Whereness in the Future Digital Networked Economy - Ubiquitous Positioning - page 40

3.4 Whereness and the Future Digital Networked Economy
It would be useful to consider how the digital networked economy (DNE) is
developing and how it will affect the emerging Whereness business. The term is
used by the ICT industry to describe the business of the Internet, which is really
about the business of the internetworking of computers. As time advances, more
and more devices that were analog, for example, the telephone, Hi-fi, TV, radio,
and personal stereo, are becoming digital and effectively becoming computer-
controlled appliances that are internetworked. We now consider some of the more
important aspects of the future DNE, how it impacts on Whereness, and vice
versa.
3.4.1 Falling Cost
The cost of electronics, computing equipment, and software will fall, perhaps
more quicky than in the past due to the effects of rapid commoditization and the
growth in the Asian manufacturing and software economies. As enterprise
software and related issues of security are replaced by more up-to-date versions,
the costs, associated with problems of the first-generation solutions, should fall as
they get fixed. Whereness will enhance trust and security and should help this
trend.
The relatively high cost of personal navigational equipment, wireless enabled
computers, and sensing systems will fall and become more affordable. The
business case for position-aware business systems thus improves and consumer
products will increasingly include positioning-dependent applications.
3.4.2 Web Services
As the numbers of internetworked computer users increase, Web services will
become increasingly important. A Web service is an application offered on
demand to a user by a service provider over the Internet or an intranet that
normally does not need any special software to be installed on the user's computer
over and above the normal browser and associated elements such as plug-ins,
cookies, and Java support.
All Web 2.0 applications are Web services. The application intelligence is
distributed between the browser of the user's platform and the Web server that is
providing a service. Chapter 8 describes how it operates and includes details of the
principal location-based services such as Google Maps and Google Earth and
methodologies such as AJAX 3 and APIs. Of all the developments that are relevant
to Whereness, the recent advances in this area cannot be overestimated in
importance to Whereness. Recent devices such as the Apple iPhone are allowing
3 Asynchronous Java Script and XML (AJAX) and the Application Programmable Interface (API) are
important aspects of Web 2.0 and will be explained in Chapter 8.