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The Next Information Technology:
A Preview of Tomorrow’s Innovations and
Challenges
Nadir Belarbi,
Sr Business & Innovation Manager
http://www.linkedin.com/in/nadirbelarbi
nbelarbi@chicagogsb.edu
New York, USA – October 2009
Abstract-This article discusses possible future Information
Technology innovations based on current trends. We present
three concepts that will likely shape future services and impact
corporations, markets and societies: Hyper-Connectivity,
Social/Semantic Web, Saas/Cloud computing and Micro-
eEconomy.
I. Signs of Change
Trying to predict the future of Information Technology is
always an interesting exercise; a real attempt to imagine the
next wave of services on the basis of current breakthroughs.
Tomorrow’s IT world will mostly be an aggregation of all
the innovation and emerging technologies that the current
players of the technosphere, are either envisioning or
already experimenting.
Predicting the future is nevertheless a difficult exercise as
innovation’s pace can be influenced by multiple economic
and technical factors. The impartial rule of “the time to
market” will designate which technology will move from
simple prototypes to widely available industrialized
solutions.
IT technology has reached a maturity but only ten years
after the first Internet boom, a second revolution is quietly
preparing its coup. In the next 5 to 10 years, technology and
innovation will profoundly modify the way we interact with
computers and the way we deal with information.
I foresee a breaking point in the short term, based on the
continuous technological and innovation watch, I have held
for so many years now.
In parallel with important achievements in nano and
biotechnologies, I believe that the following factors will be
possibly the greatest change enablers, leading to an upward
shift in the trajectory of the information technology
evolution.
II. Media: Hyper-connectivity through wireless
technologies
White Space spectrum1
will intrinsically lead to a sharp
decrease of the wireless voice and data subscriptions. From
this, we can expect current subscription rates of $80 per
month to drop to $20-$30 per month in the next five years.
As other wireless operators emerge (Google, Intel,...), phone
carriers won’t long be able to resist the pressure brought
about by voice over IP applications. A set of proprietary and
open source applications, offering a combination of
excellent voice and video quality, will likely end nearly a
century of long distance billed calls.
The move to high definition video transmissions will
depend on available bandwidth and the deployment of 4G
networks. New advanced compression techniques and the
continual increase of processors computational power, will
optimize bandwidth use. In the long term, Disruption-
Tolerant Networking (DTN2
) will most certainly replace
pure TCP/IP transmissions, allowing a continuous
connectivity, even in poorly covered areas.
The result will be a dizzying array of people always
connected, always on the move. With web access available
from any location, the defining line between the worlds of
work and play will effectively vanish, causing profound
change in the work/office concept.
The consequences of being able to work from anywhere
with the same ease afforded by the traditional office will be
tangible and immediate. There will be a dramatic increase in
the total number of information exchanges taking place in
the form of emails, instant messages, approvals, and
meetings-on-the-go, all facilitated by the expedited decision
making enabled in this environment.
Humans will resist these changes but the "Blackberisation"
of the collaboration will reach another level, using the
human natural compulsion and inclination to use any
intelligent device for feeling more secure.

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People will not only read emails or answer short and instant
messages. They will also connect with others, see them and
show them their world, via recorded or streamed videos,
browse the web guided by customized recommendations
based on their profile and actions, and in relation to their
location thanks to geo-localization.
The real world will become too simple, too flat, too calm
and ultimately unexciting.
New devices with flexible screens or e-screens3
, (some
prototypes are already available), will gradually be
integrated into existing mobile devices. Eventually, these
foldable devices will completely replace today’s small but
bulky devices. New polymers, nano-designed technologies
and printable circuits will accelerate the change and the
industrialization of these innovations, which will sharply
decrease prices. LCD and Plasma TVs are an example of
this trend, where prices have fallen inversely proportional to
time in the past decade while their quality has sharply
increased.
3D vision will likely first emerge from the TV world and
later conquer the Web due to games and other virtual reality
environments.
Increasingly, outsiders will join the heretofore circle of
phone/PDA/ photo and GPS devices.
