In a near future, a variety of wireless sensor networks will be part of our environment: at home, in the workspace, and everywhere we go. Objects may embed a tiny computer with sensors: how will this make a difference to people? How will people access and discover services?

Think about your mobile phone as if it were a magnifier you can use to explore the world around you; when you pass on an object with a sensor embedded, you may activate a hyperlink from this object leading to information and services, a sort of an “amplified reality” where things and related information are integrated. The hyperlink opens a real time window with information on the object.

Other companies could use this technology to mash-up information and new services on other companies’ products and on their products. If a company’s product remains connected and is flexible to accommodate new services it can be upgraded based on new offers becoming available and on the use it is being made of that product.  The product, to all effects morphs into a service. Will the biz model also shifts towards a service biz model?

Some trials are been done at MIT with the TRICORDER, a mobile sensor network browser (take a look at http://www.media.mit.edu/resenv/tricorder/tricorder.htm) developed by the Responsive Environment Group lead by Joseph A. Paradiso.

The name TRICORDER comes from the science fiction STAR TREK where it was a device capturing physical data from the environment, such as temperature, life presence, the kind of materials, intensity of magnetic field, or whatever was pointed out.

The TRICORDER developed at the MIT; gets data from surrounding wireless sensor networks; just point the device and it gives you real time information intercepted by sensors from the environment.

The GUI (Graphics User Interface) is simple, it shapes the environment in two dimensions; in the future, the background will be the real ambient in 3D with Hyperlink integration. Take a look at this video: http://www.media.mit.edu/resenv/tricorder/tricorder_tv.avi.

This MIT’s prototype could be an example of a mobile sensor network browser that may be implemented in our cell phones in the future.

Google is aware of your lifestyle. Scaring isn’t it? But it is true. Actually, maybe it can tell more about you than your own parents or very close friends. How?

1)    Google has your e-mail – Gmail
2)    Google has your contact database – Gmail
3)    Google has your pictures – Picasa
4)    Google has your videos – Youtube
5)    Google may host your Internet domain  – Google applications. They know your job.
6)    Google knows your search tags and, if you are logged on in a GMAIL account, it can map your searching preferences.
7)    Google can manage your mobile phone – Android, their mobile Operational System.
8)    Google knows where you are. By two different ways: if you have ever browsed the maps application logged on in a GMAIL account or if you have installed the maps on your mobile phone.
9)    Google may know your mobile phone number. Remember: you can install many mobile applications on it, i.e. google maps, gmail etc.
10)     Google may know your bookmarks – Chrome browser.
11)     Google may know your computer files – Google Desktop Search Engine.
12)     Google is aiming more and more on cloud computing. They can host your files on the Google Documents Application.
13)     Google knows what you like to write, if you use the BLOGGER platform.
14)     Google knows your friends and related communities – ORKUT.
15)     Google knows what your chat history is – Google Talk.

So, what they want? Simply rule the world without charging you for that? Rule your life? No, their business is information and information is power in a business ecosystem. The revenue comes mostly from advertisement, which means that a network of third party companies pay the bill. Who owns user information has the privilege of becoming a seed, and ecosystems are created around these sort of seed: open sourced, accessible, and heavily based on user collaboration and interaction.

How can TELECOM companies leverage the CUSTOMER LIFE INFORMATION + INTERNET + MOBILITY business model? Becoming a totally integrated service provider, connecting the third parties companies providing fast radio network for data transmission and charging them for the “User Anywhere Accessibility” on their platforms. Mobility means that the customers don’t have to be in front of a computer to perform financial transactions, shopping or IP chatting. The mobile phone is going to be your credit card, your personal identity, bringing the WEB X.0 user interaction and communities all in one service to its most distant border with high flexibility, thereby linking banks, shop stores, your daily issues, school, intranet and everything you like for entertainment.

Best part is to know who you are, what you’re looking for and how to manage it. Remember, your life is now measured in bits and everything about you is stored somewhere.

On March 23rd Skype has made its application available on iTunes appStore and yesterday Network World titled “Mobile Skype: the end of cellular as we know it”.

