 My name is Manik Sertani. I work for Red Hat, and I'm going to be talking about ubiquitous computing, often shortened to Ubicomp. A little bit about me again, I tend to focus on cloud computing, on cloud storage, on distributed computing. These are just areas of interest that I tend to follow within Red Hat. Red Hat itself is an open source company. Does everyone here know what open source is? No? Okay, that guy does. Open source essentially is not a mechanism, it's a way of writing software. It's actually a licensing model behind your software. Most software companies tend to write what's called proprietary software in that they own the rights to the software. No one else can see the source code of the software, a bit like Windows, right? You get a copy of Windows. You don't know how it's actually built. You don't know what goes in it. It's all a big secret. It's a trade secret to a certain corporation. Open source software is right the opposite. It's like software written by the community, by people like you and I, written either for fun or for profit or for any reason at all. But the key thing about open source software is the source code is always free and always available. It means anybody can copy it, can take it, can change it, can make it better. And this, in terms of building software, in my opinion, is one of the best ways of building software. You get to stand out other people's efforts and make things better and better. A little bit more about me. My, there you go, details to my blog and Twitter feed are up there if you're interested in following more about what I have to say about open source software and other things. But that's not what this talk is about. This talk is about ubiquitous computing. Who knows about the term ubiquitous computing? Who knows what it means? No? Nobody? Okay. So quite literally ubiquitous means always available everywhere. It's all around you computing as in computing. What it literally means in this concept. The concept first originated in the late 80s and it was based on the idea that computers are everywhere. They surround us and more than just surround us, they are stitched into the very fabric of our society. They kind of form the backdrop of our society. The way we interact with computers today is very imperative. You have a computer. You use it. That's not ubiquitous computing. Ubiquitous computing is the computers are all there in the background. We build our society on top of that. We don't even notice that they're there. They're all around us. They're doing stuff for us. They're helping our lives, making our lives better and so on and so forth. It's a very futuristic vision. The term was first coined in the late 80s. We get ever closer to achieving this almost science fiction like ideal. Ubiquitous computing encompasses several different areas of technology, mainly mobile, cloud, social networks. I'm going to talk about these in more detail later on so don't worry if you don't actually understand what these terms mean. There are a few more things as well including artificial intelligence, sensor networks for auto discovery and the way humans interact with computers. Again, I'm going to explain all of these things in more detail as we go along. Essentially computers have come a very long way since Charles Babbage's first difference engine in 1822. So let's have a little bit of a history lesson. Necessity has always been the mother of all invention and in the early 1900s there has not been more necessity than the two great world wars which have driven computing to where we see it today. Who knows what that machine is? Who's seen a picture of that before? A few hands up there. Okay, that is the enigma machine. The enigma machine was used by the German forces during World War II to encrypt messages so that Allied forces, so that British forces, American forces, et cetera, could not intercept these messages. And this was a very, very powerful weapon in the hands of the German army. It meant that the Allied forces could not track their whereabouts and their movements and so on and so forth. The Allied forces led by Britain actually had a counter project to overcome enigma and that was called Project Ultra. Project Ultra was essentially, it's a fairly large all-encompassing term. It included computers, mathematicians, researchers, code breakers, things like that. And the point of Ultra was to crack the enigma code and to figure out what was actually going on, what the enemy was up to. In fact, Ultra was so important that it's widely believed that without Ultra, Britain and her allies would not have won the war. That's a famous quote by Sir Winston Churchill reporting to King George VI a few years after the end of World War II, saying that it was thanks to Ultra that we did win the war. Ultra did play a crucial role. This machine over here, this is Colossus from 1943. Colossus was used in Project Ultra. Project Ultra was primarily based out of Bletchley Park, which was at the time the home of GC and CS, and it's now called GCHQ. It stands for the Government Code and Cypher School. This was the government department that was given the task of breaking codes of figuring out what the enemy was up to, intercepted messages and so on and so forth. It was their intelligence unit, basically. Colossus was the world's first digital, electronic and programmable computer, and Colossus and her derivatives were used by Alan Turing and his team at Bletchley Park to crack enigma, and that was a very big part of Project Ultra. This entire project has always been treated with utmost secrecy. For