“The Internet is everywhere; therefore,the future of the internet is actually the future of everythingThis is how Ariel Poter, investor (dMob, Blippy, Flixster, Slideshare, Xobni, RockYou …) and businessman expressed himself, who yesterday moderated the table on “The future of the Internet” at EmTech Spain in Malaga, the first Congress that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) holds in Europe.Geoff Raiston, co-founder of Imagine K12, who recalled that the word “digital” has permeated practically everything: music, books, communication with other people, education … And predicted that in the next ten years “systems computer scientists will be more “aggressive”, in the sense thatwe will never be offline, we will never be out of the reach of computing power. “For Raiston,” the web is like a house that we have taken several years to build; our children have already been born in it, we are still finishing our installation “.
Othman LarakiDirector of Search and Infrastructure at Twitter, he recalled a phrase often used by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey to define his popular microblogging network: “The world, in your pocket.” On Twitter, he stated, “more and more people want to post and tell about the things that happen.” Not for nothing is it the platform that generates the most content in great moments, as happened in Japan during the earthquake, or in the United States in the last presidential elections, or throughout the world during the so-called “Arab Spring.” Looking ahead, the main thing according to Laraki is that, if before we thought of the Internet as a set of web pages, “now what really matters are not the webs but the services“And the services that are worthwhile are those that reduce the number of transactions and operations that a user must perform to obtain information. The rule, says Laraki, is very simple:” the faster an application responds, the greater the what use he has. “And he knows it well because he led the development of Google Toolbar, Google Gears, Firefox extensions in early development, and FastNet (a real-time infrastructure memory and search engine), among other products. On the other hand, the expert highlighted that both on Twitter and Google “the recipe for success has been the same: reinvent something basic that everyone can use in a simple way.”
Internet and the mobile market
Another speaker, Erik Schultink , director of information technology at Tuenti, emphasized “the changes that the mobile market has brought to the Internet, which has led to a revolution.” And he affirmed that, when he thinks about the future, what worries him most is the power that “device manufacturers will have, who have taken over from the operators, and also control the application stores.”
On the other hand, the three speakers agreed that the Internet has marked a before and after because now anyone can transmit information and knowledge to the rest of the world . It is not surprising, therefore, that according to a worldwide survey launched last year by the BBC in 26 countries, four out of five people consider that access to the Internet should be considered a fundamental right . Furthermore, in Finland access to broadband Internet is already a constitutional right.
During the debate, some questions about the future of the Internet were left in the air. Will Internet access – and its speed – advance as fast as services and applications? Is there going to come a time when everything collapses, when there is more information available than we are capable of processing? How long will it take to connect to the Internet from anywhere and from any device, simply by pressing a button?
