By the way, a friend of mine really is such a signals technomancer and works with the NATO doing network technology. I think I could get him to do a short seminar on those possible future network technology related to information sharing. Would there be some interest in that you think? For librarians it might offer some long term perspective on what to expect/plan/aim for?!

Lukas

It’s like seeing known history passing by! A great overview.

Do you know about this one already?
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ground/win.htm

Perhaps the future of fully integrated information networks? A forerunner of possible future mobile hardware and software capabilities.

Will you be discussing bandwidth issues as well, perhaps together with signal formats and security?

Good work, nice summary of current trends. Will be useful in our meeting

There is one argument between apps (installed on the device) and webapps that you didn’t mention though: for the user, an app when installed comes with a simple way of running it: an icon on the springboard or its equivalent in android, palm, etc.

Even though it’s pretty easy to add an icon to a webapp, about as easy as it is to bookmark/favourite a site in a browser… it just lacks the convenience. And frankly, how many people are still creating local bookmarks? These new devices, closed as they are, are all about convenience.

So a lot of apps in the iphone store are just wrappers that load an html5/css3 page in webkit and present it as an app. This way, the main developing costs are split between the iphone, android, palm and bb (soon) platforms, and only the shell is different between them.

Relevant discussion on Ask Mefi: http://ask.metafilter.com/137679/The-Elusive-Quick-and-Dirty-iPhone-App

BTW – I have a number of apps installed on my iphone that really are bookmarklets… Pie Guy for instance: http://mrgan.com/pieguy/ – which also runs offline, since it uses the html5 local storage!