Web 3.0 & the CEO: Why Will They Care?
Do you know what my dream job is? (this week) I venture capitalist. I would love to travel the world with my millions or billions of dollars listening to presentations from the young and eager people looking to be the next Google or Apple. There is at least one major hurdle to that: I don’t have millions or billions and I don’t know anybody who knows what a billion of anything looks like although I once read that a billion golf balls would fill a baseball stadium.
In Silicon Valley and around the world there are people developing what they hope will be the next major advancement in technology. Once they do, they are going to seek out funding to take it to the market and at some point a CEO is going to evaluate it to see if his or her company can benefit from it.
What is called Web 3.0 will be born from that kind of scenario. It all depends on who you talk to about this. I heard from a reader just yesterday about how Web X.0 is advertising hype more than it is an actual technology. It would be difficult to argue that fact in the end but it does give us a way to mark time periods just as history has periods like classical, impressionist, and romantic.
I read a one line description of what may be the first defining moment in Web 3.0. It was said that we will transition from software being installed on our computers to software and storage being web based and our computer being simply a portal to the Internet. Seems far away doesn’t it? If you use Google Docs, or a Netbook you know that it’s not only close, but in small numbers, it’s already here. While it isn’t widespread, we have it already.
If this is Web 3.0, a CEO might just fall in love with it because their existing computers will work fine and the only cost may be a subscription service to web based software. Office buildings would be smaller which means utility costs lower, and employees would be able to work from anywhere. Their home? Their child’s baseball practice? The sandy beaches of the Bahamas?
This is only one reason why the CEO would care about Web 3.0. As technology evolves, it becomes more efficient and I’m proud to say that many of those alarmists have been wrong. Large amounts of people are not losing their job because of computers because as effecient as computers are, they still require human beings who have a dream, work hard to develop it, and take it to the venture capitalists for funding. Computers are only as good as we are.
Mention this article and my venture capital firm will give you an extra $10,000!
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Instead of going the opinion route today, I’d like to share some information. Most services that people think of as Web 2.0+ are more officially described as cloud computing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing). Cloud computing is when your pc acts only as a means to access software and services that are hosted on the internet. This concept has been around for awhile but has mostly relied on proprietary software.
With the development of new frameworks like Ajax, cloud computing is easily done with a standard internet browser. Although Ajax itself is new,one of the main components, Javascript, is not. Ajax really just sends and requests data via Javascript. That said, it’s a lot easier to use Ajax than to do the same thing from scratch.
Building onto this is Google Web Toolkit(http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/). It allows developers to write websites and services in a Java-like syntax and compile into a proprietary bytecode. That bytecode is then used to generate all the Ajax code needed to create a slick website. So you go from Java to Ajax to Javascript. Some developers may feel that this gives you less control over your web app which may be true but it also severely cuts down on your development time. This allows a high school grad to spend less time coding in his mom’s basement and more more time thinking up the next big thing.
Another technology worth mentioning is Windows Azure(http://www.microsoft.com/azure/default.mspx). I haven’t looked into it too much or read reviews about it but it’s Microsoft’s new development kit for developing web services. I don’t know much about it’s features compared to other web technologies but as a Microsoft product, you’ll be seeing more and more services developed using it.