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JEENI TALKS June 2014 / Article

THE NEW INTERNET_: WHEN EVERYTHING BECOMES

SMART.

There is going to be a future where you will be able to write “www” on almost

every device. In fact, “the internet of things”, as it is called, is not so far from

now. At the time when we discovered the concept, we must humbly admit we

thought it was one more of those tendencies aiming to make our already

“deviced” life even more dependent of cables and chargers. However, the idea

behind the internet of things is ambitious as it will likely produce fundamental

changes in economies and societies.

Steve is at work. He wears a smart watch able to report his allowed saturated fat

per day is about to be reached. So, he activates his sleeping tablet right away,

and asks his refrigerator (at home) what stuff is available for dinner, querying

specifically “low saturated fat content”. The refrigerator, a light trendy device

able to scan every simple piece of food it contains and to calculate and also

display what their composition is, replies in seconds providing an accurate list of

things. Two green lights and one red start blinking on top of the tablet screen

more or less at the same time. One indicates the air conditioning has been

switched off because nobody is at home. The other one says the energy

administrator device has started providing electricity to the smart grid system

once the domestic energy requirements are guaranteed for that day. And the

third red light reminds Steve the garden is getting thirsty and the irrigation

system will start working right after 7 p.m., exactly when herbs and fruit trees

can take more advantage of water because the evapotranspiration diminishes

(unless he wants to change that).

Tim Berners Lee invented the

World Wide Web in 1989. Although

used indistinctly, the internet and

the World Wide Web – or simply

“web” - are not the same. The

Internet is a huge network with

tons of information, which

connects millions of computers

globally. The information is

transmitted using “protocols”

(languages). Precisely access that

information is what the Web is

useful for. Using the HTTP protocol

and web browsers such as Firefox,

Chrome or Safari, the information,

displayed on websites, gets right

into our computers and other

devices. Thus, if the internet were a

pie, the web would be a significant

slice of it, but not the whole.

When we advertise one of the core

products of Jeeni that is called Jeeni

Mobile, we use slogans such as

“…because the world is going

mobile”. By “mobile” we mean the

small portable device whose screen,

nowadays, is going bigger and

bigger, but Kevin Ashton had

another idea in mind when he

coined the term “the internet of

things” already in 1999. Let’s

picture the foreseen future to make

things more understandable.

AT A GLANCE

JEENI TALKS introduces

interesting content on email and

mobile marketing by using visually

appealing designs and insightful

short articles which highlight

relevant aspects and ease the

reading process.

This JENNI TALKS’s article is a

brief journey on the Internet’s

history, its inflexion points during

its already 25 years and what the

near future may look like

considering its unstoppable

influence in almost every sphere of

our lives. It is believed that the so-

called "internet of things" will exert

a radical change in the way we

currently understand community

life.

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Before deciding to get more serious with his job duties, Steve wants

to say “hi” to his two dogs, so he “calls” them using a sort of dog-

friendly mobile app connected to a home device which emits

humanly-imperceptible sounds and, obviously happy, the two long-

eared animals find the corner of the house where a screen shows

Steve’s face.

SOLVING THE TRAFFIC COLLAPSE

You may be probably asking yourself: is the internet able to support

so many devices, all of them connected at the same time? No. it

wasn’t or more precisely, it was about to not being able until another

parallel massive network called the IPv6 (Internet Protocol Version

6) started to work in 2013, aiming at solving the problem of IPv4

address exhaustion. When the IPv4 was created in 1981 by DARPA

(a United States Department of Defense Agency) framed in a

research project, others were the circumstances and motivations

and no one thought the revolution that invention would cause in the

decades to come.

UNDERSTANDING THE WEB 3.0

By 2004, the world started talking about the Web 2.0. It was the time of My Space, when the

once most influential social media in the world had more visits than the very same Google.

Since then, we understood that the World Wide Web was more than an inert static showcase

of endless information but rather a virtual place to socialize, share and collaborate. Familiar

things to us, such as blogs, social media, wikis, web applications, etc. as we know them

nowadays, arose at that time. With the Web 2.0 as an umbrella, appeared the Enterprise

2.0. In 2006, Andrew McAfee coined this name which refers to software platforms allowing

collaboration, sharing and organizing information within companies, between companies

and between them and their stakeholders. So, what is next? What is coming after Twitter,

Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus, etc., the Web 2.0 and all the other stuff?

Experts have already started talking about the Web 3.0 or “the semantic web”. And, in fact, we do not have to wait for. It is

arriving slowly but definitely to stay. Search engines are becoming more intelligent and able to understand what we

precisely want by making logical connections between pieces of information we have requested before. Searching will be

less and less about key words and more about interpreting “semantic” expressions (to make it simple, semantic has to do

with the meaning behind what we say). Metadata – in simple words, the description of the characteristics of the container

of data – is being indexed to web pages, so they can “talk” to each other to improve the user experience. But the Web 3.0

may bring other innovations: a great part of the websites will provide 3D vision options, social networks will become more

complex and more interactive, the Enterprise 2.0 will evolve to Enterprise 3.0, and its flexibility and responsiveness – in

terms of sizes and layouts - will increase as more devices of various shapes and sizes be capable to access the web.

