In Conversation with Adam Greenfield author of "Everyware."

TalkNewsIndia has a podcast on Adam Greenfield.

Adam Greenfield is the author of a new and fascinating book called, "Everyware." Adam says everyware is "information processing embedded in the objects and surfaces of everyday life." Naota Fukasawa san famously describes this kind of behavior in an elegant and simple way: "Design dissolving in behavior." That is, our actions are so unconscious that we are not even aware of the underlying technology that makes our unconscious acts possible. These devices are essentially invisible, or attain near invisibility that we don't pay attention to them.

Everyware is an umbrella term that Adam coined to capture the unfolding of this fast moving phenomena that many of us are not paying attention. An interesting upshot of this everyware technology is that people are unaware that they are using it. An old example of this is the cell phone, but that has been replaced by new and nifty devices that we use in our everyday life, and we are not even aware of it points out Adam.

Some of them include the touch and go pay system credit card that Chase Bank has introduced in New York; the RFID technology that is used to tag goods, and in some cases used to tag people (some patients have RFID chips embedded in their arm that help doctors get instant access to their medical history and prescription); the instrumented floors used to build houses for senior citizens in South Korea...these are just a few examples of how technology is increasingly meshed into our lifestyle. Adam labels this development as "colonization of everyday life."

And with the coming of the IPV6,, the next generation Internet, Adam thinks that every grain of sand in the world could have an IP address. Every device at that point could have multiple IP addresses. Currenlty, we are using the older IPV4 technology, where we are running out of IP addresses for these rapidly proliferating devices. The fact that every object in the world could potentially have an IP address is partly what worries Adam.

Through this book Adam wants to create awareness of the unintended consequences of everyware and the impact that it will have in our collective lives. One of the worrying aspects of this development is that all kinds of information can be gathered, tagged, stored and searched for future reference. So, every action of yours persists in some kind of a meta database for a long time. That in turn has him worried about privacy issues, and how that will impact society.

Adam is also worried that the User Interfaces being created for such devices are not-so-friendly and can have unintended consequenes. By addressing these issues early on in the debate perhaps some of these issues can be addressed and corrected is Adam's line of reasoning. Adam is in some ways advancing and pushing forward a debate that Howard Rheingold of Smartmobs started a few years ago with the coming of IRC, mobile phones and PDAs. Adam was involved with the first Moblogging Conference that took place in Tokyo in 2003.

Adam's book is available on Amazon and will be releaed next week: Feb 18, 2006.

More on ubicomputing:

The father of ubiquitous computing is Mark Weiser, who worked at Xerox's PARC Lab in Palo Alto, California. Weiser spoke about how computing will pevade our life, and become nearly invisible. It was his seminal research in ubicomp that triggered research in mobile computing.

Here is what Weiser said in Scientific American article titled "The Computer for the 21st century"

"The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it. "

And here is more:

"Whenever people learn something sufficiently well, they cease to be aware of it. When you look at a street sign, for example, you absorb its information without consciously performing the act of reading.. Computer scientist, economist, and Nobelist Herb Simon calls this phenomenon "compiling"; philosopher Michael Polanyi calls it the "tacit dimension"; psychologist TK Gibson calls it "visual invariants"; philosophers Georg Gadamer and Martin Heidegger call it "the horizon" and the "ready-to-hand", John Seely Brown at PARC calls it the "periphery". All say, in essence, that only when things disappear in this way are we freed to use them without thinking and so to focus beyond them on new goals. "

Mike Kuniavsky of Orange Cone has outlined defintions of ubicomp, pervasive, and physical computing, and what constitutes ambient intelligence.