Computerised living
- Article 13 of 25
- Infoconomist, March 2002
Technology companies are trying to put their visions of the pervasive Internet into practice. But is the world ready?
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It is 5am. Your radio wakes you. There is congestion on the motorway so it has taken the liberty of rousing you half an hour early to ensure that you still make your client breakfast meeting on time. Is this Hell or the high-tech future? Neither. It is Hewlett-Packard's 'Cooltown'.
Based in California, but with the European branch in Wokingham, UK, Cooltown is a project designed by HP to illustrate how pervasive Internet technology is going to revolutionise business and everyday life. The Cooltown vision is that, in the not too distant future, everything will have a URL (universal resource locator) and everyone will have constant web access via a 3G phone, bluetooth-enabled PDA, wireless local area network enabled-laptop or digital subscriber line-equipped office or home.
In Cooltown, life is seamless. If a customer wants to know more about a product in a shop, he wirelessly checks its marker tag with his phone or PDA to find out its URL, then goes to the web site to get more information about it. When he rents a car, he verifies his identity with his fingerprint and the car downloads his personalised settings from his web site, even tuning the radio to his pre-selections.
Everything in Cooltown, HP stresses, uses technologies that are largely available today, although many have been heavily modified. But even if Cooltown is feasible, does that mean it is desirable or, from a business point of view, commercially viable?
Certainly corporations look set to increase their spending on wireless application access. A study carried out by Forrester Research found that FTSE 500 companies expect their average spending to increase from €814,000 today to about €1.93 million next year.
What the research also found, however, is that 80% of the companies investing in wireless, cannot identify what they were getting for their money. A third of respondents said that they were unable to measure any benefits.
HP, for its part, hopes the benefits of wireless initiatives like those seen at Cooltown will come not just from being able to access corporate information on the move, but from being able to access any information. On top of the obvious corporate applications, it expects a number of third-party services to spring up such as intelligent agents that can access diaries, bookings, computers, weather and traffic reports. These agents can then communicate with their masters via an Internet-enabled radio to inform them of their actions.
HP admits that there is still some way to go before the infrastructure is in place to support this vision. And there is the human issue. “There will always be technophobes who won't want to use the technology, no matter what we do,” confesses one researcher.
On the other side of the Channel from Cooltown, in Brussels, Cisco is working on the Cisco Mobile Office (CMO), its own vision of the pervasive Internet. It is less futuristic but importantly, it is available now. Cisco sees wireless and broadband Internet provision as a differentiator for service companies wanting the upper hand in attracting business customers. It is partnering with airports, hotel chains and restaurants that want to offer wireless and wired Internet connections to people signing up to its CMO scheme. To do this, they will use the latest wireless local area network technologies such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth John Mason, European VP for the company, explains that by working with partners to offer 'hot spots' where business people can access the Internet, Cisco hopes to make not only its own products popular to partners but to make Internet-availability as much of a pre-requisite in services choice as a fax machine or a VIP lounge might be today.
Carlton Booth, chief information officer for the Starwood hotel chain, a CMO partner, says that the hotels in the chain that have broadband Internet access boast a 40% retention rate of customers, notably higher than the rest. The plan now is to add wireless capabilities to some rooms and to hotel foyers – just as soon as the company has worked out how to make it pay.
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