A new game with new rules, a revolution within a totally connected world and the influence of a generation of off-the-wall, passionate thinkers. These are just a few of the descriptions surrounding the impact of the Internet on business and society to emerge from Telkom SA’s 15th 2012 SATNAC.
Pieter Geldenhuys, Futurist and Technology Strategist at Innovation Agency, told delegates that the revolution is here and the time is now for consumers and business decision makers to understand how to take advantage of the opportunities.
Geldenhuys pointed to a number of primary forces, including 4G/ LTE, Zettabytes of storage capacity and Internet 2.0 that now shape business development and application of technology.
In his presentation Geldenhuys mentioned that according to The Economist Big Data is expected to be valued at 20 billion by 2017.
“Part of this revolution is the way we view manufacturing, computational and personal manufacturing, where people can conceptualise and develop on their own through the application of technology,” he said.
The emergence of concepts like a life cockpit – or a dashboard to centralise all areas of an individual’s connected life – or the first law of telecosm (the value of the network grows by the square of the processing power of all the terminals attached to it), is evidence of the growth of this revolution.
“We see radical changes in key areas of life including medicine, security and finance, for example. We are also moving into the rise of the stupid network, where the intelligence is moving to the edge, in the world of bandwidth traditional models are open to change,” Geldenhuys continued.
Advertising and marketing are highlighted as examples of this.
He added that whilst we have the Internet and ‘the perfect oracle to connect the senses to the invisible world’, the question remains – how do people access these channels and leverage off the opportunities?
Geldenhuys pointed to a number of lessons that people can take on board, including that peer-to-peer (P2P) medium is the message and the new way to do business.
Chris Tredger, Online Editor
