Great X-pectations: Executable, extended—new Internet paradigm could change the user experience and connect us with the real world - Business of Technology - Industry Overview

Computer Technology Review, Feb, 2003 by Naresh Lakhanpal

The business case for these applications, said Altio's Levett, is straightforward. "The application requires no downloads or plug-ins, it runs through firewalls and can deploy to people in your extranet without having to go out with a CD and do support for them, and it provides diagnostic information for people using the product."

While Altio is working with companies that want to use its products in an internal enterprise environment, Curl and Macromedia are looking at potential consumer uses as well.

These kinds of applications provide a strong value proposition to Larry Hawes, senior advisor at The Delphi Group. "These [new tools] allow you to decrease development time and get applications to market faster," he said. "The other, more important, issue is user productivity. The idea of interactivity over the Web now is limited to a controlled series of HTML pages, but these new tools make the user interface more responsive and intuitive," he said.

Pick a Device, Any Device

If the idea of an executable Internet sounds new and exciting, the idea of an extended Internet has actually been around awhile, which Howe, of course, concedes. Telematics is a kind of extended Internet application. So are instant messaging, wireless sensors and plug-and-play. And as innovations like microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), Wi-Fi, ultra wideband and others mature, the possibilities expand. Apple, for example, has just released Rondezvous, which creates instant wireless networks of computers and smart devices.

Sun's Project JXTA is another notable example. It enables services to connect. Essentially a peer-to-peer technology, it's an open source platform focused on collective processing.

"JXTA attempts to define a set of protocols for peer-to-peer computing that allows for collaboration across multiple computing environments and multiple physical networks," said Matt Reid, business development group manager for Sun. "We have to be able to include not just TCP/IP networking, but things like Bluetooth, infrared and cell phone networks. This plethora of devices and physical networks creates a huge amount of complexity for the developer. The core idea is to create a virtual network in which the complexity is obstructed out. The developer treats the network as one network and JXTA handles all of the underlying complexities."

The result, said Reid, is an environment in which multiple devices can be leveraged so that the technology functions more like a person would work. That alleviates the user from having to adjust to the way the technology works. So with a personal peer group of matched devices, you could update a phone number on a cell phone and that new number would automatically propagate on all the other devices in the network: the desktop computer, the PDA, the laptop. From an enterprise standpoint, notes Reid, it could mean better use of computer resources that sit at the edge of the network.

Getting computers to sense the real world is a challenge for the Auto-ID Center, a research project of Massachusetts Institute of Technology funded by about 65 industry sponsors. Researchers believe that by putting microcomputers into every manmade object in the world, computers could, in a manner of speaking, sense the real world.