Abstract
Ubiquitous computing is a term coined by Marc Weiser to describe a concept where computers could be woven “into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.”Footnote 1 Several present day applications of ubiquitous computing were discussed, and Kuniavsky pointed out that there is a need for “information wranglers” like librarians in order to make ubiquitous computing functional.
The first thing I should tell you is that I have no formal background in library science, so I apologize in advance for all terrible misunderstandings that may occur. I am a user experience researcher and designer. I spend much of my time thinking about how technologies and people affect each other from social, economic, historical, and technological perspectives, and how the technological side of that relationship can be made better, or at least more interesting, for the human side of it. I spent a little more than ten years doing design and research for the Web. I was the designer of one of the first e-commerce websites in 1994, HotHotHot. Despite the name, we sold hot sauce. In 1996 I was the interaction designer of one of the first big search engines, HotBot. In the late 1990s I worked with many dotcoms, some famous, some—like pets.com— infamous. I sat out the dotcom crash writing a book based on the work I had been doing. Ask your reference librarians to order extra copies. In 2001 I co-founded an Internet consulting company called Adaptive Path. Things went very well, Adaptive Path is doing very well, but ten years in cyberspace is a long time. So four years ago I decided to pause and think full time about how to apply what I had learned about people and the Internet to the other computers that were increasingly embedded in our lives. Things like mobile phones, iPods, TiVos, smart refrigerators, and talking greeting cards. In other words, I decided to leave the office, leave cyberspace, and walk around a bit. Two years ago I founded a company with Tod Kurt called ThingM to pursue these ideas commercially. We are a ubiquitous computing consumer electronics company.
UBIQUITOUS COMPUTING
So what's ubiquitous computing, which sounds either ominous or exciting depending on your attitude toward contemporary technology? Ubiquitous computing was coined by the late Marc Weiser of Xerox PARC about twenty years ago to describe a concept where computers did not have to be monolithic general purpose devices that required special training to use but could be, in his words, woven “into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.”Footnote 2 He made an analogy to books: a laptop is like a single really important, really big book. Such books exist, of course, but they are the exception. Most books serve a special purpose and are read or consulted as needed, but that's not how we have been treating computers.
In other words, in his view, and in mine, the power of information processing technology should not be limited to viewing the whole world through the lens of a single magic window. The power of that technology, the potential of that technology, should be brought into everyday life. When Weiser was writing, his vision was more of a dream than a pragmatic reality, but in the intervening twenty years, something happened.
[Showing an illustration of Moore's Law.] This is a graph of Moore's Law.Footnote 3 You have probably heard of it. It started as a key piece of technology trend analysis but became a blueprint for the development of technology over the last thirty years. Normally, this graph is read as a trend representing how computers are getting more powerful, but it also represents a trend that shows how technology, especially older technology, is getting smaller and cheaper, because this is done not in the abstract but within the context of the marketplace. The personal computer chip that was the state of the art when Weiser was initially writing and thinking about ubiquitous computing was the Intel 486. It's in the middle of this chart. The 486 corresponds roughly to the beginning of the modern, Internet-connected computer and is a very powerful device.
In the nineteen years since it came out, thanks to the economics of Moore's Law, that processing power has become a commodity and it's possible to buy a chip nearly as powerful for about fifty cents. Such commoditization of a technology profoundly changes the social response to it. When something is expensive, you are going to have one of it and it's going to have to do a wide variety of different things. Maybe one of the reasons Gutenberg printed Bibles was because he knew a Bible is a kind of a general purpose book with a guaranteed wide audience.
Something a little closer to home is the electric motor. In 1918 electric motors were expensive, so you bought one for the house and then you bought attachments for it. The motor was a general purpose tool that was adapted as needed. That's the way KitchenAid mixers still work, but that's more of a quirk of the KitchenAid rather than a necessity. In 1918, it was an economic necessity because few people could afford to own many electric motors.