a long time, Colossus was not even entered in museums, people didn't even know about it. The people who worked on it, even for decades after the war, people weren't even given the proper recognition and reward for what they have done, because this was treated with the utmost secrecy for a very long time. So just putting things in perspective now, that's Colossus 1943. The other device you see over there is a 2007 iPhone, which do you think is more powerful? Right? How many times more powerful? A lot. A lot, yes. Any guesses? A number? No? 250 times more powerful. And that is the first iPhone from 2007. I'm not even talking about the devices we have today, just a few years on. I'll talk about how much that's changed as well in a little bit. Again putting things in perspective, the iPhone, in addition to being 250 times more powerful than Colossus, is 500 times more powerful than the guidance control computers of Apollo 11. This is the thing that put new arms from on the moon, and that iPhone is more powerful than that. 500 times more powerful than that. So what does this all mean? This all means, this is very, very interesting times we live in, that we have devices as cheap, as powerful, as small, as ubiquitous, in our hands, in our pockets, all around us. Right? What can we do with this? Well, let's see what we can do with this. So we've grown up in an era of computers, right? We're all used to computers being around us. There's nothing new to us. We're used to being surrounded by desktops and laptops. We're used to using these things every day, all the time. In fact, we're also kind of used to smartphones now as well, kind of everywhere, and pretty powerful, they're almost as powerful as your laptop. We're getting more and more used to tablets. These things are becoming more popular, more common, more widely deployed. But there's even more to it than just this. Some of the smaller everyday devices we are surrounded by are also very powerful computers that we don't think about. Things like the routers that run our Wi-Fi networks, whether at home or in the office. Things like our VCRs or DVD players, televisions. These things are all powerful computers too. They're as powerful as your iPhone. They're as powerful as your tablet. But even these are relatively obvious. There are some even less obvious things around. Your microwave oven, your washing machine, the stuff you find in your kitchen, even your car, right? All of these things have CPUs, they have processors, they have memory, they have everything a regular computer has. That washing machine is probably several times more powerful than my first computer from not too many years ago. And I'm not joking about that. So this is all very interesting that you have all of these devices. Current statistics say that there are five times more processors on the planet than there are people. So for every human being on the planet, there are five such machines capable of talking to one another, extremely powerful things, and the fun really starts when we actually let these devices start talking to one another, forming an autonomous mesh around us. And that's when we see some very interesting behavior. So let's take a step back now. I mean, that was all kind of futuristic-ish, right? Having all these devices around us and trying to get them to talk to one another. Where are we today? What has technology given us today? Where do we stand at the moment? I'm going to focus on some of the most recent game-changing innovations of the last few years specifically and talk about how that is going to extrapolate out. The first thing is cloud computing. It's a fairly overloaded term. A lot of people talk about it. Very few people understand what it really is. Who here does understand what it is? Who does know what it is? Who's heard of it before? Right? So you have heard of the term before. It's a fairly common term, right? In most common parlance, it is used, the term is used to define a series of servers, a series of large powerful computers sitting out there somewhere on the Internet, which you have access to. You have access to it. You can do certain things with it. Primarily for storage, at least in terms of consumer devices today, people think of cloud in terms of storage actually probably made popular by Apple and iCloud for iPhone. Actually, they've hijacked the term cloud and they just use it to mean back up your phone somewhere. That's not really what cloud computing is. That's just a tiny fraction of what it is. What it really is, the official definition of cloud computing, is the ability to use virtual servers on physical hardware and provision this dynamically. Now that's the load of jargon that's probably meaningless to most of you. I'm going to try and explain that. What it really is, is you have large physical machines sitting somewhere in a big data center. Now if you actually want to have access to a large computer somewhere, you don't actually have to buy a machine anymore or install it in a data center anymore. What you can do is you can get a virtual machine sitting on top of this actual machine and connect it remotely. These virtual machines are very easy to switch on. You can get them on demand and so on and so forth. Not really useful for people like you and I. It's not generally a useful thing, but it is very important for commercial businesses, for e-commerce businesses, things like that. Just like eBay, sites like Amazon, they all rely on cloud computing to be able to scale outwards as they need more machines, scale back in as they don't, things like that. The one aspect I want to point out about cloud computing though is that elasticity. I think that's important moving forward. That seemingly unlimited amount of storage that you have. You can put all sorts of stuff up there, you will not run out of storage. It's not literally true, but let's assume it is for the time being. That's important for the talk as it progress. The other important thing is mobile computing. Now, who here does not have a phone, a mobile phone? Yep, no hands expected. Everyone's got one, right? We've come to take this for granted. Everyone's got a mobile phone. It's pretty obvious we all use it. We all know the benefits around it. Fast SMSs, cheap ways of communicating, you're always contactable. Very, very useful in the way it's affected society. