TechPulse 360

The Web 2.0 was about harnessing the collective intelligence of users. The next Web will about taking advantage of sensor data, Tim O'Reilly predicts

But before that, he reminded his audience of the origins of Web 2.0.

“Web 2.0 was never intended to be a version number. It was really a reflection of what happened after the dotcom bust. There were some companies, some projects that seemed to survive when others were flatten. Why was it?” O’Reilly pondered.

For O’Reilly, the companies that survived the Internet bubble learned how to use the web as a platform. “And in particular they understood that the heart of that was to harness the collective intelligence, that is to get their users to add value to what they were doing.”

O’Reilly talked of “information shadows”, “electronic sensors coordination”, and statically extracting the “meaning” hidden in all the data that is being collected, gathered.

In a nutshell, for this Internet visionary, Web applications are going to be more and more driven by sensors and not by people typing on keyboards. A major shift from Web 2.0 applications today that heavily rely on user inputs.

There is power in less

Another of O’Reilly’s theme was how to apply Moore’s Law to the world’s hard problems.

“In the technology industry, we take for granted that we get more each year for less. But it doesn’t work that way in the world. The whole basis of our economy is that more will be spent, that things will be bigger, and cost more, and economy will grow.”

Part of the power that we have, is to take these techniques that we’ve developed in the consumer Internet and start to apply them to big hard problems, added O’Reilly.