The Next Generation Internet (NGI)

Last month, I discussed the Semantic Web as one of the three technologies that I think will converge during the next five years to make a significant change in how we live, how we work, how we play, and how we shop. The Semantic Web will know what you want. Your browser will understand the content of the web pages that you surf. You will do things with the Web that you cannot now imagine.

Today, it is as hard to predict the future of the Internet and e-business as it would have been for a Civil War telegraph operator to imagine what we are doing now in communications. We simply can't foresee all the ways that the Internet of the future -- the Next Generation Internet -- will be used or the full impact it will have.

In the last ten years, the Web was born, browsers have emerged and users have grown from 16 million to almost a Billion. It has created hundreds of billions of dollars of economic growth. It enabled the meteoric growth of thousands of companies and transformed business, education, entertainment-- almost every aspect of our lives. And even larger changes are coming as the Internet becomes faster, more robust, and more versatile.

What would you do different if the Web ran at 100,000,000K bps? I think you would do everything different. You could transfer a DVD in a less than a second.

The Next Generation of the Internet has been built and is now running at over 200 Universities.