[Techtalk] The future of internet technology

[E. Sterling Wall]

That seems to me to be such an open question. The Internet is made up of
so MANY technologies, and all of them are constantly developing and
changing. It might help if you were to narrow it down into specific
subsections. 

For instance, you might be looking at new e-commerce technologies, such
as the kinds of personalization and community building (ahem, community
selling) software that you see on Amazon. Some of this is just a matter
of improved use of data that organizations already collect and hold.
Some of it is a matter of developing tools that people will actively use
to connect with other people and opinions. Taking from the Amazon
example again, think of "the store you made", recommendations, "other
people who bought this also bought...", dynamic product linking for
combination sales, dynamic price adjustments, and opt-in marketing which
includes intelligent customer selection for specific mailings. 

You could also be looking at Content Management which has come a long
way in the last 3 years but is still developing by leaps and bounds.
Many of the tools available right now under the guise of "CMS" are
really development intensive and don't allow for easy access by
lay-users until vast amounts of expenditure on product customization.
There is a huge market for CMS tools which are truly useful to the end
user right out of the box, but those will be a while in coming. There
are other technologies in Content which are still "future" oriented,
though.

XML has been the "language of the future" since the moment it came out.
It is already used in many different ways, but it still hasn't permeated
the culture as it eventually might. Oddly, some pundits who've missed
the ball entirely think that XML is a "could have ran". Actually, some
might be surprised at how many applications they use already have XML in
the background somewhere, from Microsoft applications to OpenSource
products. With the spread of technologies such as VXML and XHTML, the
continued evolution of XML cannot be ignored.

Then there's what I call "outreach technologies". These are tools that
allow the spread of the Internet beyond its current demesne. CoolBase
(http://www.cooltown.com) and its brethren fit into this category,
spreading the use of the Internet to assorted devices that are not
generally thought of as computers. There has been some question as to
how useful or secure these technologies will be, but it looks like an
inevitability that they will take hold, and perhaps more quickly than
people imagine. Just as computer systems were built into cars without
drivers thinking much about the jobs that the computers were doing,
these communication technologies will find their way into our
refrigerators and home security systems before most of us realize they
are there or why. (You will know that the police come automatically, not
that they were called by an IM-like alert instead of a phone call.) 

Another "outreach technology" might be the use of GPS coordinates as an
Internet address. By giving global space an address you allow things
like virtual post-it notes and air-graffiti. This is not for off either,
as some next generation phones in Europe and Japan already have GPS in
them, and similar location-based communication tools have already been
used with mobile phone users. (ZAPME.com did a number of SMS marketing
campaigns for their clients using cell-location based technology in the
UK, and BeepMarketing.com expects to continue on from that work into
SMS, GPRS, and WAP available campaigns based on location.)

This is just a smattering of ideas and just based on my own experience.
As I said in the begining, though, it all depends on what areas of
Internet Technology you are interested in. There are new technologies in
routing, security, information management, data harvesting, mobile
communication, Web-to-Other-Network (like Email to Voicemail), hardware,
and on and on and on...  it all depends on what's important to you and
your business.

-- elizabeth

Sumgai Technology
http://www.sumgai.co.uk
p. 01628 780738
m. 07766 073235