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/033009-mobile-skype-the-end-of.html?hpg1=bn

It is interesting to see that Apple is restricting the use of Skype on the iPhone to the WiFi to avoid hampering the AT&T business on their 3G network (and that of other Operators). My personal take is that this limitation will not last for long.

Clearly, one way out for an Operator is to charge for bits so that the call will be pricey but that is also decreasing the appeal of using the iPhone to connect to the Web, something that has proven to be a golden egg for Operators given the pleasure in using the iPhone as a browser! Also, this approach would limit the use of many applications based on data access and exchange.

In the long run this policy may hamper new revenues and it is probably not going to stop the shrinking of the present ones.

This is just another example of the Telecommunication paradox: we have a growing demand of communication, exponentially growing traffic and at the same time a dwindling of revenues.  Operators need to find new revenue streams based on different models.

Skype disrupts the value chain by creating an alternative communications channel that is “funneled” in existing communication channels exploiting different tarifing schemes. We need to look at a broader picture where value chains are part of an ecosystem and we should look at ways to harvest value in that ecosystem space.

OK, so let’s assume that people will be using Skype extensively (let’s forget for the moment the issue of wireless network saturation that is probably a second level concern, since saturation is more likely to derive from other sorts of data traffic). They will probably start to shift their perception of communication from the telephone call paradigm to the communication space paradigm. In the former you place a call, in the second you are always connected.

This extends to being always connected to other people, but also to information, but also to your enterprise, your work team, your clients…Who is going to leverage on that? What kind of services can be offered to an enterprise who can place its employees on the same space of its clients, providers, resellers? There is a whole new space, and plenty of opportunities, to generate revenues.

It is going to be a new world, new businesses, but it requires new eyes to look at it.

The world around me is no longer “out there”. It is becoming an integral part of my dialogue. I talk to things. Well, it is not actually talking, but it feels like it. I have a cell phone and with it I can interact with most objects around me. And I discover that objects may change over time, as result of our interaction. It is not just my cell phone. My car is also interacting with the environment and brings me in into this interaction. Of course the car is talking with road signals, it is getting information like “fog ahead”, “pit hole in the tarmac”, “ice around the bend” and takes preventive actions. But this is what is known as M2M, machine to machine and also as the Internet of Things.
No, what I am talking about is the Internet with Things.

Things have started in the previous decade to be connected to Internet and a variety of enterprises have started to piggy back on these things to wrap information and services on them. Most of these enterprises, in the first phase, were the ones that produced that thing. Since more and more objects were embedding a computer and an interface enabling communication with Internet, it looked interesting to exploit them by providing additional features to the product, in some cases uploading new software releases on it to deliver better functionalities or patching up faulty behaviour. In other cases the communication was exploited to monitor the product remotely.

It took little time to see other enterprises taking advantage of these new objects capability to start offering their “wares”, information and services. The object has become an interesting distribution channel, an effective way to reach a potential customer.

Regulation is probably the main enabler, and hurdle, in the foreseen evolution. Regulation plays at a different level and in the various stages of the information acquisition, storage, usage, sharing.

In the acquisition phases regulation can force the various actors to make information available to the owner (the one who directly or indirectly generated it). Today there is the theoretical possibility of acquiring our information that is residing in some Company or Institution data base; in practice the only sure thing is that we can ask for its deletion (though it is almost impossible to be sure that it will be done).

In the storage phase, regulation can provide some limits to service offer and liability. However it is clearly in the usage and sharing that regulation can set up a trusted framework that can enable or delay business development.

Fact is, there is no marking on information and there is basically no control. Technology may provide answers to this and significant work is required starting from the assumption that personal information will be created more and more, and that we have to find ways for managing it.

The availability of massive quantity of information will lend itself to statistical analyses. It will provide a lot of raw material to study behaviour, markets, social relations.

Quantitative analyses and statistical approach will open up new ways to understand societies and results will benefit communities and individuals.

It is likely that new representation paradigms will be required to make out sense of these analyses.

Possibly, some new Application Programming Interfaces, standardised at a global level, would be required and instrumental in the diffusion of acquisition systems. Personal data bases (semantic based) will also be required, as well as a set of defined interfaces to access information, neutralise them, share them, tag them. Data encapsulation technologies are required to an extent never approached before.

