Dr. Vinton Cerf - Internet, Infinity and Beyond - Page 9
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There are lots and lots of devices that I expect will show up on the Internet. My prediction is that there will be a lot more devices on the Internet than there are people; but some of these devices have really surprised me over the years; one of them is an Internet and enabled refrigerator with a liquid crystal touch screen display or picture frames which download images off a given web page and then cycle through them automatically.
Telephones that look like telephone but are actually voice over IP boxes, but the one that really takes the cake is this kid that was probably out surfing somewhere in San Diego and he realized that if he had Internet enabled his surfboard he could be surfing the Internet whilst he was waiting for the next wave in San Diego so he put a laptop in his surfboard and put a WiFi service station back at the rescue plant on the beach and now sells the product an Internet-enabled surfboard, something I never would have predicted.
So just generally speaking I’m expecting billions of devices to show up on the net, some you see every day like I do, I'm in a lot of hotels these days, I see Web TVs there all the time, personal digital assistants are online, mobiles, videogames, picture frames, washing machines are even online and that surfboard.
I’ve been wondering what would you with an Internet enabled refrigerator and if you step back for a minute and think back about RFID chips, these radiofrequency ID devices that are typically used as you go through a toll road to decrement your account,
if you imagine putting RFID chips in the products that you put in the refrigerator, eventually the refrigerator has an idea of what it has inside of it if it has an RFID detector. So while you're off at work your refrigerator’s surfing the net looking for recipes that it knows it can make with what it has inside so when you come home you see a nice list of things for dinner. Now you can extrapolate this little bit you can imagine being on vacation and getting an e-mail, it’s from your refrigerator. Saying I don’t know how much milk is left but it's going to crawl out on it's own because it's three weeks old or maybe you're shopping and your mobile goes off it’s an SMS from your refrigerator “don’t forget the marinara sauce I have everything else I need for Spaghetti dinner tonight”.
Now the Japanese have done a really bad thing, they've invented an Internet-enabled bathroom scale so when you step on the scale it figures out which member of the family you and as part of the House network it transmits the data to your doctor to become part of your medical records which seems like a reasonable thing to do, the problem is that the refrigerator is on the same network. So you come home and you see diet recipes upon the display or maybe it just refuses to open because it knows you’re on a diet.
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