisation" of the collaboration will reach another level, using the human natural compulsion and inclination to use any intelligent device for feeling more secure.

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People will not only read emails or answer short and instant messages. They will also connect with others, see them and show them their world, via recorded or streamed videos, browse the web guided by customized recommendations based on their profile and actions, and in relation to their location thanks to geo-localization. The real world will become too simple, too flat, too calm and ultimately unexciting. New devices with flexible screens or e-screens3, (some prototypes are already available), will gradually be integrated into existing mobile devices. Eventually, these foldable devices will completely replace today’s small but bulky devices. New polymers, nano-designed technologies and printable circuits will accelerate the change and the industrialization of these innovations, which will sharply decrease prices. LCD and Plasma TVs are an example of this trend, where prices have fallen inversely proportional to time in the past decade while their quality has sharply increased. 3D vision will likely first emerge from the TV world and later conquer the Web due to games and other virtual reality environments. Increasingly, outsiders will join the heretofore circle of phone/PDA/ photo and GPS devices. It’s difficult to imagine any compact camera in the future without a wireless connection or a GPS. Already photo applications like the Apple’s iPhoto use geolocalization which can be combined and automated with WIFI localization using SD memory camera cards. The lines between these devices will continuously blur and tomorrow’s device will probably just be named Pods or Pads; marketers will decide. In theory, any device will be able to connect wirelessly to the web, update its configuration and even send or receive requests and commands. Cars, mediacenters and TVs, alarm systems, home heating and cooling systems, etc, will become active members of the Web. The next Semantic Web4, which we will cover in the next section, will be extended to non-computer devices allowing them to interact intelligently with web services, other devices and ultimately people. The autonomy of these devices will be greatly improved as a result of solid disks, new processors, nano-technologies and fuel cells. A decade from now, most of the devices’ power sources will require no more than a monthly. Mobility will be freed from its energy constraints. Voice recognition will be the perfect complement to a mobile, visual and flexible web on the go.

Google is already offering a voice search via the Android platform where future sound canceling systems will isolate callers’ from the surrounding noise. Hyper-connectivity will become the new standard by which people stay connected. The consumer landscape of the future is already discernable; a consumer base continuously on the move, demanding increased responsiveness from corporations and merchants; an atmosphere of heightened competition as those same corporations and merchants struggle to capture changing consumption patterns of users saturated with information and sales offers. Operational Marketing, as we know it today, will vanish. The new generation of connectivity will accelerate users’ migration from the passive entrainment of broadcast television to the interactive and rich connected web services, requiring changes in the delivery, frequency and content of marketing messages. New trends will emerge daily, replacing the old, born just a few weeks or days ago.

II. Content: A Social and Semantic Web Hyper-connectivity will likely spread faster than the new wave of Hyper-Social and Semantic Web. However, the revolution won’t come from the swarm of mobile devices continuously connected to the Web but from the Semantic applications that will be gradually added to it. The hackneyed and misunderstood Web 2.0 is currently rapidly evolving and its wave of communities gatherings is expanding. Interactivity, information and feedback sharing will be mandatory components of any mercantile or informational web site. Hyper-connected users will no longer just type their inputs but will increasingly express themselves with snapshots and recorded or streamed videos, an easy way to quickly share their thoughts and opinions, or to simply ask and answer questions. Real time video use will increase; causing a plethora of spontaneous feeds to continuously challenge the bandwidth of Internet routers, as events both significant and mundane are documented as they unfold. As with Twitter today, anyone will be able to have his fifteen minutes of fame as a reporter. Journalists will begin to emerge from the users of the Hyper-Web and information will no longer be the exclusive domain of major international information agencies. An important shift in the

