David Siegel, author of Pull and a former SemTechBiz keynote speaker, recently shared his thoughts regarding the future of Apple, the cloud, and data in general. Siegel states, “The consumer’s electronic world as we know it today is shared between Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and a handful of other popular brands. Most offerings must ride on these platforms and play by their rules. Yet I believe our current interest in—and use of—this ecosystem will peak in 3-6 years, and what awaits each of these companies on the other side must be a completely different business.”

He continues, “We have spent the last twenty years making everything digital, and now that transformation is 99 percent complete. Read more

A recent article covers Austin non-profit CLOUD, the Consortium for Local Ownership and Use of Data. According to the article, CLOUD “is trying to create tools and standards for how the Internet of the future will handle the bits of your online identity currently scattered all over the digital landscape.” With a concept reminiscent of David Siegel’s personal data locker, “CLOUD is working to create a contextual markup language — a kind of additional layer of tagging and filtering atop the existing Internet — around identity. The goal is to create tools to better manage ID data. It would decentralize data so your entire online profile wouldn’t be duplicated everywhere, just the bits that you might need for, say, a doctor’s appointment or to sign up for a library card.” Read more