David Hill of Network Computing recently shared his theory on the three transformations of IT. He writes, “The first was the digitization of business. The second is the continuing digitization of human experience. The third stage is the digitization of machines. Each transformation is ongoing, builds upon the others, and may overlap. Thus, some technologies that formed a foundation earlier are still active. For example, the mainframe is still alive and well, even in the time of mobile computing. Even though specific technologies provide a frame of reference, these transformations span a broad perspective and are not dependent upon any one technology. Please also note that there is not a smooth transition to each transformation, but that elements of a later transformation may be present while the key transformation of an earlier era is still more prominent.” continued…

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Alex Williams of TechCrunch reports, “What a two weeks it’s been. Something happened that has been simmering for a while. The API market exploded. Intel bought Mashery for more than $180 million and CA acquired Layer 7. 3Scale received a new $4.2 million round of funding from Javelin Ventures. Mulesoft acquired Programmable Web. And then Facebook jumped in and bought Parse. The acquisitions and funding point to a maturing market that is reflected in the ubiquity of APIs across the application landscape. It’s not a new market by any means. continued…

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Trento, Italy, hosted a technology conference ‘ICT Days 2013’ between 20th and 23rd March. Like all such events it was interesting, dynamic and informative, but it was also quite different from the normal conferences.

It broadcast a very loud message that Semantic Technology, Big Data, and the interconnectivity of things will – without any doubt – affect everything and everyone; that these technologies will change the way everyone interacts with public services, the way in which dwindling natural resources are distributed and managed, the way citizens interact with each other, the way in which public and private bodies cooperate to support the needs of the citizen and the way in which public bodies are monitored and held accountable to the people that elected them.

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David Meyer of GigaOM reports, “IBM and Deutsche Telekom, the carrier behind the T-Mobile brand, are to work together on creating smart city systems, the companies have announced. The smart city concept, which is closely related to the internet of things, is reliant on pervasive connectivity, drawing on what has traditionally been known as machine-to-machine (M2M) technology to hook up everything from traffic lights to public transport vehicles to the local broadband network. This usually involves the use of cellular networks.” continued…

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John-Paul Rooney of the Guardian recently called on readers to make way for the Internet of Things. He writes, “Growing interest in the interoperability of household appliances and the difference this could make to our everyday lives, is leading to calls for new ‘standards’ to be introduced to accelerate the way to the internet of things. Much like those used in other areas of industry where technology sharing is important, such as the telecoms sector, innovators in the consumer electronics sector and other hi-tech industries believe that the use of Europe-wide ‘standards essential patents’, could help to protect innovators’ routes to market and encourage research and development (R&D) investment.” continued…

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In an interesting development within the Internet of Things, Disney has introduced Touché, “a new sensing technology that proposes a novel Swept Frequency Capacitive Sensing technique that can not only detect a touch event, but simultaneously recognize complex configurations of the human hands and body during touch interaction. This allows to significantly enhances touch interaction in a broad range of applications, from enhancing conventional touchscreens to designing interaction scenarios for unique use contexts and materials. For example, in our explorations we added complex touch and gesture sensitivity not only to computing devices and everyday objects, but also to the human body and liquids.” continued…

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Blackberry president and CEO Thorsten Heins with new global creative director Alicia Keys.

The new and long-awaited Blackberry 10 line from Research In Motion (RIM) makes its debut today. The company that once defined the smart phone market has a lot riding on it, and it remains to be seen if the new models debuting today will revive its fortunes. It’s already revived its name: Thorsten Heins, President and CEO, revealed at the launch today that “from this day forward, RIM becomes Blackberry.”

The two models that kick off its re-engineered approach to mobile computing are the Blackberry Q10 with a hybrid touch-screen/keyboard and the Z10 with a full touch-screen and onscreen keyboard, powered by the Blackberry 10 platform. Of the Q10, Heins said, “We built this for all those people who told us, ‘we just have to have a physical keyboard typing experience’.” Given Blackberry users’ well-known attachment to traditional keyboards, getting the onscreen keyboard right is going to be a big concern for tried-and-true Blackberry users.

As on the Blackberry Playbook before it, SwiftKey – the best-selling Android app of 2012— is reportedly behind the virtual keyboard technology on the new models. Though that vendor wasn’t named in the launch presentation during the demo of the touch-screen keyboard capabilities, the features Blackberry demonstrated pointed to the company’s leveraging the cross-platform SwiftKey software development kit for at least some of the new devices’ capabilities.

And what’s behind SwiftKey is natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning technology to speed up touch-screen typing.

