The current issue of Communications of the ACM features several articles on ‘invisible computing’. I have also just come across a short piece in the February 2005 issue of MIT Technology Review, Invisible computing is hard to miss. A quick search does not reveal this on the website. What it says, alongside some data showing movements:
… the integration of technology into our business and personal lives is well upon us. Invisible computing promises a world filled with networked devices – not just desktop or laptop computers but cars, toys, cell phones, RFID tags, and even kitchen utensils – that communicate with each other. And part of its invisibility is that it should impose no major learning curve on consumers. Driven by advances in wireless and Web-services technologies, customer relationship management, asset management, and instant messaging, invisible computing will deliver the productivity benefits long promised by computing’s pioneers.
Over the next decade, traffic from the edges of the network to its center will become almost as heavy as the traffic flowing from servers to clients.
This emphasises for libraries the need to develop services which can be in the new *-flows created by such diffusion of computational and communications capacity.
*-flows : learn-flow, research-flow, work-flow, music-flow, …