This is an interesting perspective for us to take when we are thinking about computers. What you see is that when something is cheap, you can have more than one of it. When you have more than one of a given thing, you get specialization. The concept of the self-contained kitchen appliance appeared when motors became cheap enough to hide. Instead of a juicing attachment, you have a juicer. Instead of a blending attachment, you have a blender. When you can have dozens of things, they get hyper-specialized, as any of you who have ever shopped for appliances knows.
This is what we are already seeing with computer and networking technology. The age of objects with embedded processors is largely already here. Let me give you some examples. Mobile phones are of course a kind of portable computer that almost everyone has. So are cars. The Toyota Prius display is kind of a surfacing of that kind of computer technology, but cars have had multiple embedded computers in them for twenty-five years. That's one of the reasons why you cannot be a weekend mechanic anymore—you also have to be a weekend software developer. There are hundreds of robotic and computer augmented toys on the shelves and they cost little more than toys that have no information processing in them at all. The computer augmentation is a competitive edge used by manufacturers in the way that they might use a different kind of plastic, fur, or rubber. The Adidas 1 shoe has an embedded microprocessor that analyzes the running surface about twenty times a second and adjusts the stiffness of the heel in between strides in response. The two buttons between the heel and the toe are used to adjust the characteristics that the shoe has. This product is about five years old. The Blendtech blender has programmable blender cycles. If you have been to Jamba Juice or any of the other big smoothie chains, you have had the products of these. They take the guesswork out of how to blend a random quantity of ingredients. Someone has to figure it out once and then the person working at Jamba Juice never has to figure it out again. Whole new classes of objects with embedded computers are being added on a regular basis. In other words, we already live in the world that Weiser envisioned, and both we and it are changing in response.
INFORMATION SHADOWS
A key piece of this is digital, machine-readable, identification. Things have long had identifying marks, from silversmiths' hallmarks to barcodes, but mating machine-readable identification with pervasive networking greatly increases the value of the marks. For example, when a machine-readable identification method such as RFID (radio-frequency identification) or a high density visual code is combined with the wireless networking of a mobile phone, a new way of interacting with everyday objects is created. Point certain phone cameras at a QR-Coded (Quick Response) object and it takes you to a URL that the phone, which is a kind of portable networked computer, automatically follows. You can see where a product was made and, for example, what the nutritional value is. You can get third party reviews of the product. Once you have that capability, you can attach meta information to anything. Such machine-readable identification technologies let you see a lot more of the social life of everyday objects. How much is this worth on eBay? Which of my friends has one? Will this go with my Mom's china? Can I attach it to my KitchenAid?
I call this digital representation as accessed through a unique ID an object's “information shadow,” and I now see them attached to just about everything. Paraphrasing Yahoo!'s Tom Coates, first we learn to digitally point at a thing's information shadow, then we can glue information handles to it.Footnote 4 Once the shadow has handles, we can grab and throw the information around. I think it's telling that Tom developed this way of thinking of objects as having digital handles while developing the BBC's online program guide. TV shows are a kind of serial and he had to learn to think about that data and how that data could be used while trying to organize this mass of constantly generating, updated, serialized information.
Let me give you another example of information shadows. A geographic coordinate is a simple kind of information shadow. [Showing a map.] Here's a map of the trails of San Francisco's yellow taxis as they move around the city. Every cab has a unique identifier, a GPS device, and a wireless network connection that updates its location in real time. The unique identifier is the handle and the GPS coordinate is the information shadow. So how can we throw this around? We can use this data to do something as basic as suggesting what street corner to wait at for the next cab, or as complex as understanding downtown migratory patterns to make urban planning decisions. Once we have that handle, the possibilities of what we can do with that information open up greatly. This is the key to the power of machine-readable identification.
Another example: Ulla-Maaria Mutanen, a Finnish researcher, realized that when Amazon extended ISBN to create their ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number) system they suddenly allowed anyone to reference any product Amazon sells or has ever sold. The ASIN is the handle that we can use to throw Amazon information shadows around. Amazon has built a large portion of their business around the fact that people point at their objects in a million ways, but at the core of that is always the ASIN.