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way information is shaped today and how the “truth du jour” is managed. The first victims of this trend are professional photographers who are already targeted in layoffs and compressions as lately at the Gamma photo agency. Journalists, TV reporters, writers will follow. Quality will be increasingly available and reachable through the Web. As any and all events are covered and commented upon, the Wikipidisation of the news will begin. The increasing flow of information will challenge servers and networks capacities, pushing them to their limits and transforming Datacenters in gigantic energy devourers. More than ever, delivering an uninterrupted service will be a critical factor in the user retention. The expanding mass of information will require enhanced search engines capable of indexing the new and hidden information, the web dark matter. Search engines will need to combine indexing techniques with semantic to provide pertinent search results. Searching audio and video information will be a challenge but social meta-tagging will precede the emergence of a more intelligent content tagging that will take probably a decade to become operational. But the revolution won't really be there. The Semantic web will bring to the Internet what oriented-object has brought to programming; structure and pre-intelligence. The wave of meta-languages, like XML, that shaped web page design and structure has already morphed into new ontological languages able to structure any exchange between compatible applications. Any device with a connected and programmable framework, will be able to participate in Semantic web hyper-activity; including cars, TVs, mediacenters, photoframes, refrigators, etc. The structuralization of the information exchanges will foster the emergence of autonomous applications, using simple intelligent agents able to negotiate prices, book airline tickets or simply activate other remote wirelessly connected Semantic devices. A real Artificial Intelligence is not for the next decade, neither for the next several. Increasing the computational power of microprocessors with hundreds of cores will reduce the computation time but certainly not create an intelligent from a cognitive point of view. Some form of intelligent behavior will, of course be achieved as computers and devices will become able to

learn and respond to certain commands and stimuli but they won't very likely be able to design new devices from scratch. And though enabling a device or application to perform actions according to a predefined set of rules, may tempt us to label it as intelligence, it’s but a very rudimentary intelligence, at that. That being said, in five years, we will probably see the emergence of a new type of autonomic services, able to learn simple tasks and execute simple actions on behalf of the user. Execution times will be reduced and repetitive actions will be taken over by a swarm of connected virtual machines comprising a basic intelligence. From a large perspective, the questions arises “will this distribution of basic intelligence, give birth to a form of multi-agent, neuronal intelligence?” In some ways yes, the web will act independently of its users interactions, continuously searching for the best deals and most efficient parameters, while simultaneously exchanging information and beating to the tempo of its hyper-connected users but the Singularity5 will remain a long term objective. Without a global set of rules enforced by distributed controllers, the Semantic web will be difficult to regulate, leading to overflows, denials of service, unwanted disclosure of private information and increasing vulnerability to hacking. The Semantic web will attempt to self-regulate, creating unexpected states of information and behavior, and fast moving concentrations of information and interactions with virtual nodes among computers, mobile devices, servers and applications. But despite these risks, the semantic web will rule and conquer the social web arena and business to consumer services, taking by surprise an old and unprepared corporate world dealing in antiquated managements methods. I am astonished by how most graduate schools of business programs are not addressing these future trends in order to prepare managers for this new age of hyper-connectivity and hyper-Information. It’s actually not a really surprise; the strategic role of IT in corporations is not even addressed today. The corporation paradigm will be torn a part and profoundly affected by the IT and technological changes to come in the next years. As the Industrial revolution forever changed the artisanal manufacturing world, the Hyper-Web will upend today’s corporations. From a geopolitical standpoint, these IT, bio, nano-technology changes will completely redefine the world’s

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distribution of powers. Any nation not currently investing in these trends, will fail. Several decades from now, the innovations brought by these technologies, will have minimized the importance of cheap labor force. Margins will increase as a result of innovative products and processes and not because of outsourcing. Specialization will be essential to master these technologies and nations who haven’t prioritized strong scientific education will fail. There's a price to pay to stay ahead; the price of learning cutting edge technologies. These innovations will create value and establish the next financial centers, the rewards of which will pay dividends far greater their costs.

III. SaaS: Clouds on the Corporate IT The Software As A Service (SaaS6) paradigm will takeover small, medium and large businesses in the same way free trade forced a thousands of corporations to outsource their activities to Asia. Even the most reluctant corporations will be forced to follow the trend, sacrificing some data confidentiality and security for acceptable risk, just to keep up with a rapid and changing software environment. Users have already fallen prey to the appeals of the Google Gmail, Facebook and LinkedIn services. They are willing to accept exposing part of their personal information in exchange for free services they perceive as having value. Corporations will certainly be the next to fall. Reality is cruel. Today, no corporate IT department is quick to setup and deploy new services according to their business needs. The intrinsic complexity of the financial and organizational structures of modern corporations hinders any attempt to go faster. Even new fancy project management methodology recipes won’t be able to manage a growing active market catalyzed by a Semantic Web with a continuously changing set of services and users. Twenty years from now, markets will be extremely competitive. Globalization will lead to the equalization the income levels of the Chinese and India economies with their Western counterparts. Selling to this saturated sphere of ever-connected and moving users will be a challenge. Traditional IT organizations won’t be able to keep up with the quick-change requirements.

