Ubiquitous Computing and the Impact on Information Economy

Riegler, Markus

Ubiquitous Computing and the Impact on Information Economy

Zusammenfassung

Inhaltsangabe:Zusammenfassung:
Ubiquitous Computing - oder allgegenwärtiges Computing - ist mehr als nur die Möglichkeit, zu jeder Zeit and jedem Ort Zugang zum Kommunikationsmedium Internet zu haben. UC beschäftigt sich mit der Vernetzung aller Dinge, dem Verschwinden des Computing-Aspekts, der Integration der Technologie in den Alltag.
Auch die Kommunikation von Gegenständen und deren Handeln (Smart Things) ist ein wichtiger Askpekt dieses Zunkunftsthemas. Diese Arbeit (in engl. verfasst) diskutiert die informationswirtschaftlichen Folgen, die mit wachsender Verbreitung von UC einhergehen. Der Wert der einzelnen Information und die Qualität wie auch die Einfachheit der Erhebung und Verarbeitung stehen im Mittelpunkt des Papiers.
Ferner legt die Einführung der Arbeit ein Fundament, dass es dem Laien ermöglicht, UC zu verstehen und den Umfang zu begreifen, im Verlaufe der Arbeit werden auch aktuelle technische und politische Probleme angedeutet.

Inhaltsverzeichnis:Table of Contents:
List of Abbreviationsiv
Executive Summaryv
1.Ubiquitous Computing1
1.1The Vision1
1.2History and Elements3
1.2.1History3
1.2.2Elements and Definition3
1.3Enabling Technologies5
1.3.1Radiofrequency Identification Technology5
1.3.2Communications Backbone8
1.3.3User Interfaces10
1.3.4Smart Dust12
2.Information Economy13
2.1Information as a good13
2.2Types of Information Goods14
2.3Creation and Cost Structure of Information Goods15
2.4Distribution of Information16
2.5Pricing and Rights Management17
2.5.1Monetary Pricing17
2.5.2Attention Economics19
3.The New Information Economy21
3.1Assumptions21
3.2Effects on Commercially Published Content22
3.2.2Changes in Creation and Processing24
3.2.3Changes in Distribution and Value Capturing25
3.2.4Changes in Pricing25
3.3Effects on Private Personal Information27
3.4Effects on Private Business Information30
4.Issues and Scenarios34
4.1Current Issues34
4.1.1Privacy Issue34
4.1.2Security Issue35
4.1.3Technological Issues36
4.1.4Control Issue38
4.2Four Scenarios40
4.2.1Low Acceptance40
4.2.2Medium Acceptance42
4.2.3High Acceptance45
4.2.4Fully Integrated UC Environment46
5.Conclusion49

Leseprobe

Inhaltsverzeichnis

ID 7457

Markus Riegler

Ubiquitous Computing and

the Impact on Information

Economy

Diplomarbeit

WHU Koblenz - Wissenschaftliche Hochschule für Unternehmensführung

Otto-Beisheim-Hochschule

Lehrstuhl für Electronic Business

Abgabe August 2003

ID 7457

Riegler, Markus: Ubiquitous Computing and the Impact on Information Economy

Hamburg: Diplomica GmbH, 2003

Zugl.: WHU Koblenz - Wissenschaftliche Hochschule für Unternehmensführung - Otto-

Beisheim-Hochschule, Universität, Diplomarbeit, 2003

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i

Table of Contents

List of Abbreviations...iv

Executive Summary ...v

1.

Ubiquitous Computing...1

1.1 The Vision ...1

1.2 History and Elements ...3

1.2.1 History ...3

1.2.2 Elements and Definition ...3

1.3 Enabling Technologies...5

1.3.1 Radiofrequency Identification Technology ...5

1.3.2 Communications Backbone ...8

1.3.3 User Interfaces...10

1.3.4 "Smart Dust"...12

2.

Information Economy ...13

2.1 Information as a good ...13

2.2 Types of Information Goods...14

2.3 Creation and Cost Structure of Information Goods...15

2.4 Distribution of Information ...16

2.5 Pricing and Rights Management...17

2.5.1 Monetary Pricing ...17

2.5.2 Attention Economics ...19

ii

3.

The New Information Economy...21

3.1 Assumptions...21

3.2 Effects on Commercially Published Content...22

3.2.2 Changes in Creation and Processing...24

3.2.3 Changes in Distribution and Value Capturing ...25

3.2.4 Changes in Pricing ...25

3.3 Effects on Private Personal Information...27

3.4 Effects on Private Business Information ...30

4.

Issues and Scenarios ...34

4.1 Current Issues...34

4.1.1 Privacy Issue...34

4.1.2 Security Issue...35

4.1.3 Technological Issues...36

4.1.4 Control Issue ...38

4.2 Four Scenarios...40

4.2.1 Low Acceptance...40

4.2.2 Medium Acceptance...42

4.2.3 High Acceptance ...45

4.2.4 Fully Integrated UC Environment ...46

5.