Amazon sells a lot of stuff, but they do not sell everything. Mutanen went beyond her initial observation to create a new system, Thinglink, that extends the idea of having a digital handle to any object, however unique or mundane. She hopes that Thinglink will let everything be as easily addressable as Amazon's products, so that even the most humble homemade product can have the kind of social life Amazon's products have.
Some things are crying out for having their information shadows so easily accessible. For many wine enthusiasts, information about wine is as important as the wine itself. They may spend as much time researching and talking about wine, comparing wine, and interacting with the wine's information shadow, as they do drinking it.
Other things have become subsumed by their information shadows. We all know what happened to music, and now Amazon's Kindle is trying to do that to books. In the past, there was a fairly clear distinction between an object, a digital representation of that object, and the metadata about that object. Now that distinction has sufficiently blurred that there is a range of objects that exist to varying degrees in and out of their information shadows.
Some things have dematerialized almost completely. When was the last time you thought of a plane ticket as a physical thing? These kinds of identification and tracking technologies are not wholly new. However, until recently, information handles have not extended far beyond the world of digital objects, and machine-readable identification has not extended beyond the logistics and shipping industries. That's going to change soon.
MY VIEW OF SERIALS
In the rest of this talk, I am going to speak about how I believe the world of serials and the world of ubiquitous computing intersect. First, however, I would like to tell you how I think of serials. I come from outside the library world, so my view of what a serial is may be naïve, so first let me tell you what I imagine when I think “serial.” I think of a journal. And what's a journal? Well, from my perspective, it's an agreement between a publisher and subscriber that one will provide information of a certain type to the other. This service traditionally manifests as a softcover book.
The New England Journal of Medicine mails my doctor housemate medical information every week. Next week this one will be replaced with a similar one, and similarly the week after that, and the week after that, and so on. When I look at this journal on our coffee table, I see a dotted line in the shape of a soft-covered book. The outline is regularly filled in with something that addresses a set of concepts that are defined by the agreement between publisher and the subscriber. Furthermore, the space inside the dotted line represents what can be thought of as a slice through a single object, some of which has been created, and some of which has not.
When I think about purchasing a subscription, I think about buying some paper that represents a chunk of the contents of that larger object. As long as I, the subscriber, am interested in that broad set of concepts, I keep buying new chunks. What I, the subscriber, own is the agreement for the service. The paper manifestation of that agreement is one way that the agreement can be satisfied and the service provided. There can, of course, be other manifestations, but at the core for me is the idea that when you subscribe, you buy the dotted line and you own whatever fills in that dotted line. Now, I believe that journals are no longer the only things that have implicit dotted lines around them.
A familiar dotted-line object is the time-shared condo. Allow me to compare a timeshare to a journal. In a journal, the form and update period are fixed, and the content is variable. Similarly, in a timeshare the form and usage period are fixed, and the occupants are variable. You could say that in this view, the timeshare is subscribed to you, although of course, then you are paying to be the contents, and that's probably taking the metaphor too far. Or maybe not. In both cases, what you own is the possibility of an object, rather than a specific object. Also, unlike a rental, which is a time-limited agreement that implies no rights before or after, both a journal and a timeshare represent a kind of true ownership. You have some rights to that property forever, even if—in the case of the journal—it may only mean being able to keep the paper manifestation on your shelf forever.
Now I'd like to talk about a related concept called a “vacation club” that extends the timeshare idea and this kind of relationship even further. Disney has one, of course. They have one of everything. Ownership of a Disney Vacation Club property, for example, lasts about fifty years and gives you the right not to a fixed property at a fixed time, but the right to vacation at something like five hundred different properties at just about any time. In this agreement neither the place nor the time is fixed, only the rough outlines of the experience you are going to have. So what do you own for fifty years? Not getting into the literal legal definition, roughly speaking you own the right to request a class of things that changes with every instantiation. But it changes in a way that is predictably different.