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Some of the more interesting things that mobile phones have done for us, we don't quite realize yet. For one thing, mobile phones are cheap and they are for everyone. It is not just a first world technology. It never was intended to be a first world technology. There are entire communities in Africa, for example, that have never seen a regular landline and they've leapfrogged completely into mobile phones. They started with not having any form of electronic communication and suddenly everyone's got a mobile phone. That's a very powerful thing. That's powerful because it means that mobile phones are all inclusive. No one's going to be left behind. Everyone's going to be involved in this mobile revolution, so to speak. A lot of people like to tell this story. It's a story of how mobile phones affect socioeconomic behavior of people. What that means, this particular story is about fishermen off the coast of Kerala in India. These guys go out in their fishing boats. They go out to sea for days on end, come back with a whole of fish. They can go to one of several villages to sell their fish. They can't go to every village because by the time they go to every village, that fish isn't going to be fresh anymore. They want to go to the village that's going to fetch them the best price for their fish. How do they know which one to go to? Again, cheap mobile phones means that they can call around. They can find which market's going to pay them the highest amount of money, the largest amount of money for their fish, and they can go straight there. This has had a huge impact on the way these societies live, their livelihoods, and so on and so forth. But these stories are just again the tip of the iceberg. This is all based on what we call, what I call dumb phone technology. This is old world technology today, right? This is based on GSM phones and SMSs. I'm not talking about smartphones yet. I'm not talking about mobile internet yet. In this room, most of us have mobile internet already. Most of us have smartphones already, right? What happens when these smartphones become small enough, cheap enough, and ubiquitous that everybody has access to these? That's a whole other revolution just waiting to happen. Mobile computing also is not just phones. There's also the e-book revolution or the e-reader revolution. Who over here has a Kindle or an iPad or a similar electronic reader device? Okay, cool. Who uses it for a school, for your textbooks? It's really handy, isn't it? I wish I had one when I was in university, instead of having to lug big textbooks all over the place or waiting in a library on a waiting list for a particular textbook that's in high demand. It's great to be able to just have a single device to have all of your reference material and everything else in a very small, light-portable manner. Now, I know that there's a pretty interesting innovation happening around here where a lot of schools are considering deploying these en masse as well to be able to provide all of their students with all of their textbooks, all of their material on a single, tiny electronic device. So that's mobile. Social networks is the next interesting thing here, the next important innovation. I'm sure everybody knows what this is, right? Which of those, those are just a few social networks I've listed up there, some of the more popular ones. Who's on all of them? Someone's on all of them over there, okay, cool. Essentially, social networks are very important. They change the way people discover one another. They change the way people communicate and share. They change the way communities are formed. You all know this, you all do this. This is not news to you, right? But what's interesting is the kind of behavior that that creates afterwards, and that's what I want to talk about. But before we do that, let's look at this. A few statistics here. There's 6.8 billion people in the world today. 6.8 billion people, two billion people are online. Of the two billion people who are online, one and a half billion, almost one and a half billion are on the top social networks. I find that astounding. I find that astounding because that means that almost everyone who's online is on a social network and is communicating in this particular manner by sharing, by collaborating, by finding societies and so on and so forth. It is even said that slum dwellers in Mumbai who don't have access to a computer still have a Facebook account on their smartphone. And this is actually a real story. I've actually seen this in action, so to speak. Okay, so we have all these amazing building blocks. I talked about some really cool things that we have today. What has that brought us so far? What sort of emergent behavior have we seen from this? The first