Computing needs a big increase in bandwidth to unleash the creativity of developers working on content for the Web, Intel's vice president told the Seybold conference in San Francisco on Monday. At the same session, the chief scientist of the famed Xerox PARC talked about a high-tech newsprint material in the works that can display digital text.
The lack of high-speed communications in the home "is the real limiter to having a new medium for consumers," said Avram Miller of Intel (INTC). The Net "will be relatively slow over the next five years."
Miller offered his forecasts of the Web's future during the "Visions of Computing" keynote. He said Web publishing needs more bandwidth, processing power, Web-development tools, new business models, and a lower cost of production to radically change online content as we know it.
"The fact is there's not much [good content] out there," he told about 1,000 attendees. But the audience for good content is not lacking, he added. Web developers should keep an international audience in mind. The United States only represents 30 percent of the chipmaker's business. In the next 10 years, Asia and Africa will have access to the same amount of information as US citizens, Miller said.
He also said computers will evolve to become friendlier to readers. The machines won't have a "boot up" or "log in" function anymore, but will have "instant on."
After Miller, Xerox's (XRX) chief scientist John Seely Brown discussed his company's product plans to accommodate the future of documents on the Net.
PARC's Brown demonstrated the research lab's vision of the future of documents. Xerox PARC -- the birthplace of the modern PC, Ethernet, and the laser printer -- is putting its research resources behind electronic documents with "fluid boundaries" between virtual and real worlds.
Brown described a "fluid-user interface" that allows users to annotate a document, quite literally, "in between the lines."
He also talked about PARC's "electric paper," an attempt to combine traditional paper with electronic documents. The newspapers of tomorrow will be published on a material that's flexible like fabric, but is coated with a substrate of charged balls, half white and half black. By changing the magnetic field behind balls, the balls rotate to form tiny dots that form letter and words. The material can be "erased" to accommodate the text of another publication.
Brown said the technology is in the prototype phase.
He also discussed a model for a physical, Web-enabled "document portal" based on a traditional copying machine. Physical documents can be copied to the Web or to email, or they can be filed according to underlined keywords. The portal machine can look up Web-site links contained in the document and get information on those pages. The physical paper becomes a "fluid boundary between the physical and virtual," he said.
