Internet Must Grow to Feed Mobile Phones’ Hunger, Stanford Prof Says

SANTA CLARA, Calif. - If Stanford professor and Oracle evangelist Timothy Chou is right, the future health of the mobile industry will be dependent on the 'cloud' -- geek-speak for the internet -- which currently holds only a fraction of the information that it will contain in the next few years.

In a panel sponsored by Carnegie Mellon and UC Berkeley today, the industry insider predicted that the more ubiquitious mobile cell phones become and the more we start to rely on them, the more wireless networks (and the internet) will need to grow to take on the demand.

But while cloud capacity will revolutionize community applications, providing more info that will be usable via mobile devices, it's pretty hard to visualize where we stand in terms of total information that is now available. To illustrate how early we are in the process, Dr. Chou threw out some interesting ideas and numbers:

• The current 'deep web' of information is approximately 10,000 times the surface of the web, where 'deep web' is defined as all the information buried in the hard drives and data networks of the hundreds thousands of businesses and individuals.
• A regular computer tower is 100 times more powerful than the iPhone, so a lot more of the power that we are used to using will go into the cloud.
• Because a lot of the information isn't in the cloud, many future businesses will use this need to create networks and companies to settle, arrange, and manipulate information in a useful manner.
• "Enterprise 2.0" is all about collective intelligence, or mass collaboration. Bringing social networks to a general audience that benefits from it will be part of the next step for large mobile companies.
• Transaction-oriented systems, like e-commerce and finance applications, will matter even more than they already do. These systems will enhance the overall quality of the 'cloud' when the accumulation of intelligent transactions come together. Some of the leading transaction providers are the NYSE (with 10 million transactions per day), Visa (100M per day), and Google (with 200M transactions per day). When these systems build on the search and buying patterns of individuals, the intelligence of the applications on the back end will know way more. For example, almost all of Amazon is more about managing information, rather a large shopping cart. But the more it builds upon your tastes, the closer it will get to create a satisfying transaction intelligence for the individual user.

So if you're the type that goes to the same grocery store, weekend after endless weekend, you won't be able to lie to your significant other later in life that you used to only eat tasty organic grapes and nuts. She'll know all about the chips, the beer, and the endless collection of meat.

Written by admin on April 22nd, 2008 with 1 comment.
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