Quick adaptation and responsiveness will be a benefit offered by specialized outsourcers as today's Sales.com for the corporate sales force. By then, enterprise resource planning (ERP) software such as SAP will be cast of the corporate temples. Difficult to maintain and upgrade, with an ever-increasing competition from specialized on-line services from the cloud, this dinosaur will slowly disappear from the IT scene. Corporations unable to flow the pace of these rapid changes will fail. Quick adaptability to change will become “the next big thing“ in marketing with a permanent requirement for new products, new messages, new ideas, new applications and new trends to be competitive and increase market shares. The school of hyper-connected and highly-saturated consumers will continuously seek novelty. The "flipping phenomenon" originally triggered by TV remote controls, will be a web behavioral pattern, fostered by social bookmarking and tweeting. In the next twenty years, IT internal services will morph into out-of the box, customized software as application services (SaaS) hosted by outsourced datacenters immersed in the cloud. As it evolves, technology intrinsically seeks to provide rich functions through user-friendly interfaces masking its complexity. As for today’s computers, new SaaS services will be easy to use and customizable with defined costs, features and level of services, a dream of any Chief Financial Officer. By 2050, IT departments will vanish into the Cloud and the SaaS service manager will contact the CFO or CIO, once a month to check that services are rendered as expected. In the long term, corporations will subscribe to new services in the cloud, without worrying about or how long a new service requires to be running. IV. Micro-eEconomy: A Hyper-Connected and Hyper-

Active Web Combine all these factors and cast them into the real world to reveal a new Web economy. Extremely active, fostered by hyper-connectivity and consumers able to connect from almost any place, semantic applications continuously negotiating prices, consumer constantly solicited to buy goods bases on their profiles and under acceptable price sustained by continuous sales and promotions.

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The Web on the rise will definitely foster the pay per use services. The first goods impacted by the change were digital but the trend will expand to other traditional goods. The music industry will mostly sell songs rather than albums. This set of micro-services will dynamize and fluidify sales on the Net. The emerging services of this micro-economy won’t be the only ones to take advantage of the plethora of wandering consumers. With geo-localization, restaurants, shops, hotels, taxicabs and others will be able to jump into an augmented reality virtual web and offer promotions to connected users, as they pass by their premises. In the near future, not existing on the Web, will really mean to be dead.

References

[1] White Space Spectrum, "IEEE 802 LAN/MAN Standards Committee 802.22 WG on WRANs (Wireless Regional Area Networks)". IEEE. http://www.ieee802.org/22/. Retrieved 2009-01-18. [2] A Delay-Tolerant Network Architecture for Challenged Internets, K. Fall, SIGCOMM, August 2003. [3] Flexible Screens Get Touchy-Feely, MIT Technology Review, February 27, 2009. http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/22232/ [4] Grigoris Antoniou, Frank van Harmelen (2008-03-31). A Semantic Web Primer, 2nd Edition. The MIT Press. ISBN 0262012421. http://www.amazon.com/Semantic-Primer-Cooperative-Information-Systems/dp/0262012421/. [5] The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, Ray Kurzweil, Viking Adult, 2005. [6] Traudt, Erin; Amy Konary (June 2005). "2005 Software as a Service Taxonomy and Research Guide". IDC. pp. 7.

Nadir Belarbi received a Master Degree in Networks and Telecommunications from Paris V University & Sup Telecom Paris, France (1994), studied 3 years of studies and research on Intelligent Networks during a PhD program (1997) and received an Executive MBA from the Chicago University, Booth Graduate School of Business, USA (2008). He has worked for IBM, Air France, Groupe Danone. He currently leads Business & Innovation projects at Dannon. Nadir Belarbi’s research has spanned a large number of disciplines, emphasizing information technology and telecommunications with a focus on emerging technologies. As a manager with multi-cultural skills speaking five languages, he worked in an international environment where he specialized in the coordination and lobbying of global organizations. His political and social experience ranges from heading the corporate work council to participating in political and geopolitical organizations and think tanks. With a major interest in Intelligence, Technology & Energy roles in Geopolitical, Military & Security issues, also manages a LinkedIn group on Business, Innovation & Geopolitics.