We are standing on the brink of a new ubiquitous computing and
communication era, one that will radically transform our corporate,
community, and personal spheres. Over a decade ago, the late Mark
Weiser developed a seminal vision of future technological ubiquity, one
in which the increasing “availability” of processing power would be
accompanied by its decreasing “visibility”.
As he observed, “the most profound technologies are those that disappear…
they weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are
indistinguishable from it”.

Early forms of ubiquitous information and communication networks
are evident in the widespread use of mobile phones: the number of
mobile phones worldwide surpassed 2 billion in mid-2005. These little
gadgets have become an integral and intimate part of everyday life for
many millions of people, even more so than the internet. Today,
developments are rapidly under way to take this phenomenon an important
step further, by embedding short-range mobile transceivers into a wide
array of additional gadgets and everyday items, enabling new forms of
communication between people and things, and between things
themselves.



an elephant RFID location collar



a roach ??