The impact of this advancement is so big it would be difficult to over state, so I won't quote numbers, or bore you with
"this changes everything."

The advancement is 3G and networked video telephony. Few technologies will change society as much as this shift but consider the following ideas that are likely to appear after this year's opening round of 3G start-ups and judge the importance for yourself.

1. Video requires very high bandwidths and accomplishing it opens the way for thousands of other less demanding technologies that "ride free" on the video signal. The effect will be a host of new time, place and personal services.

2. Video is so inexpensive today that, like still cameras, it is included in the cost of the 3G phone. 3G bandwidths and low cost wireless hanbdsets, open the way for "ubiquitous networked video." Dirt cheap video cameras mean they and their wireless phone logic will begin to be embedded in everything, offices, homes, cars etc. Your children's ideas about privacy will be markedly different than yours.

3. Ubiquitous Networked Video easily integrates with face recognition programs. Law enforcement, national security, and finally retail sales databases will track you with increasing frequency. If 1984's Big Brother scenario worries you, your worst nightmares are about to arrive packaged in excellent and compelling reasons to use the technologies.

4. News delivery will find personal and national broadcast feeds to use from "on the spot observers" who's are up close and personal to the action. This probably brings with it more of humanities private subjects than you care to see. Chalk that up to "Good old human nature" and the exhibitionists among us. If you think spam is offensive today, "you ain't seen nothing yet."

5. Video capture presents a kind of "iLife Audit Trail." Will people be more careful with their conversations and actions? Remains to be seen but some are sure to feel intimidated and restrained when they know they are "on-camera."

6. The astonishing growth of conversational information we've seen on Internet in text form may take off like a shot as conversations go video. Internet has shown us that people have nearly an insatiable appetite for conversation and Video Networked Telephony will link us more intimately than at any time in history. Atrocities will be harder to mask. Human Right Violations will become public knowledge more quickly. Indeed the political process will likely be altered.

Finally the huge bandwidth necessary to carry a video signal is what may be called a "pull-through" technology that will spawn a host of applications to index, store and retrieve video clips. GPS, Customer identification, Time and Place of family and friends are each enabled as minor users of this enlarged network capacity.

We feel that people will look back on the opening of this century with nostalgia and longing for a simpler and less observed life. But the benefits to society in democratized information, personal growth through education, and business conducted on a face-to-face basis are very real and very compelling benefits of Video Telephony. So it is probable that much of what we've forecast will come into being in one form or another.

Views from Lisa Wellman & Terry Wellman

Powered by CityMax.com