Alcides Fonseca

Para quem não sabe, está a decorrer o PopUp, um evento “espontâneo” com pipocas, música, xboxs e passatempos para a malta. Para saber mais sobre isso podem ver as fotos na galeria. Dentro do evento há também apresentações surpresa pelos bares dos departamentos. A primeira de hoje foi a minha, sobre o Futuro da Web (para leigos).

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Aquilo que era previsto ser uma curta apresentação, acabou por se tornar numa conversa, o que foi óptimo para ouvir outras opiniões. Tive apenas mais um participante de fora da área (os eventos surpresa acabam por ter fraca assitência) mas gostou bastante da conversa. Quanto aos outros participanetes, têm de começar a tentar esquecer os termos técnicos nestas conversas (hint hint). Em relação ao site da semântic web, eu simplesmente mostrei microformats e OpenSearch em uso, e falei de potencialidades do APML para sugestão automática.

Em relação à apresentação assim, tencionava falar das várias tendências que podem ser levadas para o futuro da web daqui a 5, 10 anos (claro que um puto numa garagem pode ter uma nova ideia que revolucionará isto tudo) e discutir um pouco cada uma delas. Depois no final tinha três scenarios possíveis usando a web daqui a 5 anos, mas nem foram precisos :)

Espero ter oportunidade de repetir esta conversa, mas num contexto mais geral e com pessoas de outras áreas.

I have just finished watching the Back to the Future Trilogy and I was really amazed for something they started even before I was born! It is just a classic that I won’t forgive anyone who doesn’t watch it!

One thing that made me thinking was the way they predicted the future in 2015. A lot of things we already have, or even better, but things like flying cars or the hoverboard, which I dreamed when I was a kid are still far from our crafts.

As for the screens, we already achieve it with projectors, and even better with the flexible plastic LCDs. As for the wicked phone-glasses, we have 3G phones and bluetooth ears, that I believe is better than that. We already have the hat with leds and fingerprint door locks! We almost have self-adapted shoes but self-cleaning jackets are still to come.

Is any current scifi movie up to those predictions? I guess not, but we’ll see. And I can’t wait to get back to 2015 to check if it was all true!

For those who haven’t heard of WiMax yet, it’s a broadband internet access everywhere. Not that weak connection you have on you mobile phones or those express card/PCMCIA modems you have. While those only give you 14Mbps download and 6Mbps for upload (that are totally virtual. If you get to half of that, you’re very lucky!), WiMax allows you to have up to 70Mbps up and down when near the access point, but you have a real value of 10Mbps 10km away, which in my opinion is pretty good, but insufficient in 10 years. But we are in the right path.

There are already a few companies offering WiMax services, but in very small areas (remember WiMax is supposed to be global) and there are already a lot of ISPs owning licenses, but no great effort yet. Well, Sprint is ‘soft-launching’ a intel-based WiMax network in downtown Baltimore, Chicago and Washington DC. Still small areas, but being Sprint the third largest telco in the USA, I believe they have the power to really spread WiMax over the country. Europe and Asia will follow.

Back in the WSMU I heard this technology will only be spread by 2012, which I now disagree strongly. In one/two years, there will be express cards (or whatever will be used for the same purpose) and mobile phones/UMPCs will come already with WiMax support. So the revolution is happening quite soon.

This post was inspired by Aral Bakan’s web’08 predictions: the rise of RIAs and the 3D web. It’s a nice writing on what may change in the web next year.

For a long time I am expecting web to gain one more dimension. It’s the natural evolution: at first you have one dimension (this one would be linear text, like telnet), then the two dimension (hypertext) came along and everyone was dazzled. Although hypertext has a long road ahead, I believe we should be jumping now to the next step.

Papervision3D is offering a pretty good solution in the present. I know of examples where it is being used and it will make other websites look pretty common. But I believe we can go farther in this 3D web. With the computer power we have at home nowadays, it’s not hard to launch a 3D browser. A 3D canvas with objects with x,y,z coordinates would allow whole new experiences in websites.

