The Web's Future

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is helping to create the World Wide Web Foundation, a new organization that will certify Web sites it finds to be trustworthy and a reliable source of information. Berners-Lee says there needs to be a new system that will give Web sites a label for trustworthiness once they have proven to be a reliable source. "On the Web the thinking of cults can spread very rapidly and suddenly a cult which was 12 people who had some deep personal issues suddenly find a formula which is very believable," he says. "A sort of conspiracy theory of sorts and which you can imagine spreading to thousands of people and being deeply damaging." Berners-Lee and colleagues at the World Wide Web consortium examined simple ways of branding Web sites, but concluded that a whole variety of different mechanisms are needed. In addition to creating a trustworthiness rating, the World Wide Web Foundation also will strive to make it easier for people to get online. Currently, only 20 percent of the world's population has access to the Web. The foundation also will explore ways of making the Web more mobile-phone friendly, which will increase its use in Africa and other developing parts of the world where there are few computers but plenty of handheld devices. The foundation also will examine how the Web can be used to benefit those who cannot read or write. "We're talking about the evolution of the Web," Berners-Lee says. "When something is such a creative medium as the Web, the limits to it are our imagination."

Microsoft Asia Research

Microsoft's Bill Gates says the dramatic growth of the Internet will eventually help eliminate "the last constraints we have" and lead to a software-writing revolution. Speaking at a forum marking the 10th anniversary of Microsoft's Asian research division, Gates said that technology currently in development will transform how people use computers as well as expand their ability to interact with machines. Greater Internet connectivity will give users better services, providing remote access to a variety of software and information, Gates says. "That will eventually lead to machines that have lots of server capacity, lots of low-cost computing, low-cost storage," Gates says. "And that will let us write software in an even more ambitious way, eliminating the last constraints we have." Gates believes that uses for computers will expand to encompass all interactive techniques, such as touch, sight, and speech. Gates also praised the work of Microsoft's Asian research division, and praised science and technology as a force for positive change. Gates says major developments in Internet services and computer interfaces are at a good stage of development in the labs, and should be widespread within 10 years, while more advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence or robotics, could be available within 20 years.

Artificial Tongue

Anton, a mechanical tongue and jaw that has successfully mimicked the muscular activity involved in producing certain vowel sounds will be presented at this year's International Society of Artificial Life conference. Robin Hofe of the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom says Anton has the potential to help improve speech recognition software. Existing systems are working with larger databases of recorded speech, but their performance has not significantly improved because the way people talk is not steady and uniform. Speech can be affected by where people are and what they are doing. The researchers believe Anton will be a key to learning more about how the mouth produces sounds, since obtaining data from inside the human mouth might not be the best approach. The researchers also want to embed artificial muscles in Anton to make it more realistic, and eventually have it produce sound. The previous test involved MRI scans to compare the movements of Anton with those of real mouths.

Plastic Based Electronics

Plastics-based electronics can be cheaper and less energy intensive to manufacture than their silicon counterparts while also being bendable and potentially more energy efficient. Organic light-emitting diodes (OLED) can be used for displays that require no backlight and are flexible, and major technical issues such as uneven wear and durability have been addressed. Experts say price is currently the biggest obstacle to the launch of a mass market OLED display. High-definition televisions that can be rolled up after use is one OLED application that is envisioned to happen after the technology breaks into the mainstream. Electronics for plastic displays can be "printed" roll to roll like a newspaper rather than be constructed piece by piece, and NanoMarkets analyst Lawrence Gasman says this feature will probably lower the cost of fabricating OLEDs to a significant degree. Universal Display has a two-year, approximately $2 million contract with the U.S. Department of Energy to develop thin OLED lighting panels that can either be printed or mounted onto numerous surfaces. Another breakthrough in plastics electronics is electronic paper. Co-op America estimates that electronic magazine delivery through e-paper could spare 35 million trees from getting converted into paper yearly. The emergence of affordable solar panels could also be accelerated by plastic electronics through the efforts of companies that are working on organic solar panels.

Cuil Search Engine

Cuil is a new search engine started by former engineers from Google and several other tech giants. Cuil's founders say the new search engine covers as many as three times the number of Web pages as Google. Cuil aims to deliver better results than other major search engines by searching through more Web pages and studying pages more accurately. Cuil's results page also is different; it looks more like a magazine than a list of results. "You can't be an alternative search engine and smaller," says Cuil cofounder Anna Patterson, one of the engineers who helped build Google's search index. "You have to be an alternative and bigger." Cuil claims to be able to search across 120 billion Web pages, compared with Google's 40 billion. Patterson says Cuil has developed a faster and better way to index Web pages that relies of fewer machines. Analyst Greg Sterling says the strong skills of Cuil's founders, which includes Patterson's husband Tom Costello, who built search engine technology for IBM and was on the research faculty at Stanford University, and the fact that the company has already built such a large search engine from scratch strengthens Cuil's chances of competing over the long term. However, the company must still find a way to generate enough advertising revenue to fund the hefty infrastructure and technology costs of scaling a search engine.

Comparing Web 1.0 & Web 2.0

Among Web 2.0's key attributes are the growth of social networks, bi-directional communication, diverse content types, and various "glue" technologies, and the authors note that while most of Web 2.0 shares the same substrate as Web 1.0, there are some significant differences. Features typical of Web 2.0 Web sites include users as first class entities in the system, with prominent profile pages; the ability to connect with users through links to other users who are "friends," membership in various types of "groups," and subscriptions or RSS feeds of "updates" from other users; the ability to post content in various media, including blogs, photos, videos, ratings, and tags; and more technical features, such as embedding of various rich content types, communication with other users through internal email or instant messaging systems, and a public API to permit third-party augmentations and mash-ups. Web 1.0 metrics of similar interest in Web 2.0 include the general portion of Internet traffic, numbers of users and servers, and portion of various protocols. About 500 million users reside in a few tens of social networks with the top few responsible for the bulk of the users and traffic, and traffic within a Web 2.0 site is more difficult to measure without help from the site itself. The challenges for streamlining popular sites for mobile users differ slightly between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, in that instant notification to users through mobile devices can be facilitated because of the short or episodic nature of most Web 2.0 communications. Most communication in Web 2.0 is between users, so Web 2.0 sites have no easy way to select during overload; however, the sites apply varying restrictions to guarantee that overall load and latency is reasonably maintained. Some of the Web 2.0 sites are eager to maximize and retain members within an "electronic fence," which can facilitate balkanization, although total balkanization is likely to be prevented by a countercurrent stemming from the prevalent link-based nature of Web users continuously connecting to sites outside the fence. The authors point out that there are substantial challenges in permitting users to comprehend privacy implications and to simply represent usage policies for their personal data.

Intel's Ct Programming Language

Intel showed off a new programming language for multi-core computing, called Ct, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., on June 11. An extension of C/C++, the programming language automatically partitions code to run on specific cores. "With Ct, it's almost like you're writing to a single-core machine," said Intel researcher Mohan Rajagopalan during the open house for Intel labs. "You leave it to the compiler and runtime to parallelize." Intel developed the Ct compiler, which chops up the code to run on separate cores based on the type of data and the operation performed on the data, in addition to the runtime and an API for the compiler. Less than 5 percent of Ct is new, so C/C++ programmers will find it easy to use. Rajagopalan also noted that programs compiled in Ct can scale to the available number of cores. Intel is relatively close to bringing to market a product developers will be able to use to make financial analytics applications and software for processing images or decoding video