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Anders Gustafsson, CEO of Zebra Technologies recently posed the question, is the Internet of Things all hype, or is it a reality? He writes, “The discussion around [the Internet of Things] typically has been about the possibilities — the big ‘what ifs,’ particularly as it relates to consumers. There are many interesting ideas that will offer new conveniences and life-changing applications. We talk about ‘what if’ we could connect the Internet to the things in our everyday life. At the 2013 International CES last week, we heard a lot about Internet-connected crockpots, washing machines and other home appliances. In a nutshell, it’s about using data to make objects smarter and more responsive to our needs.” continued…

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Christopher Mims of Quartz recently discussed a concept that may rise alongside the Internet of Things: the Internet of You. Mims explains, “We’ve been hearing about ‘wearable computing’ for years. But we’re finally at a tipping point. Better batteries, miniaturization, and radical new approaches to manufacturing electronic circuits have finally made screens, computers and sensors small enough to stick just about anywhere. It no longer seems strange to see someone wearing a bracelet that records their vital signs, a watch with as much power as a cell phone, or, soon to be available, glasses that augment our reality.” continued…

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Applying semantic technologies to IoT, however, has several research challenges, the authors note, pointing out that IoT and using semantics in IoT is still in its early days. Being in on the ground floor of this movement is undeniably exciting to the research community, including people such as Konstantinos Kotis, Senior Research Scientist at University of the Aegean, and IT Manager in the regional division of the Samos and Ikaria islands at North Aegean Regional Administration Authority.

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Roger Kay of Forbes recently opined that the world is becoming more and more user-centric. He explains, “User-centric computing is a theme we can expect to hear articulated in many ways next week at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. The simple view of the shift from device-centric to user-centric computing goes like this: when all we had was one device — a PC, first to do our work and later to connect to the Internet — we adapted to the device.  We learned how to wrestle it into more or less obeying our will.  We became skilled at the arcane keystrokes of DOS commands and Lotus 1-2-3 in order to do productive work.  We went to the machine.” continued…

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The BBC has posted a new video

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Aron Kramer of The Guardian recently predicted long-term changes to the world that will occur in 2013. He writes, “A healthy dose of scepticism is in order whenever one attempts to foresee the future. Events usually make great sense in retrospect, but are difficult to predict at the time. The daily hum of headlines, breaking news and Twitterfeeds may distract us from the underlying changes taking place. With this in mind, the best way to think about 2013 is to consider the long-term changes that are reshaping our world – some with visible effect, and some under the radar.” continued…

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Courtesy: Flickr/LadyDragonflyCC <3

Yesterday we began our look back at the year in semantic technology here. Today we continue with more expert commentary on the year in review:

Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead:

I would mention two things (among many, of course).

•  Schema.org had an important effect on semantic technologies. Of course, it is controversial (role of one major vocabulary and its relations to others, the community discussions on the syntax, etc.), but I would rather concentrate on the positive aspects. A few years ago the topic of discussion was whether having ‘structured data’, as it is referred to (I would simply say having RDF in some syntax or other), as part of a Web page makes sense or not. There were fairly passionate discussions about this and many were convinced that doing that would not make any sense, there is no use case for it, authors would not use it and could not deal with it, etc. Well, this discussion is over. Structured data in Web sites is here to stay, it is important, and has become part of the Web landscape. Schema.org’s contribution in this respect is very important; the discussions and disagreements I referred to are minor and transient compared to the success. And 2012 was the year when this issue was finally closed.
•  On a very different aspect (and motivated by my own personal interest) I see exciting moves in the library and the digital publishing world. Many libraries recognize the power of linked data as adopted by libraries, of the value of standard cataloging techniques well adapted to linked data, of the role of metadata, in the form of linked data, adopted by journals and soon by electronic books… All these will have a profound influence bringing a huge amount of very valuable data onto the Web of Data, linking to sources of accumulated human knowledge. I have witnessed different aspects of this evolution coming to the fore in 2012, and I think this will become very important in the years to come.

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Gil Press of Forbes reports, “Norman Joseph Woodland, the co-inventor of the bar code, died this week at 91. What is now called ‘The Internet of Things‘ was born one day in 1949 when Woodland was sitting on a Florida beach, thinking about how product information can be captured at the supermarket checkout. The only code Woodland knew was the Morse Code he’d learned in the Boy Scouts, his daughter told the Associated Press this week. Woodland drew Morse dots and dashes as he sat on the beach and absent-mindedly left his fingers in the sand where they traced a series of parallel lines. ‘It was a moment of inspiration. He said, ‘instead of dots and dashes I can have thick and thin bars,’’ Susan Woodland recalled.” continued…

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