place, serving up solutions with a side of legal issues and altering your reality on the

Liebhold describes scenarios in which “all the things that the Web does for us when we

AT THE HEART OF THIS
NEW WEB IS A MOBILE
DEVICE WILL BRING YOU
VIRTUAL WORDS YOU CAN
CARRY IN YOUR POCKET.

bounce. How will we arrive at this brave new world? And what should be done now to shape an inevitably complex future?

Pull up a Piece of the Platform

At the heart of this new Web is a mobile device will bring you virtual words you can carry in your pocket. “Although there has long been a promise of a mobile Web, we are just now getting to the cusp,” says Michael Liebhold, senior researcher at Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto think tank where Liebhold focuses on areas like immersive media and geospatial Web foundations for context-aware and ubiquitous computing. Liebhold sees several things occurring simultaneously to make the mobile Web possible: pervasive widespread broadband wireless services, the arrival of truly programmable mobile devices, and the advent of full-scale mobile Web access.

Certainly this means we will be carrying our amusements with us—vast music collections, video collections, instant news access—all tailored to our preferences and perpetually updatable. But beyond that

are sitting in front of our computers is available for us wherever we are.” Our work will find us wherever we go as our mobile devices offer “access to all of our work processes, access to all of our recreational experiences, access to software and computing tools.”

Not everyone who speaks about Web 3.0—the catchall term for all that’s likely to happen in the wake of today’s social-network-obsessed Web 2.0—describes it as a mobile Web, but most at least imply it.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt, for example, didn’t use the term “mobile Web” when he fielded a question from the audience at the Seoul Digital Forum last year about what Web 3.0 would comprise. In his response, captured in a widely viewed You Tube segment, Schmidt explained that Web 2.0 involved applications based on underlying Ajax architecture. By contrast, applications in Web 3.0 would be “pieced together” and would share a number of attributes: The apps would be small, fast, customizable, and distributed virally (through social networks, e-mail, and the like), while data would be in the cloud. Significantly, applications would