thing I want to talk about is social commerce. Now today, businesses are social. They have to be social. Any company out there that does not consider the always-on nature of the internet, that does not consider the fact that people are always communicating, partly thanks to mobile, and the collaborative nature of social networks that people are always sharing, that business is dead in the water if they do not think about these things today. Even if you're not an online business, even if you're not a social network, you could be a traditional shop. And if you don't think about these things, you're going to be in trouble. Why is that? Well, let's look at what you get by taking all of these things into consideration. You get contextual, useful advertising. I'm not talking about big billboards. That's actually poor advertising. That's broadcast advertising. I'm talking about contextual and useful advertising, stuff that's useful to you. You get useful things like product reviews, recommendations. If you want to buy something, you know, pairs of yours, friends of yours have bought the same thing, and what they thought of it, and things like that. So you get a very, very intelligent way of buying things, of doing business. Cellar ratings, again, are very important as well. I mean, you see this on eBay. I mean, I'm sure people here buy things on eBay, right? Trade on eBay, so to speak. That's a very powerful thing to be able to have cellular ratings. You know who it is you're buying from. You know what other people thought of that person. Is that person reliable? Is his stuff any good? Very powerful stuff. In fact, here's something I do. So I didn't know if you mentioned I'm a climber. I do a lot of mountain climbing. I sometimes buy a lot of very expensive mountaineering gear, mountain equipment. This stuff is expensive, but it can be bought anywhere. So very often I go into a shop. I try and buy something. Let's say a set of ropes, and I want to see how good these ropes are. I pull out my phone. I'm looking at reviews on different sites. What are my other climbing buddies done? What ropes have they bought? Which ropes would be good for me? I can make that decision very quickly, in real time, standing in a climbing shop in the middle of who knows where. And then I can also start looking at prices in other shops. I can start comparing. I can say, oh, hang on. The other climbing shop down the road has the same ropes, and they've got a 10% sale. So suddenly it means that I can be very intelligent about how I do my, well, how I buy stuff, how I deal with commerce with the world around me. And as I said, any new business today is starting up that does not have an angle that includes mobile and social in their business plan. They're gonna have a very, very hard time trying to find funding today. Art is social too. Who knows what that picture is? Who's seen that picture? All right, so a few people recognize it. That is basically a band called OK Go. It's an American indie band based out of Chicago. Really good music, really good, very, very entertaining bunch of people. They decided on not going to a record label. They decided not to sign up with a record label when they want to sell their music. Traditionally, the way you sell music, you have a band, you put together some stuff, you have a record, you take it to a record label, they'll help you market it, they'll help you promote it, and so on and so forth. These guys decided to be rebels about saying, no, we're not gonna do that. We're gonna go from unknown to super famous. And the way they did that was through their music videos. They ended up building a series of very quirky, very entertaining, very funny music videos. And these videos went viral. They put them up on YouTube and the videos were so interesting, were so much fun, that everyone was telling their friends about it, they were sharing it on Facebook, they were tweeting about it. And in a very, very short time, these guys became really, really popular. And this is what I mean by art becoming social. They've bypassed all the middlemen, all the traditional ways of advertising and becoming popular, and they've found a completely alternative mechanism to doing that. And it's not just music videos, it's not just music at all that you can do this with. So for example, if you are a budding author today, if you've got a really cool idea for a book, traditionally you would go to a publisher again, a publishing house, and they would sign you on and things like that if they liked your idea. Today you don't have to do that. You can go straight to Amazon. You can go to Amazon and say, I've got an idea for a book, and they'll let you publish it directly, this is what's called self-publishing. You publish it directly as an e-book, and Amazon will then push it to people's kindles around the world directly. And they have an option of buying it and you get the revenue from it immediately. So suddenly, all of these things, you're cutting out middlemen, you're cutting out the traditional ways of doing things, that becomes quite interesting. Even news is social. So what does this mean? Social news is important because there's so much happening today in the world. There's so much going on, and more importantly, the delivery channels of this news to us. There's so many ways of receiving news that we're in a state of information overload. We're receiving far too much than we can actually process. How do you know what's important? There's a competition for our attention. So there's a lot of news, so little time to consume at all, how do you