Living in the "cloud"

The dream of network computing has come true

Zen with technology

Pervasive telecommunications

Every single device is now able to be connected to any other device on earth ! Let's take the example of one of the most communicative device : the mobile phone.
This device is really changing our lives, and it is very hard to tell to what extend it is doing so ! The most advanced mobile phones now include Infrared, Bluetooth, WiFi and GSM. By using any of these protocols, the device is able to wirelessly reach an other device which is wired to another one and then to a backbone. From there you can reach other nodes through high-bandwidth pipes and finally, you reach your destination.
However, neither it is the cables nor the waves, but the devices which are interesting ! And so it happened:

The Net was designed to allow the computers to be seen without having to see the cables.

The cloud was born !

And then came the Web

Being able to access any device worldwide is really amazing. but it is no enough !
Indeed, it is not the computers, but the documents which are interesting ! And so it happened:

Now you could browse around a sea of documents without having to worry about which computer they were stored on.

The navigator was born !

The latest step

Then, the proliferation of broadband Internet connections and reliable server farms made it viable to store an increasingly greater amount of data on this "cloud".
This amount of data is so huge (Google derives from Googol) that it is not the documents, but their processing which is interesting ! And so it happened:

Now you can easily merge and process information online thanks to the increasing use of XML (RSS feeds, Microformats).

The mashup was born !

My dream of mobile computing has come true

Information is getting easier to merge...

...whatever the device, the time and the place.
That's what I call mobile computing: processing global data from the "cloud" whenever I want and wherever I want !
And this is no longer restricted to very important CEOs using VPN, Exchange servers and personalized applications. No. This is yet at arm's length of the average Joe (who can afford the following $800 device).

Powerful devices

The technological race has gone so fast lately that I have difficulties to stay in ! Within two years, Taiwan's HTC has become a major actor in the world of PDAs. I am the proud owner of one of their latest product, the Kaiser (see photo), which really deserves its name ! The specifications are impressive :