I think these types of goods point to a new model of relating to everyday objects, one that's enabled by ubiquitous computing and which could fundamentally challenge and change what it means to own something. I believe that it could shift the nature of many everyday things from existing as monolithic objects to being closer to something that's between a service and a serial.
To paraphrase science fiction writer and ubiquitous computing theorist Bruce Sterling, why should I own a bicycle and my neighbor own a bicycle, when we typically do not need to use one at the same time?Footnote 5 Why does everyone on the block need to own their own wheelbarrow? Until recently, the logistics of sharing everyday objects have been complex and have happened only where traditional ownership was financially prohibitive or where the people involved were highly motivated, such as at a commune, summer camp, or in the military.
As anyone who's lived with roommates will tell you, sharing is difficult and the tools are primitive. Ubiquitous computing gives us tools to track, trade, and share objects much more efficiently than any previous technology. Let me give you an example. City CarShare, the first car sharing company, would not exist without ubiquitous computing technologies. When you buy into their service, you get a dotted-line car and a key fob that has an RFID in it, which is essentially a small microprocessor and radio. The car is connected to a central network. You can only open the car and start the engine when your specific key fob is scheduled to open and start it. Like the yellow cabs I showed earlier, it uses a GPS to track where the car is, whether it's been dropped off at the right location, and how far it's been driven. All of that is transparent to you, the owner of a membership. You treat it much like your own car and have access to it twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, with very little advance notice. It's of course different than your own car—you can't leave your CDs in it—but it's certainly a lot more like your own car than a rental. At the same time, it is a profoundly different new kind of car object. Unlike a single car, it's a car possibility space. An ad from Zipcar, a similar service to City CarShare, shows the implicit power of this kind of system. It says, “Is today a BMW day or a Volvo day?” It shows how your relationship to your car can change if that car is a dotted line object.
Here's another example: Germany's Call-a-Bike program run by the rail service. The program is completely based on ubiquitous computing technology. When you need a bike, you find one of these bikes, which are usually at major street corners. You use your mobile phone to call the number on the bike. It gives you a code that you punch in to unlock the bike lock. You ride the bike around and when you have arrived, you lock it. The amount of time you rode is automatically billed to your phone, by the minute. You do not have to own a bike; you can just get one when you need it.
Here's another example that's not technically ubiquitous computing, but points to some interesting possibilities. Bag, Borrow or Steal is a designer purse subscription site. It works like Netflix, but for really expensive handbags. It's fashion by subscription and it again points to a new way of thinking about everyday objects. It wouldn't have been possible before all of these networking technologies became interlinked so that we can track objects in a way that is sufficiently efficient to create dotted lines around all sorts of things.
THE CHANGING NATURE OF EVERYDAY OBJECTS
Information shadows and dotted-line objects are related. The shadow of an object allows it to be tracked and managed so that it can become an instance of a dotted-line object. In other words, it's the trackable metadata of physical objects that allows for their efficient conversion to services, to subscriptions. It was technically possible before, of course, and variations on these ideas have existed for a long time, but it was not widely practical until the technology enabled these relationships to be embedded in many kinds of everyday objects and once embedded, to be automated.
This points to a fundamental change in the nature of everyday objects, one that simultaneously opens great possibilities and raises deep questions about ownership and privacy. Economist Jeremy Rifkin coined the term “The Age of Access” to define this change. He says it represents a shift from ownership of objects to access to services.Footnote 6 This is not unlike the philosophy of the Whole Earth Catalog, which promised access to tools, but now the tools are services. Rifkin was not talking about ubiquitous computing, but I believe that ubiquitous computing represents a key enabling set of technologies that are going to introduce a deep social shift in our understanding of what is a service and what can be provided as a subscription, as I have shown.