know what should be on the front page of your newspaper? Well, you can't have a generic newspaper anymore, there's just too much information out there and interests are too varied. This is where social news comes in. As an example, I'm going to use a startup called Prismatic. It's a California-based startup. What they do is they do social news, essentially. They've got a website. It looks a little bit like the BBC's website, except it is different for every individual person who logs on. Everyone who goes on sees a different homepage. How do they do this? Well, they track your movements in Facebook on Twitter. They know what you're talking about. They know what your friends are talking about. They know what sort of things interest you. They know what sort of things interest your friends and your peer groups. And they prioritize certain stories over others to appear on your particular homepage. And many people find this very interesting. It's very experimental at this stage. It's fairly new technology, but it's got huge potential. Now, in all of this, crowdsourcing plays a very interesting part. Who knows what crowdsourcing is? Who's heard the term before? There's fairly few people, I shall explain it. Crowdsourcing, essentially, is a complex network effect of a lot of individuals around the world, all contributing very small amounts of resources to achieve a very big effect. These resources could be knowledge. It could be experiences. It could be money. It could be anything. Lots of people contributing tiny amounts of these things to form a very, very big effect. So one example is Wikipedia. Everyone knows what Wikipedia is, right? I'm sure people can't live without Wikipedia today. What is Wikipedia? It's essentially a bunch of people around the world, and not a bunch of people, everybody, really, around the world contributing tiny bits of information. Domain experts talking about specific things they're good at, other people helping them, correcting them, correcting the grammar, shaping the page, forming, well, the world's biggest knowledge base, really. And that's pretty astounding, right? TripAdvisor is another very interesting example of crowdsourcing. TripAdvisor is a website where four travelers, people who like to go traveling around the world a lot, and you look for recommendations. You look for things, places to go, things to do in new places which you've never been to before. TripAdvisor collects information from other people just like you who've been there before. So I could go to Rome and I could talk about a very nice restaurant I went to in Rome, and I could talk about the kind of food I had there and what I liked there and why I thought it was interesting. Anybody else who goes to Rome and likes the same kind of food or the same kind of ambience would find my review and go there. So this, again, becomes very interesting, a very big network effect and a very big knowledge base. TripAdvisor's become one of the world's biggest travel guides as a result. The other example of crowdsourcing is Kickstarter. Now Kickstarter is particularly interesting because the resource they're talking about here is not just knowledge or experiences, it's actually money. Kickstarter is a company in California. What they do is, well, let's talk about venture capital first. Who knows what venture capital is? The process of venture capital. Essentially, venture capital is if you're a startup, a new company with a new idea, you wanna do something cool, but you don't have the money to build this new company. You go to a venture capital firm. A venture capital firm effectively gives you the money, gives you money to start your company and in exchange they take a certain share in your company. They take a certain ownership in your company. Now, most venture capital firms are small. They're owned by a few big companies, a few very rich individuals and it's very hard to get their attention. It's very hard to get money out of them. Kickstarter's right the opposite. This is crowdsourced venture capital. You go onto Kickstarter and say, I've got this cool project, this cool idea, I need some funding for it and lots of people around the world start contributing tiny amounts of money, whether it's five pounds each or 10 pounds each and so on and so forth. It's like passing a hat around and suddenly you have this pool of money that you need to start your company. Everyone gets a micro share in your company. An interesting story about Kickstarter specifically is very recently actually. Up until now, the biggest projects on Kickstarter have not been very big. They've been up to $10,000, $20,000, things like that. It's not huge in terms of value. A few days ago, and this is literally a few days ago, this computer gaming company, this online gaming company decided to propose one of their new projects, this new computer game they're trying to build. They went to Kickstarter and said, we need $400,000, that's almost half a million dollars to build this new computer game. Everyone thought this was nuts. Kickstarter's not about big money, it's about smaller bits of venture capital. It turned out that they reached their $400,000 target in eight hours of going online where everybody started contributing five bucks, 10 bucks, so on and so forth, started telling their friends about it, started tweeting about it. This had this whole network effect on Facebook and everybody started contributing tiny amounts of money to this new computer game. And they ended up raising $400,000 in eight hours. Today, four days later, I checked this morning, they're up