Sebastian Schaffert

After the KiWi Meeting, Georg and I participated for the first time at the Future Internet Assembly, as representatives of the KiWi project and of our company. The conference took place in Kista Science City at the premises of Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan (KTH), which are very nice buildings indeed. The first day started with introductions by several “politicians” and an overview/keynote over the different perspectives of those who started the Future Internet topic. And here comes my first criticism: not only were the presentations really bad and the speakers very untalented (never seen this before in an opening), what is worse is that the selection of topics is heavily influenced by the in my opinion very narrow viewpoint of people from the networking infrastructure community. New topics, like those in the Social Media and Smart Content area we are investigating, have a pretty tough standing in this community.

The day continued with several sessions on cross-cutting concerns of the Future Internet. I participated in “Different architectures for different business models”, “What does Future Internet mean for smart cities?”, and “What does Future Internet mean for enterprise”. I very much liked the session on smart cities, but the other two were a bit frustrating: in the architectures, the message of the speakers / organisers was basically: take our architecture, we know it better anyways. And in the enterprise session, while I found the “knowledge café” idea pretty good, I was very unhappy with the moderation because all discussions were very superficial and as soon as we wanted to go into more details it was cut off.

The second day was dedicated to thematic sessions. I participated in the “Future Content Networks” session, though the “Software and Services” session would have been fitting as well. The first presentation was by Spanish Television and described there vision on New Media applications of the future. I found this talk very inspiring. But the rest of the session was basically wasted time.

What is frustrating me very much in the Future Internet community is that everything is superficial, and almost noone talks about what concretely the Future Internet will bring us, what applications can be envisioned, and how this all would benefit the user. Everything is just about infrastructure. How can we even discuss what it means for the enterprise when we cannot present them a vision on how it looks like?

The final talk was given by the CTO of Ericsson. First shocking message was that Ericsson moves its headquarters to Silicon Valley (to “profit from the innovative spirit there”). WTF? A European technology company moves its headquarters to the US? Thanks, Ericsson, I’ll never buy again from you. Second shocking message was that “Internet is too cheap” – the monthly fee for Internet is as low as going out for a Pizza but should be much more valuable. So what? I consider Internet access a public infrastructure that needs to be as cheap as possible; and in this case it is even the market regulating it, so please stop complaining. Scribes also had to abadon their business model when the printing press was invented…

Summary: some interesting talks, many boring presentations, and a shocking keynote at the end. But a good opportunity to meet people, see other perspectives and raise one’s voice. Still not sure whether we should go to Valencia, thoguh.