It’s difficult to imagine any compact camera in the future
without a wireless connection or a GPS. Already photo
applications like the Apple’s iPhoto use geolocalization
which can be combined and automated with WIFI
localization using SD memory camera cards. The lines
between these devices will continuously blur and
tomorrow’s device will probably just be named Pods or
Pads; marketers will decide.
In theory, any device will be able to connect wirelessly to
the web, update its configuration and even send or receive
requests and commands. Cars, mediacenters and TVs, alarm
systems, home heating and cooling systems, etc, will
become active members of the Web.
The next Semantic Web4
, which we will cover in the next
section, will be extended to non-computer devices allowing
them to interact intelligently with web services, other
devices and ultimately people.
The autonomy of these devices will be greatly improved as
a result of solid disks, new processors, nano-technologies
and fuel cells. A decade from now, most of the devices’
power sources will require no more than a monthly.
Mobility will be freed from its energy constraints.
Voice recognition will be the perfect complement to a
mobile, visual and flexible web on the go.
Google is already offering a voice search via the Android
platform where future sound canceling systems will isolate
callers’ from the surrounding noise.
Hyper-connectivity will become the new standard by which
people stay connected.
The consumer landscape of the future is already discernable;
a consumer base continuously on the move, demanding
increased responsiveness from corporations and merchants;
an atmosphere of heightened competition as those same
corporations and merchants struggle to capture changing
consumption patterns of users saturated with information
and sales offers.
Operational Marketing, as we know it today, will vanish.
The new generation of connectivity will accelerate users’
migration from the passive entrainment of broadcast
television to the interactive and rich connected web services,
requiring changes in the delivery, frequency and content of
marketing messages.
New trends will emerge daily, replacing the old, born just a
few weeks or days ago.
II. Content: A Social and Semantic Web
Hyper-connectivity will likely spread faster than the new
wave of Hyper-Social and Semantic Web. However, the
revolution won’t come from the swarm of mobile devices
continuously connected to the Web but from the Semantic
applications that will be gradually added to it.
The hackneyed and misunderstood Web 2.0 is currently
rapidly evolving and its wave of communities gatherings is
expanding. Interactivity, information and feedback sharing
will be mandatory components of any mercantile or
informational web site.
Hyper-connected users will no longer just type their inputs
but will increasingly express themselves with snapshots and
recorded or streamed videos, an easy way to quickly share
their thoughts and opinions, or to simply ask and answer
questions.
Real time video use will increase; causing a plethora of
spontaneous feeds to continuously challenge the bandwidth
of Internet routers, as events both significant and mundane
are documented as they unfold.
As with Twitter today, anyone will be able to have his
fifteen minutes of fame as a reporter. Journalists will begin
to emerge from the users of the Hyper-Web and information
will no longer be the exclusive domain of major
international information agencies. An important shift in the

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way information is shaped today and how the “truth du
jour” is managed.
The first victims of this trend are professional photographers
who are already targeted in layoffs and compressions as
lately at the Gamma photo agency. Journalists, TV
reporters, writers will follow. Quality will be increasingly
available and reachable through the Web.
As any and all events are covered and commented upon, the
Wikipidisation of the news will begin.
The increasing flow of information will challenge servers
and networks capacities, pushing them to their limits and
transforming Datacenters in gigantic energy devourers.
More than ever, delivering an uninterrupted service will be a
critical factor in the user retention.
The expanding mass of information will require enhanced
search engines capable of indexing the new and hidden
information, the web dark matter. Search engines will need
to combine indexing techniques with semantic to provide
pertinent search results. Searching audio and video
information will be a challenge but social meta-tagging will
precede the emergence of a more intelligent content tagging
that will take probably a decade to become operational.
But the revolution won't really be there.
The Semantic web will bring to the Internet what oriented-
object has brought to programming; structure and pre-
intelligence.
The wave of meta-languages, like XML, that shaped web
page design and structure has already morphed into new
ontological languages able to structure any exchange
between compatible applications.
Any device with a connected and programmable framework,
will be able to participate in Semantic web hyper-activity;
including cars, TVs, mediacenters, photoframes, refrigators,
etc.
The structuralization of the information exchanges will
foster the emergence of autonomous applications, using
simple intelligent agents able to negotiate prices, book
airline tickets or simply activate other remote wirelessly
connected Semantic devices.