to $1.6 million. They've been completely oversubscribed. They've made more money than they thought they would have and this is very, very interesting. So the other aspect of social media is social gaming. Everyone likes computer games, right? Maybe. Well, personal views aside, social gaming is huge. It is an area where there is a lot of innovation going on today, particularly in terms of mobile, particularly in terms of always on MMORPGs, multimedia, online, real-time computer games, whatever they're called. I'm not a gamer. But not all of ubiquitous computing is about fun and games. Social politics is very interesting as well. Who's heard of the Occupy movement? Who's been reading the news recently? A few hands up there, right? I'll explain what it is. Essentially, this has been an international protest, an international movement directed against economic and social inequality. It's about that middle tier, that large middle tier of society that have been completely forgotten about by most governments and so on and so forth. And all of this has been organized by social media all around the world. People have been talking about it. They've been mobilized. People in the Occupy movement protests in New York would talk to people in San Francisco, would talk to people in London. They'd exchange ideas. They'd exchange how they organized their rallies and things like that. And this is very interesting. There's also been a blog on Tumblr. Tumblr is a social network blogging engine, effectively. And people on Tumblr started this group called We Are The 99%. The whole purpose behind this We Are The 99% movement has been for people to use their mobile phones to take photographs of all of these protests around the world and to just put all these things in one place. And this is huge. This means that suddenly in one place, all the media agencies, all the governments around the world can see exactly what's going on. And this has had a huge effect. Finally, the growing poor and the impoverished, that big middle tier, as I said, of the Western world has been given a voice. This stuff can actually cause revolutions. This is interesting stuff. And not all these revolutions are peaceful as well. I mean, who remembers the Arab Spring from last year where various North African and Arab states started uprising against oppressive regimes? This, again, was all driven by social media. Uprisings in Tunisia, in Egypt, in Libya, in Syria today. All very powerful stuff. Oppressed people finally given a voice. These revolutions have all been organized and mobilized by Facebook, by Twitter. This is how these people communicated. This is how these people organized themselves, shared ideas from Tunisia to Egypt, to Libya, so on and so forth. Inspired by what was going on in the neighboring states and essentially finally gives them a voice against oppressive regimes. Technology always has been a great equalizer in society and this is a very, very good example of that. I'm gonna come back to this point later on, but for now, let's talk about the challenges around ubiquitous computing. So all these big changes in technology, along with all the big changes, the knock-on effect it has in society, means that there are gonna be very, very big challenges, very interesting challenges ahead of us. The first one I'm going to talk about is the data deluge. It's what we commonly call the data deluge, anyway. This is the direct result of this vast number of computers and processors around us, a vast number of people being online all the time, of computers being online all the time and talking to each other. They're generating a huge amount of data. They're generating a massive volume of data that we can't quite handle today, right? We've got cloud computing. We've got elastic storage, as I said in the beginning, seemingly unlimited storage, so we can grab all this data and we can store it somewhere, but we don't really have the technology yet to process it. That's really, really hard to do at this stage. Even single systems produce massive amounts of data. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey, this is a fairly old project from 2000. Just within a few weeks of its launching, it created more knowledge, more data about astronomy and the entire history of astronomy up until that point. Just think about that, just a few weeks, right? And this is in 2000. It's still producing data today, massive volumes of it. There was a talk, as a part of this IOP series, on Sloan's Large Hadron Collider, I think on Sunday. Sloan's Large Hadron Collider produces 13 petabytes a year of data, massive volumes of data. Yes, we can store this stuff. How do we make sense out of it? We still don't even know where to start. And of course, there's the internet itself, which is expected to see over 667 exabytes of data in 2013. Who knows what an exabyte is? That's a lot of stuff. Well, stop and think about the sheer volume of data that we're talking about. I mean, this is massive. We've got to store this stuff. We've got to process. We've got to make sense of it. This really is like drinking from a fire hose. It's not an easy thing to do. It's a very big challenge for us today. I don't recommend doing that. I've tried. The other big challenge I want to shine a spotlight on is privacy. Social media and knowing everything about us is a good thing. It helps us share. It helps us connect. It helps us form communities. It helps us back up all of our photographs. There's all sorts of useful things for you and I every day, right? But there are some negative aspects to that. This