At the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Summit conference in San Francisco, a context switch from Web 2.0 to cloud computing is well under way. Wired’s Kevin Kelly suggested a variation of the Semantic Web where pages give way to the data on the pages, with each of those chunks representing real objects in physical space, or as Kelly said, anything that can hold an electric charge.
AT&T’s Ralph de la Vega told Mike Arrington that he foresaw a world where phones controlled TVs, coffee machines, cars, and every other device along the way to and from work. The notion of a universal remote or mouse as Microsoft Research defined it years ago is now becoming an economic reality, one that de la Vega suggests is recession-immune as of now. The presence of a keyboard, whether physical as per the Blackberry Bold or virtual on the iPhone, is the new dividing line, with AT&T deriving north of $95 a month revenue versus $58 per month for the average user.
