Recently in Hyperconnectivity Category

That's the name of what is the most technologically advanced row boat ever built.

"For what purpose?" you might ask.

Last January, Oliver Hicks, a Brit, set off solo from Tasmania on his 18,000 mile (29,000 km) journey around the world. If completed (Oliver is now in New Zealand!), this will be a world first and take between 18 and 22 months to complete.

Nova Spivack, technologist and cofounder of one the first Internet companies (EarthWeb in 1984), spoke earlier in the month at the Future in Review FiRe conference in San Jose, CA.

He made the following observation: "We're moving from a web that was like a refernce library to a web that's increasingly like radio or TV".

Right on. This reflects a move from the Internet being a bunch of pages you surf to a set of self-describing objects that you 'tune into in terms of interest areas'.

It's not a new cell phone or music player, but a DNA barcoder reader you might be able to actually buy in 10-15 years!

Why would you want one?

Let's say you are mushroom picking, and want to know whether a particularly delicious looking specimen you have found will kill you. Or you are fishing, and catch a fish that you are unfamiliar with.

Hyperconnectivity hit home personally when my daughter, a paleomammoligist, called home last summer via a satellite phone from an island in the far north in the region of the North Pole. A storm was raging and she was confined to her tent. Nice to hear her crystal clear voice as if she were down the street!

But the story doesn't end there.

She was leading an expedition that had just found the skull of a 20 million year old fossil that they had found the year before, making her find 65% complete.

Many hearing-impaired people use email and text messaging to communicate. Some, I'm sure, are using 3G wireless phones equipped with video cameras to communicate via sign language. Great idea, but high cost and battery life are real problems that are a bottleneck to wide adoption.

Until now!

A team of engineers from University of Washington in Seattle and Cornell have just about completed a functional prototype, they dub 'mobile ASL (American Sign Language)'.

I applaud this initiative to extend the value of hyperconnectivity to more people.

Hyperconnectivity is brought to you by an explosion in cell phones and in networked sensors for everything.

Eric Paulos of Carnegie Mellon University is proposing to converge these two hyperconnectivity trends by shifting cell phones from being purely personal communications devices to being "networked mobile personal measurement instruments."

For example, many cell phones have GPS positioning capabilities and many are starting to integrate motion detectors (e.g. for Wii-style gaming). Combining these two into a massively distributed, earthquake early warning system may reap huge benefits for science and mankind.

Innovation comes from interdisciplinary thinking such as exemplified by Dr Paulos.

I will be retiring on April 10 after 37 years in Nortel. The decision was actually made pre-filing, but I decided to stay on to participate in one last VoiceCon, my swan song so to speak.

I have spent my career help create networking for a hyperconnected world.

Back in the 70s (what I called my pioneering years), when the world was circuit switched and flat, and when the ARPAnet was running on minicomputers over 4.8Kbps lines (not a typo), I was part of the team mandated to develop a carrier-grade packet switch that could support 56 Kbps trunks.

A recent IDC study sponsored by Nortel found that the percent of respondents willing to send business text messages on vacation varied from 52% in China and 67% in the United Arab Emirates to 11% in Canada and 17% in Japan.

Another survey of city workers in the U.K. by CREDANT Technologies found that 83% plan to take their mobile phone or BlackBerry with them on vacation, while 65% plan to make contact with the office.

This may be just fine for you, but if you feel that you are suffering from cellphonitis, help is at hand.

Hyperconnectivity, as we all know, has a dark side in the form of new security threats. Now a computer virus (specifically the W32.Gammima.AG worm) has gone where no virus has ever gone before.... hitting laptops on the International Space Station.

This is a level 0 gaming virus intended to gather personal information.

The number of wireless phones worldwide just crossed the 4 billion mark. Maybe 10% of these are currently connected to the Internet, but this is going to go way up, led by developments from Nortel and others.

How about another milestone?

There are now 1 million industrial robots, with the highest density in Japan with 295 robots for every 10K workers in manufacturing. Roughly, a third of these are in the automotive industry (they may be on paid leave!). The next nearest countries are Singapore, South Korea and Germany, each with between 163-169.

Two radically different forms of connectivity--- one hyperconnected world.