can be pretty bad. So firstly, there is the problem of identity theft. When you have everything of yours online, your entire identity available online, someone can still steal it. And what happens then? That's pretty bad. It's not just losing your photographs. You could lose a lot more than that. And I mean, literally from the financial impact it could have on you through to your future ahead and all of that. But that's still relatively small compared to something called a Googlebomb. Who's heard of this term? This term has actually become so popular in recent times that it's actually officially now a part of the Oxford English Dictionary. You can go look it up. What a Googlebomb really is, is based on the fact that the internet never forgets. Everything you put up there is up there forever. Everything you put in Facebook is there forever. Even if you take it down afterwards, it is still backed up somewhere forever. Everything you say online is up there forever, right? And this is dangerous. It's dangerous because, well, as you grow, as you change, you may say different things. Your opinions may change, but people can still find your own opinions. That's a minor point. But this also hinges on the fact that people rely on Google to search for people, to understand what people are about. You go into a new job interview sometimes. Maybe on a first date, people are gonna Google you before they meet you. They wanna see who the hell you are. They wanna learn about you. And they can find all sorts of information about you. Now, a Google bomb specifically is a very negative spin on this, where if you know what you're doing, if you know how to work, Google's the way Google ranks search results and things like that, you can print a lot of misinformation about somebody, a lot of defamatory information, a lot of negative things, completely untrue about somebody, and attack that person. So if anyone were to search for that person, they're gonna see all the lies that you put up about that person. That's what a Google bomb is. And people do it. And like I said, people do it so often these days that it actually is now an official phrase in the Oxford English dictionary. But that's still not the most important thing. That's still not the most concerning thing as far as I'm concerned. I think the most dangerous thing here is the silencing of voices. I mentioned Egypt earlier. I mentioned Facebook and Twitter about people in Egypt using Facebook, using Twitter to communicate to effectively start a revolution, to run a revolution. Facebook and Twitter are commercial organizations. We know that, right? They exist to make money, right? They're not a nonprofit organization. They're there to make money and they're under the jurisdiction of a specific country's legal system. In this particular case, America. They're both American companies. So it means that the American government can, if they decided to, shut them down. Or they can decide to grab all their data and see what's going on. Or they can silence specific individuals within these networks. And that's very dangerous. This actually did happen in Egypt where Egypt, with the Egyptian government at the time, the oppressive regime, saw all this happening and they decided to lean on Facebook and said, Mr. Zuckerberg, we need all that data. We need you to shut down any voices from Egypt. We can't have these people talking like this. And that is dangerous. They didn't succeed. They didn't succeed in the end because people managed to use mobile phones and get around the various blocks that did end up going into place. But this is just the start. The threat to freedom is huge. This very freedom that human beings have fought for since the very dawn of civilization. And that is our threat and that is the most dangerous point here. I am gonna revisit this again later on where I talk about potential solutions. But for now, what lies ahead of us? I've talked about where we are today, but what do we need to do? What do we still need to achieve to get to that science fiction like world, like I said, where machines exist in this very fabric of society around us, switched on all the time, talking to each other, making our lives better? Well, the first thing we need to achieve ubiquitous computing is that cloud needs to be inclusive of mobile and embedded. Like I said, cloud right now is primarily servers, big machines, primarily for big corporations, not really useful to you and I, kind of boring really, but they need to include all the tiny devices around us. Cloud needs to include the mobile phone in your pocket, this laptop, the tablet over there, so on and so forth, everything. More than that, the car, the washing machine, the microwave, et cetera, et cetera, they all need to be talking to one another. IPv6 is crucial to achieving this as well. I'm not gonna go into too much detail. This is kind of techy jargon here, but essentially what IPv6 is, is a networking technology that allows these devices to talk to one another. The current technology we have, it's called IPv4, is enough to provide for 4.2 billion unique devices around the world, right? Now that sounds like a very big number, 4.2 billion unique devices, who the hell would need any more? Well, we do, like I said, they're five times more processes than people, so already that's not nearly enough. We need another technology beyond that. IPv6 is the answer. IPv6 can address 340 undecillion addresses. What the hell's that? That's 340 trillion trillion addresses. Now this is really future proof. And we're never gonna exceed this number of