SHADOW WRANGLING
That's where you come in. Technologists typically leave out the information management challenges when talking about technological shifts. However, you understand those shifts better than anyone else since you have been on the forefront of the integration of information shadows and physical objects. You have been dealing with the problems of having physical objects and digital representations of physical objects, and having those digital representations be somehow similar but different, longer than just about anybody else. Your job, from my perspective, is to wrangle information about information. You have developed concepts, language, and procedures for managing a broad range of knowledge about a broad range of entities. You understand how to name, classify, organize, curate, and preserve continuity among dotted-line objects. You know how they differ from non-dotted-line objects.
Right now your focus is predominantly on informational objects, but why should that be the only kind of object that you consider? Why not think about how your work here can apply to the serialization of everyday objects? What I am saying is that the world of dotted-line objects needs people who understand how to manage information about these objects. The field needs people who will corral, label, and organize the information shadows. It does not know that yet, since the phenomenon is so new, but it will. The world will need shadow wranglers, and that's you.
QUESTION AND ANSWER SECTION
Audience member (Eleanor Cook): Bruce Sterling wrote a book called Islands on the Net, and in that book the people walking around received their Internet information in their ears. When is that going to happen? I think you're the kind of guy who knows that.
Kuniavsky: Back when I was first doing this kind of stuff, eighteen years ago at the University of Michigan, there was a guy named Gavin Eadie who used to joke, “In the future, you are going to have the Internet in your nose.” I think one of the interesting things is that at that time, Weiser saw that the fragmentation of technology and the dissipation of technology actually means something different. Rather than overlaying this technological layer on top of the whole world, you can take the things that are in the world already and augment them with technology, so that you don't have to have this science fiction vision of a virtual world overlaid onto the real world. The real world is pretty good by itself. You can use technology to make the tools and objects in our real world be more effective, more interesting, or behave in different ways. That's what I decided to pursue after having all this time on the Web, which I thought was interesting and valuable but didn't seem like life.
Audience member (Bob Schatz): From your highly knowledgeable perspective, do you lose any sleep over the security of all this behavior information already being produced, and as you indicate, being ratcheted up exponentially? Can we trust that once your every move is trackable that it isn't leading to something insidious when it comes to personal freedoms?
Kuniavsky: That is a legitimate and widespread concern about the security implications of this. Once I can track cabs everywhere, and for example, I can track cell phones everywhere, I can put the two pieces of data together and it becomes a kind of system for universal tracking and tyranny. There has been a lot of concern and talk about that. To be honest, I don't lose sleep about it because I think bureaucrats are so inefficient that they're not going to get their act together.
I believe that all these things are a negotiation. You do get these technological waves. You do get these technological effects. When new technologies come in, it fundamentally changes expectations and relationships, but it comes in kind of as a ripple in a pond. Eventually the pond settles down at a different level. The classic example is the introduction of appliances into the domestic world and the relationship it had to women's lives. Initially it promised all this free time, but in fact what happened is that it raised expectations. Once you had a vacuum cleaner to clean an area rug, why not have wall-to-wall rugs? There is a great book called More Work For Mother that is the keystone of that analysis.
We managed as a society to negotiate the implications of that. I think that's what is going to happen with these technologies as they are introduced to the world one after another. I think it's going to be interesting. There will be challenges, but hoping that it goes away or clamping down on it as soon as possible is not creating the right kind of dialogue to figure out what is the best way to be looking at these technologies.
Audience member (Regina Reynolds): I want to thank you for really getting it and for giving us some vocabulary and concepts to help our administrators get it. In the US ISSN Center, we have been “wrangling” serials and “branding” them with unique identification numbers since the early 1970s, and sometimes it is hard to communicate the importance of this. Now that we can call ourselves “information shadow wranglers,” I'm sure that we're going to have a lot more respect and possibilities. Even more so, the notion that these skills can apply so well in today's world and the future world is an exciting one. If I ever retire, maybe I can start wrangling expensive purses.
