Networking and Narrowcasting

Networking
Originally uploaded by Helge V. Keitel

Networking has been a part of my vocabulary for at least thirty years.

The digital age has changed the way we work together on a global scale, but networking is still very much a people to people business.

We used video, tape recordings, interviews and print media as tools for networking in the '70s at Hewlett-Packard.

Personally, I did interactive and transatlantic "podcasting" with C-60 minutes cassettes at the end of the '70s.

Still, the biggest challenge is to have something valuable to say or to contribute.

Technology makes some things easier and adds to the speed of interaction, but the thought process is just about as slow and cumbersome as ever before.

1987 sending a document was a courier job

It has always been a big work producing a document, but 1987 the net-worker's wet dream was to get a connection between local work-stations and send the stuff stored on his computer.

Internal networks improved the productivity and the vision of the paperless office was becoming less cloudy.

Sending stuff to outsiders, we still had to rely on post. The local publishing work had been automated by a central computer and a network of personal computers.

The benefits of office automation promised many benefits: fast, international communication with colleagues around the globe.

Personal Computers - and their users - were islands. What we needed was a bridge - an international bridge that allowed people and companies to turn their local computers into interconnected integrated systems.

Xing me to the moon

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Helge: I should be doing more on Xing, I have no time for LinkedIn, my Facebook just sends me widgets, I'm not a super active social media activist. Is life taking over? Smile ;)

Networking trends

We are going to see more wifi/ubiquitous computing and extraction of knowledge. One thing that did strike me as odd: the prediction that e-collaboration in the workplace will be enabled by biometric technology. What could that be?

• Geography means nothing in the IP space
• Wireless Internet will be big and will drive mobility
• Knowledge-based mining will transform the way people do business
• IP will eat everything, meaning all systems and networks will eventually use Internet-based protocols
• Convergence of communications and applications will become a reality: networks will be the computer
• Companies will move away from information mining and toward knowledge-based mining
• Sensor networks [such as radio-frequency identification technology] will be everywhere
• Broadband will be common and will lead to [the] death of locality
• Network convergence is driving IT and will change the way businesses use communications technology in the future