[Sigia-l] Dreaming of a career in IA: Any advice welcome!

[Listera]

"Sean Lawrence" wrote:

> Personally, I have a strange notion that GIS and IA will be an interesting
> point of convergence in the near future with GPS enabled Mobile Phones, PDAs,
> laptops, Wireless hotspots, etc.

And if you want to get a glimpse of a real-life product that foretells the
"presence" effect, have a look at the new iChat AV Apple just introduced.

It's text, audio and video chat/conferencing done with the traditional
one-click Apple elegance. It takes advantage of the global instant messaging
infrastructure. It uses a common online handle as GUID, instead of cryptic
IP, DNS or phone numbers. You may have multiple phone numbers, Internet
access points, etc., but it'll find you at your handle, no matter where you
are at the moment. Like regular IMs, it'll let others know about your
availability on line, but it'll also signal your capabilities: as soon as
you plug-in a video camera, it'll be ready to do videoconferencing and let
all your buddies know that you can. It'll negotiate the connection
handshaking for you automatically, punching ports when necessary, even
behind NATs. It'll also let you send/receive files with a simple drag&drop.

When your ability to communicate with another person is abstracted and
distilled into clicking a single button on your screen, regardless of their
physical location, time, namespace identifier, connection modalities, (and
one day) computer/device type, you got something powerful happening.

<http://www.apple.com/macosx/panther/ichat.html>

For about a year, we've already had Rendezvous-enabled devices (from
printers to digital personal video recorders to home electronics gadgets)
automatically discover and connect to each other, even wirelessly, without
any pre-configuration whatsoever.

<http://www.apple.com/macosx/jaguar/rendezvous.html>

I know this is not exciting as Visio and Office but, hey, it might just be
the future :-)

Ziya
Nullius in Verba