Audience member (Anna Creech): I appreciate the description of us being “shadow wranglers,” and I think everybody in this room, including publishers, are all dealing with data, so it's not just librarians. My concern is that we have our task, but who is going to bridge the gap? Who is going to stand there and take people who can't even get cell phone reception to the point where they can get that rich metadata that we are making available to them?
Kuniavsky: Are you referring to the larger, broader concept of the digital divide?
Audience member (Anna Creech): Yes, which is huge.
Kuniavsky: It's huge, but it's also different than we expect. There are lots of people who don't have laptops, and there are lots of people who can't afford computers, as we think about computers when we think about laptops. But, there are lots of people who have computers that we don't think of as computers, namely phones. You see this in a lot of developing economies where they skip everything that we think of as the development of technology and they go directly from having no technology as we think of it right to having phones, because phones are this really interesting platform that you can drop in and they are cheap, relatively speaking.
Motorola has this thing called the MOTOFONE, which is very popular in Africa, India, China, and Brazil, and it is designed to be a ten dollar cell phone. It's a computer with a data feed. Those phones are the first wave of the distribution of these technologies. Ten dollars is a lot of money to some people, but it's not nearly as much money as what gets you a computer. You are starting to get a lot of computer penetration in the form of phones into a society and places that you don't normally expect. I think you are going to start to get a lot of data usage from those technologies.
It's becoming a lot like electrification. Sure, some people don't have electricity and aren't going to have it for a long time, but there are a lot of generators out there, and people do a lot of stuff with electricity even when we don't think of them as having an electrical grid. I think that is going to happen with information processing technology.
Audience member (Bob Persing): My worry is that if we become really good data wranglers for blenders, the result will be even more blenders. As you say, we have enough of them right now. When people mentioned Bruce Sterling, I was thinking of Douglas Adams, a science fiction writer who wrote about a world where society collapsed because the entire world surface ended up being covered by shoes of the wrong size or style that nobody wanted to buy. My worry is that we are going to develop more and better blenders while there still are lots of people in the world who are going hungry. How do we channel the use of this data into social goods without setting up governmental systems to try and do that, which probably won't work?
Kuniavsky: I think that it's essentially a set of implicit incentives. There are a couple of ideas that I believe are changing our relationship to some technologies. One of which is that the democratization of data and the opening up of a lot of information to be used by a lot of people without a specific idea of how that information will be used is becoming more popular. That's the basis of the Web 2.0 movement. The Web 2.0 movement is all about that. It's about giving you access to our data—we're going to give you the handles (as in the Amazon model)—and then you can do whatever you want with them. We're not going to prescribe for you how you use that information because we don't know. It's a marketplace. The more people who use this information, essentially the more people buy their stuff. The more people who use our information, the more valuable that information becomes. Even if we don't profit from every single bit of it, it opens it up to a market that can innovate with it and give us new value for our information that we didn't have before.
One of the other things is that for the last twenty or twenty-five years, the economics of creating technology have been very centralized and top-down. That's changing a lot. My company has taken advantage of this right now. What's happening is that it used to be really expensive to make a piece of technology, therefore companies would jealously protect their technology, and they also wouldn't make it very easy (because it was so expensive) to modify, change, or adapt. If you look at a blender from the mid-1970s, you will see that it's designed to be maintained. If you look at a blender from ten years later, the economics have changed sufficiently that you can't maintain that blender. That trend is changing back, because now it's cheap enough to make things that have openings in them for people to modify and reuse them. It's also making things that can be stuck together in better and more interesting ways. It's designed in the same way that data is designed—to be open without a specific thing that it's supposed to do. I have a lot of optimism in that movement. Maybe it's misplaced, but that's how I think that we're going to bridge those gaps.