Some authority shall be in place to take care of privacy and ownership issues and streamline effective usage of information. In a way we will see the same kind of issues that have been confronting us with the growth of information on the Internet, however the solutions (or lack of solutions) adopted so far may not respond to the need posed by these new Internet of digital shadows.

We are already seeing some of these issues emerging in Facebook, SecondLife, Blogs and Twitter. These are today’s shared repositories of personal information. We are already seeing a variety of applications exploiting these repositories, and already feeling the brunt in several occasions.

Storage evolution beyond the TB in handheld is assumed and this assumption can be taken as a fact. We should reach this in 2012 in top of the line cell phones, it can be common by 2015. By 2020 we can expect multi-TB hand terminals to be the norm. Home storage will probably be in the 50 TB range and the whole storage will morph into a cloud from a user perspective. Seamless synchronization among different “owned” repositories will be the norm, as well as to rely to network based storage. These may be provided by trusted parties but will also be provided by “interested” parties, that is those that are giving away storage capacity to attract clients, may be a few of these will negotiate rights to use part of the data being stored.

Since the cost of storage will continue to decrease in the foreseeable future, the cost itself will not be an issue. 1TB of storage will cost less than 1 euro by 2020 (that’s assuming a 500 fold decrease in the next 12 years, a reasonable assumption, at the present trend we would only need 9 years to reach that decrease factor).

The social culture is likely to favour these shared storage, some Social Networks may provide storage for their constituencies.

Sensors and local communications area (particularly near field) will be instrumental to collect data, like the ones related to business transactions (buying things). Mash ups architectures, allowing several players to mash ups information on objects and on other information will be equally important.

Whenever I talk about a Digital Life and the information generated, and used by ourselves and others, the Big Brother Ghost appears. Privacy concerns, rightly so, are at the forefront.

However, I also have the opportunity of travelling the world and I noticed quite different reactions to personal information sharing. Whilst in Europe the privacy concern is overwhelming, in the USA it gets twisted in biz and social considerations before emerging as a top priority for the individual. You can feel it as you step in the US when they take your finger prints (over and over, I still wonder why…) and photo, in security cameras following you as you move around the streets…. In China I still have to discover if there exists a Chinese word to express the concept of Privacy.

I can also see differences in different age groups. We, the old bunch, are very concerned, whilst the Digital Native have a completely different idea of privacy, it is more related to their social groups (that seldom have no boundaries) than to the person.

My daughter chats with her boyfriend in a public Facebook chat, even though privacy is just one click away. Apparently they choose to live their life within their community.

If you have doubts, look at IYouIt, SharedLife, LifeLog…

I have my ideas on the digital life and its related information: I am belonging to the old (but wild) bunch and therefore privacy is a priority. But so is the possibility of exploiting the Information Society and My Information.  I look at privacy more from the point of view of ownership. That is my information, I should be able to do what I want with it, and to let other see, use, exploit, or not, this information of mine.

Still, whenever I am saying this, the privacy concern in most my audience is pricked and I get negative reactions.

I was therefore surprised yesterday, as I presented these ideas to the European Commission group looking at the future of Internet, when there was a general agreement on this point of view.

The feeling was that exploitation of information shall be under personal control, but that this shall not lead to an “a priori” blockage of information exploitation. It was noted that in Europe we might decide to go for a very restrictive application of privacy, but in other areas of the world different approaches might lead to better service offers and as soon as that happens Europeans will start to buy into that. This is not just a matter of losing business and directing European wealth abroad. It is a matter of nullifying a restrictive European Policy.

It would seem to make much more sense to work for a European environment that can protect privacy but at the same time can stimulate service offering. Then we would attract people from other areas because they will see information leverage and privacy protection.

Are these two goals incompatible? I don’t think so, technology and smart regulation may work to make it feasible.