devices, hopefully, right? The other things we need to achieve, auto discovery of devices, so devices can find each other, can start talking to each other, mesh networking, it's another technology which enables devices to form short-term, very quick networks among themselves, all autonomously and start sharing information. But like I said, we are stepping into dangerous territory, right? I spoke earlier about challenges. Now, some things are more than mere challenges. Specifically, some things are downright dangerous. Specifically, things like identity theft, privacy, and most importantly, the threat to freedom. And these are the things that we need to be very, very careful of moving forward. One particular solution to the privacy and freedom problem is something called the Freedom Box. I'll talk about this in a second, but about how it came about in a second. But specifically, what this device is, it's the size of a laptop charger. It's a very tiny device. It's a plug-top. It's got a little plug on it. You can just plug it into your wall socket. This has got a computer on board that is give or take as powerful as a modern-day smartphone, right? It has got wireless computing. It's got Wi-Fi. It's got a GPS antenna. It encrypts all traffic that goes in and out of it. So anytime you use it, it's completely opaque to the outside world. Which is great for privacy. It forms a mesh with neighboring freedom boxes. It effectively, if everyone had one of these in their living rooms, we'd have the world's biggest distributed computer right here, right now. It's very, very cool stuff. This was the brainchild of a chap called Eben Moglin. Eben Moglin is a professor of law at Columbia University. He is pretty much the brains behind most open-source licensing, the whole open-source concept, the model behind it. He's also the guy who came up with the idea of the freedom box saying, we can design this, we can build this today, we can build it cheap. Because everyone has a smartphone, the components that go into a smartphone have been mass manufactured and they're so cheap that we can actually make these freedom boxes for like 10 pounds each or even less. They cost next to nothing. Everyone can have one stick it in your house. This becomes your router. This becomes your local phone tower. You can disconnect from O2 from Vodafone. You don't need them anymore. Your GSM phone can talk to this. And this will encrypt your voice traffic over the internet and you can talk to anybody in the world. This also means that all of your data is completely distributed. This would mean a reinvention of social networks unlike Facebook or Twitter. It would mean that you would have a Twitter-like service or a Facebook-like service except it's distributed across multiple freedom boxes around the world as opposed to Facebook servers in California. The effect of that means that no one can own that. No one person can make a decision to sell your data to the bad guys or no government can lean on it and grab a hold of these servers and affect your freedom. This is very interesting stuff. We are very close to it at the moment. These devices are being built. They aren't fully functional in that they don't do distributed social networks yet but they do do mesh computing. They do take care of encryption and so on and so forth. So it is worthwhile having a look at. So when is all this stuff going to happen, the whole big picture thing? Well, change is happening very, very fast, exponentially fast even. Let's have a look at some of these statistics, for example. When Apple first launched its iPad in 2009, by the end of 2009, there were 300,000 of these devices around the world. Today, less than three years later, there are over 100 million of them. That's crazy growth. That's really crazy. And this is just the Apple devices. I'm not even talking about the Android-based devices yet because that makes the number even bigger, significantly bigger. There are 845 million active users in Facebook this month, versus 200 million in 2009. And iPhones, 270,000 of them in 2007 when it was first launched. 37 million around the world today. This is just gonna continue growing. We're all gonna have very, very powerful devices all around us very soon. We need to start harnessing this but this is hard to do. This is happening so fast, we can barely even keep up right now. We can barely even keep up with the technology, with how fast these things are being deployed. We can barely keep up with the new business models to harness these things, to actually harness the amount of data we have, to actually think of new ways to make our lives better. We can barely do all this stuff and we are on a roller coaster at the moment. And this is why it is crucial that more people start getting involved in this field as we move forward to start harnessing this power. So to sum things up, I spoke about the power of lots of small computers talking to one another. I talked about the current state of affairs with cloud, mobile and social. I talked about the challenges we face, some pretty ugly challenges and where we're headed. What can you the next generation do to help here? Well, there are lots of areas, lots of very exciting areas of research in which you can get involved, stuff that you should start considering. And these are all related to ubiquitous computing. This is just the tip of the iceberg again, like I said, there are many more areas as well if you want to talk about more stuff. Well, I guess now's the time because I'm going to open the floor to questions with that. Thank you for listening.