IEEE Spectrum April, 2009 - 18

By Paul McFedries

Information at Your Fingertips
At the center of this will be the idea of digital convergence. That is, taking all the information-
books, catalogs, shopping approaches, professional advice, art, movies-and taking those things in
their digital form, ones and zeroes, and being able to provide them on demand on a device looking
like a TV, a small device you carry around, or what the PC will evolve into.

-BillGates,"InformationatYourFingertips-2005,"(COMDEXkeynotespeech,1994)

icrosoft founder
Bill Gates is famous for
many things, includ--
ing being the world's richest
person (until recently, anyway)
and being the world's unoffi--
cial Alpha Geek. However, in
tech circles he's also known
for his long--standing belief
that, as he once put it, "any
piece of information you
want should be available to
you." The idea wasn't new-
as far back as the 1970s, the
motto of the Information
Industry Association was
"Putting Information at Your
Fingertips"-but Gates
championed it as early as
1989, and he was in a position
to do something about it. It
remained his overriding goal
for the next two decades.
In fact, you could argue
that IAYF (as the cooler
geeks now call it) has been
the goal for the entire tech
sector for the past 20 years,
particularly since the Internet
broke out of its academic clois--
ter and started cavorting in
the mainstream. But a funny
thing happened between
then and now: Quietly and
without much fuss, this
seemingly futuristic goal has
pretty much become a reality.
Wondering if that restaurant
you see from your car window
is any good? Ask your car's
GPS system. Somebody at
dinner claims that Dustin
Hoffman was in Star Wars?
Whip out your iPhone and
look it up in the Internet
24

Movie Database-that
information is iPhoneable.
Information at Your
Fingertips went from pie--
in--the--sky to data--in--your--
smartphone seemingly
overnight, and we're just
starting to realize how much
findability (also called
Googleability) the world's
data has. In fact, it's turning
into what technologist John
Seely Brown calls calm
technology, remaining
in the background until
needed, thus letting you
interact with it in a calm,
engaged manner. IAYF will
lead to an age of ambient
findability, the ability to

NA * iEEE SPECTrum * APril 2009

find anyone or anything
from anywhere at any time.
The key is the rise of small
tech, particularly thin client
devices that are Web enabled.
The slender iPhone is the
archetype here, but netbook
computers-tiny PCs
optimized for Web viewing
and other online activities-
also enable folks, wherever
they are, to Google away and
access cloudware. Mobile
hardware such as digital audio
players, GPS devices, and even
digital cameras are becoming
increasingly Web aware (or,
at least Wi-Fi aware). Radio--
frequency identification
(RFID) tags, real--world

sensors, and other ambient
interfaces are connecting
(deep networking) all such
devices with the world and
its staggering wealth of data.
Devices thereby become
environment aware,
giving rise to so--called
ecological computing and
information surfacing:
revealing previously hidden
data that we or our devices
can use to better make our
way in this brave new world.
The ultimate expression
of Information at Your
Fingertips will be ubicomp
(ubiquitous computing), where
we can harness data using
everyday objects and inter--
faces (ambient informatics
in the lingo), which some
wag dubbed everyware.
Like the atmosphere itself, if
something is everywhere it
becomes nowhere; we cease
to notice it. Thus, pervasive
computing (also the name
of an IEEE magazine,
by the way) becomes
transparent computing.
Expect to see a privacy
backlash against all this
when people realize that once
the world's information is at
their fingertips, information
about them is also at everyone
else's fingertips. The new elite
will be the unGoogleables,
who've never posted anything
online using a real name-
no comments, no blog posts,
no newsgroup rants, no
Web pages-and so remain
blissfully beyond the reach
of Google and its ilk. Here's
a can't--miss business idea for
you, gratis: Start a company
that specializes in Google
scrubbing-removing
all traces of a person from
Google's servers. Let me
know when you're a going
concern and I'll look you up
on my iPhone.
o
www.sPectruM.ieee.org

greg mably

technically speaking

http://www.sPectruM.ieee.org

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum April, 2009