The steps followed by the internet evolution are nicely described by Kerry Maxwell. The internet 1.0 was “read-only”, the

internet 2.0 has been “read-write” and the Internet 3.0 might be “read-write-execute” (hopefully), namely, “a version of

the Web in which users can create and execute their own tools and software to manipulate and extract information”, as

Mrs. Maxwell describes. It seems like we are gradually assisting to a sort of democratization process of the internet, where

everybody will have the right to create and say, so, the power to influence. And because of the increasing impact the

internet undoubtedly has on the way we live and understand the world nowadays, that process may produce even deeper

changes.

IPv4 and IPv6 are communication protocols

providing identification and location systems

for computers on networks and routing

traffic across the Internet. The IPv6 will

provide 3.4×1038 addresses, largely

overcoming the 4.3 billion addresses provided

by the IPv4.

Myspace Logo 2004.2010

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FROM TECHNICAL TO POLITICAL

Most of us, or probably we all agree on the importance of

the internet nowadays. Reasons are countless, at social,

political, educational or even personal levels. We

summarize this fact by asking this simple question: Can

you afford to live without internet? We, at Jeeni,

honestly, cannot. Now, have you asked yourself who is

responsible for keeping the web running? Who’s behind?

Who does the control of assignment of domains and the

creation of organizational suffixes such as .com, .net or

.biz? Until now, ICANN (The Internet Corporation for

Name and Numbers) a non-for-profit organization

located in the U.S. is responsible for keeping the

internet secure, stable and interoperable and for

assigning and controlling domains and suffixes. Those

tasks are only part of what is called “internet

governance”. The concept embraces a much more

complex bunch of topics. Wikipedia defines internet

governance as “practices and operations that are

consistent with the sovereign rights of states and the

social and market interests of end-users and operators.

It includes agreements about standards, policies, rules,

and enforcement and dispute resolution procedures”.

Undoubtedly, that makes sense, it’s correct and fair.

However, what the world discovered in 2013 when

Edward Snowden revealed the massive spy calls and

Internet data made by U.S. authorities to embassies,

diplomatic missions or even universities in different

countries, shown a complete different picture of the

reality.

Recently, Brazil, one of the leading countries in the

movement towards an international approach to

internet governance hosted the World Summit on

Internet Governance in Sao Paulo (NETmundial). Topics

such as internet neutrality, intellectual property rights

and users’ privacy and freedom were discussed

extensively and the result was a Declaration of Basic

Principles to guarantee the internet to be more

democratic and of public interest.

The future of internet is not only about technical

development, but also political cooperation and social

maturity. Without the two latter, any development

aiming at changing – and hopefully at improving – our

lives, is weakened because the context in which it takes

place is unstable and makes no warranty. What we ask

you for is reflecting, wherever you live now, on what the

role of governments should be in the internet

governance, if internet should be subject of any

restrictions and, if so, what restrictions are justified.

A NEW SENSE OF COMMUNITY

Indeed, one name or another to describe what the future

of internet may look like is not relevant, though “the

internet of things” is a nice euphemism. Understanding

the sense of what it may represent for our lives is really

the challenge. Never before a tool has overpassed the

limits of communication in the way the internet has done

it. We can talk with whoever wherever, almost for free;

we can get the latest news from different sources,

compare them and build our personal opinion upon

them; we can learn countless topics for free; we share

music, videos, stories, photos and everything which can

NETmundial’s organisers argue that Internet

governance must be “open, participatory...

technologically neutral, sensitive to human rights

and based on principles of transparency (and)

accountability.”

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be digitalized; we may start a revolution using social

media; and we...Yes, the list can get much longer.

The history of internet is linked to the process of giving

people the power to generate, manage and share

information. We don’t know if someone ever imagined

what internet has become, if it would be as revolutionary

as it actually is. Jeremy Rifkin, author of "The Zero

Marginal Cost Society", proposes a radical but exciting

future in which the internet has a lot to do. When the

internet of things becomes a reality, knowledge coming

from all the objects connected to the web, will allow us to

be more efficient, to reduce costs radically and,

desirably, to share those products and services with the

rest of people. A very tangible example is the energy. It

already exists an initiative called “The Internet of

Energy” which will develop distributed systems to

connect the “smart” grid with a cloud of devices

(electrical vehicles, appliances, buildings, etc.), so that

any device can be plugged in and loaded from any source

connected to the network.

A society of barter, where I give what you lack and vice

versa is what Mr. Rifkin proposes. And all this, thanks to

efficiencies provided by a network of things and more

conscious users (us), taking advantage of them. It is also

thought that opportunities for business will become

more accessible. For instance, user innovators, which are

more numerous than we think, might feel more

encouraged to take the leap and become active makers

and run their own entrepreneurial projects. On the other

hand, possibilities to create new business models will be

indisputably larger, diverse and, most importantly,

cheaper.

We may be facing a time with a stronger, more purely

sense of community. That “maybe someday” some of us

ideally imagine, hoping our society can change for good,

may be closer than we think.

This article has been written by Luis Salerno @salerno_luis

About Jeeni.net

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"Cisco forecasts that by 2022, the private sector

productivity gains wrought by the Internet of Things

will exceed $14 trillion. A General Electric study

estimates that productivity advances from the

Internet of Things could affect half the global

economy by 2025."(Source: Virgin Records)