A real Artificial Intelligence is not for the next decade,
neither for the next several. Increasing the computational
power of microprocessors with hundreds of cores will
reduce the computation time but certainly not create an
intelligent from a cognitive point of view.
Some form of intelligent behavior will, of course be
achieved as computers and devices will become able to
learn and respond to certain commands and stimuli but they
won't very likely be able to design new devices from
scratch.
And though enabling a device or application to perform
actions according to a predefined set of rules, may tempt us
to label it as intelligence, it’s but a very rudimentary
intelligence, at that.
That being said, in five years, we will probably see the
emergence of a new type of autonomic services, able to
learn simple tasks and execute simple actions on behalf of
the user. Execution times will be reduced and repetitive
actions will be taken over by a swarm of connected virtual
machines comprising a basic intelligence.
From a large perspective, the questions arises “will this
distribution of basic intelligence, give birth to a form of
multi-agent, neuronal intelligence?”
In some ways yes, the web will act independently of its
users interactions, continuously searching for the best deals
and most efficient parameters, while simultaneously
exchanging information and beating to the tempo of its
hyper-connected users but the Singularity5
will remain a
long term objective.
Without a global set of rules enforced by distributed
controllers, the Semantic web will be difficult to regulate,
leading to overflows, denials of service, unwanted
disclosure of private information and increasing
vulnerability to hacking. The Semantic web will attempt to
self-regulate, creating unexpected states of information and
behavior, and fast moving concentrations of information and
interactions with virtual nodes among computers, mobile
devices, servers and applications.
But despite these risks, the semantic web will rule and
conquer the social web arena and business to consumer
services, taking by surprise an old and unprepared corporate
world dealing in antiquated managements methods.
I am astonished by how most graduate schools of business
programs are not addressing these future trends in order to
prepare managers for this new age of hyper-connectivity
and hyper-Information. It’s actually not a really surprise; the
strategic role of IT in corporations is not even addressed
today.
The corporation paradigm will be torn a part and profoundly
affected by the IT and technological changes to come in the
next years. As the Industrial revolution forever changed the
artisanal manufacturing world, the Hyper-Web will upend
today’s corporations.
From a geopolitical standpoint, these IT, bio, nano-
technology changes will completely redefine the world’s

4. Nadir Belarbi - 4/5
distribution of powers. Any nation not currently investing in
these trends, will fail. Several decades from now, the
innovations brought by these technologies, will have
minimized the importance of cheap labor force. Margins
will increase as a result of innovative products and
processes and not because of outsourcing.
Specialization will be essential to master these technologies
and nations who haven’t prioritized strong scientific
education will fail.
There's a price to pay to stay ahead; the price of learning
cutting edge technologies.
These innovations will create value and establish the next
financial centers, the rewards of which will pay dividends
far greater their costs.
III. SaaS: Clouds on the Corporate IT
The Software As A Service (SaaS6
) paradigm will takeover
small, medium and large businesses in the same way free
trade forced a thousands of corporations to outsource their
activities to Asia.
Even the most reluctant corporations will be forced to
follow the trend, sacrificing some data confidentiality and
security for acceptable risk, just to keep up with a rapid and
changing software environment.
Users have already fallen prey to the appeals of the Google
Gmail, Facebook and LinkedIn services. They are willing to
accept exposing part of their personal information in
exchange for free services they perceive as having value.
Corporations will certainly be the next to fall.
Reality is cruel. Today, no corporate IT department is quick
to setup and deploy new services according to their business
needs. The intrinsic complexity of the financial and
organizational structures of modern corporations hinders
any attempt to go faster. Even new fancy project
management methodology recipes won’t be able to manage
a growing active market catalyzed by a Semantic Web with
a continuously changing set of services and users.
Twenty years from now, markets will be extremely
competitive.
Globalization will lead to the equalization the income levels
of the Chinese and India economies with their Western
counterparts.
Selling to this saturated sphere of ever-connected and
moving users will be a challenge.
Traditional IT organizations won’t be able to keep up with
the quick-change requirements.
Quick adaptation and responsiveness will be a benefit
offered by specialized outsourcers as today's Sales.com for
the corporate sales force. By then, enterprise resource
planning (ERP) software such as SAP will be cast of the
corporate temples. Difficult to maintain and upgrade, with
an ever-increasing competition from specialized on-line
services from the cloud, this dinosaur will slowly disappear
from the IT scene.
