I discovered this man today when a fellow engineer showed me a talk he did in New Zealand today and quite frankly the video I saw was nothing short of eye-opening, inspirational and wholly exciting.
Download the video here -> http://2009.r2.co.nz/20100218/mark-p.mp4
This the man behind what became the initial concept of the internet in terms of what made it popular today. The concept of hyper-linking is what makes the internet truly functional. He makes the point of saying while hyper-linking is the engine that makes the internet work, it’s the content that makes the internet powerful. A realization I had come to on my own quite some time ago back in my web development days.
Some of the points he makes in this video as to where the internet is heading and how it will impact the human race is very insightful. He makes special mention of the Apple iPad and the evolution of eBooks as the catalyst of what will become a new definition of inter-connectivity. The concept of ‘Augmented reality’ is the bit I found the most interesting as it was something I was only vaguely familiar with, but could instantly see the usefulness and potential capitalist spin-off possibilities.
“On the other hand, the arrival of the Web-as-appliance means [the internet] is now leaving the rarefied space of computers and mobiles-as-computers, and will now be seen as something as mundane as a book or a dinner plate. Apple’s iPad is the first device of an entirely new class which treat the Web as an appliance, as something that is pervasively just there when needed, and put down when not. The genius of Apple’s design is its extreme simplicity – too simple, I might add, for most of us. It presents the Web as a surface, nothing more.” – Mark Pesce – Dense and Thick
I hear the words ‘appliance’ bandied about a lot around my office, and it’s taken a major paradigm shift in thinking for people to really start to warm to the idea of the internet, computers and related technology to be simply as transparent as that of a refrigerator. The device isn’t the purpose any more. The service it provides is the purpose. It’s something I had always envisioned as a child playing with my BASIC interpreter in my bedroom, when I was supposed to be outside playing in my cubby house. Even then, on my old, black and white Acer 500+ with 640K of RAM, no hard drive, two low-density 5 1/4″ Floppy Drives and a black and white monitor, I could see the potential of the technology. I even remember my first connection to the internet in 1995 in the back of my school library, connected via a 14.4 kbps modem, and spending days trying to figure out how this HTML stuff worked and what this weird e-mail thing was. I remember back then I only knew one person connected to the Internet and I happened to know his e-mail address and I was so excited I could send a message to him that didn’t require a stamp. If only I’d realised the true potential of the Internet back then.
Anyway, watch the video and maybe you will be as inspired as I was.
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