However, a change in perception is required and this may just be happening right now

The handheld videogaming business has been traditionally dominated by Sony with its PSP and Nintendo with the DS, for a long time. These gadgets are equipped with some wireless connections. Nevertheless, first of all PSP and DS are portable gaming consoles. Internet connection is an additional feature, and videogames usually come on optical discs and cartridges (based on proprietary formats, by the way).

Apple iPod Touch and the two generations of Apple iPhone (not to mention the OS 3.0 that will be launched this summer) are having a strong impact on portable gaming consoles: the ability to buy and download games to the device, a miriad of games and application developers, the consolidated leadership of iTunes as content distribution platform together with a wider avaialbility of wireless connection, make the iPhone family a strong competitor of PSP and DS which, inherently, are still depending on physical distribution (retailers, stores).

As usual, Wired hosts two important comments, gathered during the annual Game Developers Conference (San Francisco) about the paradigm shift in portable gaming consoles business. In the first story, we’ll understand that the increasing popularity of iPhone as gaming platform is pushing Sony and Nintendo to empower their download capabilities. In the second story, we’ll learn how iPhone is actually changing the approach to mobile gaming.

Being a tourist is leveraging on a capital of personal and others’ experiences. Having them available can make tourism easier and more rewarding. Buying stuff is also benefiting to know exactly what I bought before. This can steer my buying and the customizing of services and products that I am acquiring. As flexibility in the offer increases, it is more and more relevant to be able to use our profile in the customisation of the offer. This profile will be extremely rich as more and more information is becoming available.

It is clear that I can leverage on this personal information because there are a lot of companies, out there, offering services to capture, analyse, structure, store and leverage on my information. Some of them are my trusted parties, others are just service Companies whom I disclose (part of) my data to get service from them. This “disclosure” part is a service by itself and is provided by one of my trusted parties.

I realise that a major business has developed because of these many digital shadows around. The complexity is similar, may be bigger, to the one of managing a gigantic warehouse, and on top of  that there is the empathy of remembrance, something that is unknown of to a warehouse. New enterprises that did not existed ten years ago are know acting as intermediary between personal information and services. It is like a new Internet of personal Information, and feelings, has sprout on the technologies that have made the Internet a ubiquitous framework for business and consumers alike. Many new technologies have appeared, some enabling this business, others exploiting it.

I have come to consider my data as a value that I can leverage on in terms of getting better services, and, sometimes, in terms of an asset I can release as a citizen or a participant in a community.

Privacy is very much a given in the sense that the amount of information that can be acquired has made me even more conscious of its value and on the potential danger, were this information fall into wrong hands. Protecting information, however, shall not annihilate it. I do not want undesired parties to access my information but I do not want to cut myself off from the benefit provided by having access to it.

Government Regulation shall evolve to guarantee both privacy and ownership of information. One should not cut on the other.

Government and Institutions are also very much interested in exploiting the digital shadows of their constituencies, since they can develop better plans, more to the point and timely, they can make better use of resources, they can provide better services.

These span from proactive traffic management (knowing where people are and will be moving enables dynamic forward looking traffic management), to health care (epidemic diffusion and control, right-sizing emergency centres and hospitals), from energy management to transportation. There is very little in today’s Society that cannot exploit the availability of information.

Internet is there both as a connectivity fabric, that I no longer perceive since it is ubiquitous and embedded/transparent, and as a suite of services provided by a variety of parties. Bandwidth is seldom an issue, since most information is floating nearby, in my cell phone, in my car, in my home media centre. This information is, most of the time, pushed in my vicinity based on my profile. This information creates a context, and communication is taking place in a contextualised way.

My digital shadow, therefore, plays an important role in my being connected and…understood.
It turns out that the sharing of (part of) my digital shadow makes work much more effective since my working experience can be shared and leveraged by my team mates. Similarly, my social network derives benefits from having access to (parts of) my digital shadow.

I also understand that there may be new ethical issues surfacing. And dangers. But dangers are something I am prepared to deal with, as I have in the past confronting with the various fraud brought forward by Internet. The ethical issues are more complex, ‘cause they are new. What happens to me if I lose part of my digital shadow? Will my digital shadow over live my physical body? What if, after a stroke that incapacitate me, I am confronted with someone who pretends, even just in bits, to be me?