Corporations unable to flow the pace of these rapid changes
will fail.
Quick adaptability to change will become “the next big
thing“ in marketing with a permanent requirement for new
products, new messages, new ideas, new applications and
new trends to be competitive and increase market shares.
The school of hyper-connected and highly-saturated
consumers will continuously seek novelty. The "flipping
phenomenon" originally triggered by TV remote controls,
will be a web behavioral pattern, fostered by social
bookmarking and tweeting.
In the next twenty years, IT internal services will morph into
out-of the box, customized software as application services
(SaaS) hosted by outsourced datacenters immersed in the
cloud.
As it evolves, technology intrinsically seeks to provide rich
functions through user-friendly interfaces masking its
complexity. As for today’s computers, new SaaS services
will be easy to use and customizable with defined costs,
features and level of services, a dream of any Chief
Financial Officer.
By 2050, IT departments will vanish into the Cloud and the
SaaS service manager will contact the CFO or CIO, once a
month to check that services are rendered as expected.
In the long term, corporations will subscribe to new services
in the cloud, without worrying about or how long a new
service requires to be running.
IV. Micro-eEconomy: A Hyper-Connected and Hyper-
Active Web
Combine all these factors and cast them into the real world
to reveal a new Web economy.
Extremely active, fostered by hyper-connectivity and
consumers able to connect from almost any place, semantic
applications continuously negotiating prices, consumer
constantly solicited to buy goods bases on their profiles and
under acceptable price sustained by continuous sales and
promotions.

5. Nadir Belarbi - 5/5
The Web on the rise will definitely foster the pay per use
services. The first goods impacted by the change were
digital but the trend will expand to other traditional goods.
The music industry will mostly sell songs rather than
albums. This set of micro-services will dynamize and
fluidify sales on the Net.
The emerging services of this micro-economy won’t be the
only ones to take advantage of the plethora of wandering
consumers. With geo-localization, restaurants, shops, hotels,
taxicabs and others will be able to jump into an augmented
reality virtual web and offer promotions to connected users,
as they pass by their premises.
In the near future, not existing on the Web, will really mean
to be dead.
References
[1] White Space Spectrum, "IEEE 802 LAN/MAN Standards Committee
802.22 WG on WRANs (Wireless Regional Area Networks)". IEEE.
http://www.ieee802.org/22/. Retrieved 2009-01-18.
[2] A Delay-Tolerant Network Architecture for Challenged Internets, K.
Fall, SIGCOMM, August 2003.
[3] Flexible Screens Get Touchy-Feely, MIT Technology Review,
February 27, 2009.
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/22232/
[4] Grigoris Antoniou, Frank van Harmelen (2008-03-31). A Semantic
Web Primer, 2nd Edition. The MIT Press. ISBN 0262012421.
http://www.amazon.com/Semantic-Primer-Cooperative-Information-
Systems/dp/0262012421/.
[5] The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, Ray
Kurzweil, Viking Adult, 2005.
[6] Traudt, Erin; Amy Konary (June 2005). "2005 Software as a Service
Taxonomy and Research Guide". IDC. pp. 7.
Nadir Belarbi received a Master Degree in Networks and
Telecommunications from Paris V University & Sup Telecom Paris, France
(1994), studied 3 years of studies and research on Intelligent Networks
during a PhD program (1997) and received an Executive MBA from the
Chicago University, Booth Graduate School of Business, USA (2008). He
has worked for IBM, Air France, Groupe Danone. He currently leads
Business & Innovation projects at Dannon.
Nadir Belarbi’s research has spanned a large number of disciplines,
emphasizing information technology and telecommunications with a focus
on emerging technologies. As a manager with multi-cultural skills
speaking five languages, he worked in an international environment where
he specialized in the coordination and lobbying of global organizations.
His political and social experience ranges from heading the corporate work
council to participating in political and geopolitical organizations and think
tanks. With a major interest in Intelligence, Technology & Energy roles in
Geopolitical, Military & Security issues, also manages a LinkedIn group on
Business, Innovation & Geopolitics.