An Evening with Vinton Cerf

Vinton Cerf in Singapore

The Digital Movement, together with Google and IDA, organised an exclusive evening with the Vice President of Engineering and Chief Internet Evangelist of Google, Vinton G. Cerf.

Widely known as a “Father of the Internet,” Vint is the co-designer with Robert Kahn of TCP/IP protocols and basic architecture of the Internet. You can read more about his extraordinary achievements here.

Packed conference room

The topic of his presentation was “Tracking the Internet into the 21st Century” – the up and coming trends of the Internet; how will the Internet shift in the future; and how will our lifestyles change with the shift?

Heavy stuff? Not really, Vint managed to put across his visions in very digestible bits for lay audience like yours truly. 🙂

Regional Internet Statistics (2008)

Some points Vint mentioned which strike me particularly about the future in 2035 (via Yuhui and Joanna Teo‘s Blog):

Vint predicts that the total internet population to grow up to 1,320 million internet users (1.3 billion) in 2035. That is 20% penetration of the world’s population. Asia will be the top contributor region to the internet population of the world as the infrastructures in those places gets more developed. Some countries will have beyond 100% of penetration because he saw them using more than 1 device to access to the internet at the same time. It is just like how mobile penetration can get through 100% in Singapore because some of us owns 2 mobile lines.

Death of print does not mean newspaper companies like SPH will just collapse and disappear – people still need to read the news, except that the physical form of the ‘newspaper’ as we know it may change, delivered to our door step in an alternative digital format, cutting down logistics and material costs tremendously.

The virtual environment will have a greater presence in the internet sphere. Vint projects the use of holographic technologies in instances like a business conference meetings, not on a screen but a virtual 3 dimensional figure right in front of our eyes. This moves far beyond the current state of use of the virtual environment that we see today in SecondLife and other virtual games. The boundary will be challenged.

The death of URLs. Permanent names will be used to identify processes and services that run for years.

Bandwidth will continue to increase. File transfers will be the norm, not streaming, and at high speeds.

Information will be real-time, geographically indexed, and always available.

We wil be able to predict trends based on historical Google searches. Example: knowing when an epidemic starts.

10 billion mobile devices by 2035, working as remote control and information delivery. More and more different types of devices will be part of the internet ecosystem. He estimated that one person will be using 10 devices that can be connected to the internet. Currently the number stands around 3.

You can read more about these Vint’s presentation via these other bloggers’ entries. They did a better job than lazy me in summarising the presentation:

Yuhui’s Blog: Recap of Vinton Cerf’s presentation at Suntec City

Joanna Teo: An evening with Vinton Cerf

Simply Jean: Live blogging at “Tracking the Internet into the 21st Century”

James Seng: An evening with Vint

Ian: A very special evening with Vinton Cerf from Google

After the session with Vint ended, I headed towards Citylink to meet Rachel, Mark and Meiyen for late dinner. On the way, I bumped into my good friend, Chitra and her friend, Canny. Chitra asked what I was doing at Suntec and I told her about Vinton Cerf, the Father of the Internet. Canny’s reply aptly summed up what most people in the world will feel towards Vint: “I don’t know who he, but help me thank him. I am very grateful for his invention.” 🙂

Technorati Tags: suntec city, vinton cerf, vint, father of the internet, google, the digital movement, tdm, ida, vice president of engineering google, chief internet evangelist of google, robert kahn, tcp/ip protocols, tracking the internet into the 21st century, yuhui, joanna teo, simply jean, james seng, ian