Wars will no longer be fought in battlefields. They will be fought, not with megaton bombs, but with megabits of data. These wars might be virtual, but the winners will be real. It's up to you to decide; you can be the master of the Web or a meager fly caught in its fibers.

I wrote a series of articles about the Web Technologies in the first few issues of DQ Channels. I believed in the technologies then and I still believe in them. The foolish investors who rushed to invest billions of dollars in the new technologies created the dot com bubble, which burst in due course. It left behind devastation on the Wall Street and a powerful set of Web technologies and a priceless infrastructure connecting the entire world-the World Wide Web of Optical Fibers.

Carly Fiorina, the former HP CEO, was one of the first few visionaries to realize what was happening. She declared in her public speeches that the dot-com boom and bust was just 'the end of the beginning'. She said, "The last 25 years in technology have just been the warm-up act. Now we are going into the main event." This will be an era in which technology will truly transform every aspect of business, of government, of society and of life.

Get connected
It is going to be an era of smart and pervasive technologies, pulling together the benefits of different technologies and application platforms. The world is shrinking and getting completely covered by the so-called Internet cloud! Just plug in to this cloud and everything will be accessible to you, from the industrial controllers in your factory to the home security system in your house. Some people prefer to call it the all-IP future.

As always, there will be many standards, hyped up claims and competing solutions garbed in different jargons. Solution providers will need to focus more on the real customer value rather than getting entangled in the hype. Solutions that connect people to their business in the virtual world to produce results in the real world will assume utmost importance.

According to Thomas L Friedman, the author of 'The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century', globalization has entered a whole new phase and the flattening of the world has already begun. He realized this when talking to Nandan Nilekani of Infosys, when Nandan said during the course of the conversation, "Tom, the playing field is being leveled."

Massive investments in technology, especially the millions of dollars invested in putting broadband connectivity around the world have culminated in making powerful means of communication available to people across the globe. It doesn't matter anymore if you are in Boston, Bangalore or Beijing.

Such advances in the worldwide connectivity have helped in deploying supply chain management and other enterprise solutions in such a way that buyers like Wal-Mart can accurately control the goods being produced for them in far away lands like China. Voice and Video over IP allow vendors to stay connected and interact in real time with their customers in all parts of the world. This makes it a true 24/7 business environment.

Broadband: The all purpose tool
The Megabit wars are already on. While the US is still happy with two megabits speeds, South Korea is surging ahead with 20 megabits speeds. The South Koreans are using their smart phones in the business, schools and homes for e-mail, video-conferencing, e-learning, banking, stock trading, shopping, bill payments, entertainment and many other things.

In Seoul and other large cities like Busan, broadband (wired or wireless) has become as basic a utility as water or electricity. Solutions based on smart phones as a user interface will soon become all pervasive. 39.5 million South Koreans - of a total population of 48.5 million – are expected to carry broadband-enabled handsets by 2008. The speeds are expected to touch 100 Megabits by 2012.

With hardware sizes shrinking everyday, tremendous computing power can now be packed into handheld devices like PDAs and smart phones. Multiple wireless communication options from low power – short-range to high power – long range are becoming available with built-in security. A smart phone can directly connect you to security systems, industrial controllers, access-control systems, medical devices, environmental controls, and building-automation systems.

In a truly 24/7 scenario, a production supervisor from a chemical plant might receive a process alert on his smart phone at home directly from a process control system. Without having to go to the plant in the middle of the night, he could then log on to the control system from his smart phone and make adjustments to the parameters through the graphical user interface on the device's screen to bring the system back on track. He could even send an instant report to his superiors about the situation.

Symbian as operating system
Smart phones, PDAs and other such devices will ultimately converge into a pervasive-computing interface, which will almost become an extension of the user, allowing transparent interaction with the world through the Internet Cloud!

User authentication will also be built-in to such devices through biometric sensors. There is no standardization in sight yet, as these devices are powered by different operating systems such as Symbian, Palm, Linux, Blackberry, Microsoft, and other proprietary operating systems running on different processors.

Symbian is currently the leading Smart Phone operating system, accounting for a very large share of worldwide shipments. For the developers of interfacing solutions, it is still a difficult task, as each operating system requires different software-development and maintenance tools. To simplify the problems on the user side, the only way is to restrict Smart Phone users to a common service provider and a single handset model.

Various types of miniature Web Server Modules, just about a square inch in size, are available as drop-in boards that provide a serial interface on one side and an Ethernet interface on the other. With the networking software built in to the modules, these can be used to build smart phone compatible embedded-systems. The World Wide Web Wars will be fought and won using these smart gadgets!

The author is an independent consultant, and can be reached at: Ashok Dongre

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