Ok, it may look the same at first, but it’s not. Lindenlabs own the world, and by definition no one owns the Internet. For the good and for the bad, Internet browsing is a anonymous task. Of course you can login in which sites you want, but you can have the freedom to be anonymous and SecondLife doesn’t allow you that. You should also be able to own your own webserver and give what content do you want to, without any rules (but in a standard extensible language, like tHTML). And SL is trying to simulate the real world there, while the 3D websites would be far more abstract (of course a lot of people will emulate the real physics) and allow innovative experiences.

SL is however a good study-case for this 3D ambient. Not everyone seems comfortable with it and it serves only some purposes, mainly playful. When it comes to productivity, I believe 2D is simpler and straightforward. This 3D context should have come first in the Desktop, and we have not one popular example. I am not talking about Compiz’s cube effect, but more about a BumpTop experience.

Is this a bad omen for the 3D internet? Or the new possibilities will overcome that lack of productivity? I look forward to hear new opinions on this subject.

Unlike a lot of colleagues, I don’t carry a pen or a pencil anymore. I only take my PDA to school everyday and it works for me… except that routine of signing the presence control. So you are right, in the last months all I have handwritten was my name and my student card number (and my ID number occasionally). I do all my writing on the computer and I take notes, manage my calendar and contacts on my PDA with its keyboard. And in a few months I will be using a RFID card that will allow me not to borrow a pen anymore. So why did I learn to handwrite?

There are computers for children at a very low cost and schools could even provide computers to students, like the EEE pc targeting kids and at a very low price with all they need, not like that dirty business we have in Portugal for students and teachers to have standard laptops for 150 euros.

But on the other hand, mobile devices such as PDAs, UMPCs and Tablet pcs already have handwriting support and are improving in order to make writing on it as easy as using a piece of paper, but without killing a tree for it.

So what do you thing? Kids in a near future will learn how to write in their keyboards and forget how to draw by hand that beautiful letters we have? Or it will be still taught, used for note-taking tasks on tablets and keyboards will be only used to long tasks?

Yesterday Steven Levy published on Newsweek an article about The Future of Reading based on the opinion of Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO.

In the pre-dot-com-bubble, Jeff believed on a worldwide online bookstore. He brought his vision to the real world, and today we have Amazon, as he has billions of dollars in his bank account. Pretty fair. Now he believes this is the time to change to books 2.0 (or the so called e-books). From my researching, the first e-book can be traced as far back as 1946, but only in mid-90s companies tried to sell them. I remember back in 2000 everyone was talking that e-books were going to be the future along with Pocket PCs. Microsoft Reader and Adobe PDF e-books were so promising, but 7 years later I only see some e-books being shared on P2P networks by those who don’t want to pay writers.

But if someone can successfully launch e-books, it’s Bezos. Everyone buys books from Amazon and they are in position to demand e-books from publishers. But how will they make consumers change ideas? I believe they should do to books the same as Apple did with music back when they introduced the iPod. Everyone was attached to the physical format of the CDs, just like we are to books, but the advantages of the MP3 were no match for most people. Everyone now downloads musics from the Amazon of music: the iTunes Music Store and move a few to the device. The same will happen to books. Bezos has already thought on the device for reading e-books: it’s called Kindle and has being developed since 2004. Of course I don’t believe this will be the revolutionary bookreader, but a simple prototype. The real one will be much more appealing to users.

But do I real believe books will be replaced? I still have my doubts… I’m an avid reader and I do value the physical experience of reading page by page and most of all, having them on my shelves. I need to know that they are there and I do own them. But that’s me, someone who loves fantasy and sci-fi books. But as for daily feeds, and technical books I sure read them on the computer. The interactiveness and, above all, the Ctrl+F make me use my computer for my reading. But that’s me.

The average Joe doesn’t read so much (in Portugal almost nobody reads, but I know it’s not that bad everywhere else) and the e-book will be a nice way of improve those statistics. When I went to Barcelona, one thing that amazed me was the book vending machine! A lot of people read books in the metro in the everyday commuting to work. For those people, the e-book with a Amazon online bookstore was a pretty nice innovation. And they could just go to the nearest Starbucks and download a new romance, just like you could download a music.

The crucial factor will be price. E-books will be a lot cheaper than physical books of course, and this will make young people pick the electronic version rather than the traditional one. And they are who will decide the future technologies. Of course the real lovers would still want to buy books, and there will be always those available (maybe more expensive?!) just like you can still go the a FNAC store and buy a few CDs.