Audience member (Tom Mulak): Do you think of the use of the Kindle as a scholarly device vehicle in a way that's big-time? I was thinking in terms of within a year, the cost of the Kindle is going to come crashing down, and I was wondering whether you and the librarians have any reaction to the use of the Kindle within the library, renting it the way you can rent a book? Somehow, it could be jury-rigged so that instead of having a connection to the Amazon store, it would use something like Shibboleth to authenticate access to the library's e-book collection. This way, someone who is on-the-go could rent a Kindle from the library and be able to connect wirelessly to the library's material so that they won't have to take a laptop with them to have access to research materials. The med schools now automatically give PDAs to the incoming class, which are loaded with databases concerning drug interactions and things like that. I just want to see what you think of the Kindle and that type of vehicle in the future, since there have been so many other things that have evolved very quickly.
Kuniavsky: I think that it very much points to the future of how things are going to work. I think it's a really ugly device. I have another device that has that same screen, and I think it isn't ready for prime time as a thing that you could read a novel on. I think that it is going to be how reference material is going to exist in the future. Right now it is tied into the Amazon store, but I think that there are other devices that are going to be very similar that won't be tied, that will allow you to throw PDF and text or whatever on, and they will be able to give you access to an immense amount of information.
Let me pull back and give you a little parable of my own experience with the dematerialization of objects, which is that I needed a digital copy of my own book. My publisher wasn't able to get me one that was very good. They could give me giant PDFs or the text that I already had, but I didn't have a particularly good version of it that I could give as a blob to somebody. So, I started looking around and thankfully, there is a giant book piracy industry in China, and they had pirated my book. I was able to download a great digital copy of my book, which when anyone asks me for a digital copy of my book, I give them the Chinese pirated one because it's much better than my publisher's. Similarly, when I discovered this, I was amazed that there's all this great stuff out there that these nice guys have been scanning in and OCRing (Optical Character Recognition) and checking for years.
This is probably a really bad thing to say in front of a bunch of librarians, but I have something like three- or four-hundred reference books that relate to my field on my laptop that are automatically indexed by Spotlight, which is a Mac OS X indexing technology. I would never have bought those books or read them, but they are reference books. When I need a very specific piece of information, I have a really large reference library on my laptop that is instantly accessible.
William Gibson has a famous quote, which is, “The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed.”Footnote 7 I think that I'm in the forefront of this. My laptop right now is what a Kindle will look like four years from now. I'm going to have all that same stuff on a thing that looks like a piece of paper fifteen years from now. That's just coming, whether or not there is a subscription service that is related to that. I can't rely on the nice Chinese book pirates to get all the right books for me, so if I could subscribe to the books and have them automatically update for me, that would be great. That would be a perfect service.
I hope that Amazon opens up—and they have to a certain extent—access to that device such that other people can plug their data into the back end. There could very well be a business model where you could sell through Amazon to the end user using Amazon's back-end services. They've already done all the hard work of negotiating with all of the telephone companies. The Kindle is essentially a cell phone. It's a computer with a network connection that works through the cell phone network. If you could leverage that, that might be the model.
CONTRIBUTOR NOTES
Mike Kuniavsky is founder of ThingM.
Anna Creech is Electronic Resources Librarian at the University of Richmond.
Notes
1. Mark Weiser, “The Computer for the 21st Century,” Scientific American 265, no. 3 (September 1991): 94.
2. Ibid.
3. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., “Image:Moores law.svg,” Wikimedia Commons. December 30, 2007. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Moores_law.svg (accessed September 24, 2008).
4. Tom Coates, “The Age of Point-at-Things …,” plasticbag.org. April 26, 2005, http://www. plasticbag.org/archives/2005/04/the_age_of_pointatthings/ (accessed October 23, 2008).
5. Bruce Sterling, “Pervasive Computing,” IDSA/IBM Designabout on Pervasive Computing. Palisades, New York. December 3, 1999. http://www.viridiandesign.org/notes/101-125/00113.html (accessed October 23, 2008).
6. Jeremy Rifkin, The Age of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism, Where All of Life Is a Paid-for Experience (New York: Putnam, 2000).
7. Brooke Gladstone, The Science in Science Fiction, National Public Radio interview with William Gibson, David Brin, and Anne Simon, November 30, 1999.