Conclusion...49

iii

Appendix Overview of Scenarios...I

Sources ...II

Literature ...II

Reports...II

Online Resources...III

iv

List of Abbreviations

2.5G

Upgraded 2

nd

generation cellular phone network, e.g. GPRS

3G

3

rd

generation cellular phone network, e.g. UMTS

CRM

Customer Relationship Management

EPC

Electronic Product Code

ERP

Enterprise Resource Planning

GPRS

General Packet Radio Service

IE

Information Economy

MIT

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

ONS

Object Name Services

PARC

Xerox Palo Alto Research Center

PML

Physical Markup Language

RFID

Radio Frequency Identification

RFID

Radio Frequency Identification

SCM

Supply Chain Management

TDMA

Time Division Multiple Access

UC

Ubiquitous Computing

UMTS

Universal Mobile Telecommunication System

UPC

Uniform Product Code

USD

US Dollar

W-LAN

Wireless LAN, e.g. IEEE 802.11-standards family

WMS

Warehouse Management Systems

WWW

World Wide Web

XML

Extensible Markup Language

v

Executive Summary

The emerging technology named "Ubiquitous Computing" is characterized by

an increasingly "smart" and self-aware environment. By placing "smart tags" on

objects that might also host miniature microprocessors, everyday objects will be

able to:

· identify themselves to other objects,

· connect to each other to work in joined systems,

· connect to a communications infrastructure, or

· manipulate their own state or the state of other objects

Information economy will be affected by the new possibilities of monitoring, and

analyzing the environment by collecting data and acting autonomously based

upon this information.

Previously untapped sources of information e.g. due to volume or complexity

of observations will become available. This will lead to a higher validity of

observations and could make new conclusions possible. New or more efficient

processes enable new business models or improve existing ones.

The questions of privacy, security, technology and control over the

infrastructure can only be speculated about and shall only be mentioned in this

paper, neither discussed in depth nor solved.

Ubiquitous computing is considered as a highly relevant outlook of

technological developments over the next decades. Comparatively "primitive"

systems have already begun to be integrated in the workflow of many companies

most notably in the fields of Supply Chain Management and Logistics.

After analyzing a set of scenarios it would appear that what we consider the

information economy today will not change in essence, but that UC enables a

new scope and a new quality of information that will add to it.

1

1. Ubiquitous Computing

1.1 The Vision

Chris Jones is sitting on the train, commuting to work. His eyes are wandering

around, scanning the motion advertisement screens on the wall opposite of him.

Right across from his seat, a musical show is advertised on a 2' x 1' panel.

"Tickets for tonight's shows are still available! Order now and receive a free

category update," it reads on the display. Chris has heard of the musical before,

so he is intrigued. Rolling up his jacket, he exposes a screen in the sleeve of his

shirt. With a few taps on the screen he has accessed his calendar; tonight would

be good for him. The link to his wife's calendar allows him to find out, that she

has no prior engagements as well. He wants to find out more about the musical

before making any further steps toward purchasing the tickets, so he brings up

his web browser and with another few taps accesses an opinion portal. He waves

a sensor in his sleeve at the display opposite of him, the portal recognizes the

show that is advertised here and brings up user opinions. They all read rather

well and the portal algorithm also judges, "Based on your submitted profile and

rating history you are very likely to enjoy this show." Waving the sensor at the

display a second time, a window for ticket sales opens on his sleeve display. "At

these discounts, tickets are a steal", Chris thinks to himself. Selecting a pair of 4

th

row seats he is about to finish the transaction, when he decides to make sure his

wife really is available that night. However, she is already in a meeting. Her

system gathered this information from her location and the surrounding people,

so the video phone feature has turned itself off. She is still receiving instant

messages. "Are you free tonight for a small surprise", Chris softly says into his

sleeve, not wanting to arouse too much attention around him. The voice

recognition software displays the message and submits it. A few seconds later he

sees his wife's handwriting appear on his screen. "Sure. I'll be taking off at

around 5pm today." That should be enough time; the show doesn't start until 8pm.

Chris brings up the transaction again and confirms the form, which had been pre-

populated with his personal profile information. However, a warning screen

comes up, "Dear Mr. Jones, please be advised that your wife already has a

booking for two tickets to this show for next Wednesday. Are you sure you want

to continue?" With a small chuckle he leans back. "So this is what she was

planning for my birthday surprise..." But while he is looking up to the ceiling he

sees another ad for an "experiential dining" restaurant, which looks like fun in the

ad. He decides not to tell his wife about the slight mishap with the show and

books a table for two, without checking the opinion portal this time. After all, what

would life be without surprises?

2

This little story tries to give an example of how life could be in a ubiquitous

computing (UC) environment. There are numerous projects of many IT related

companies that revolve around the concepts and the development of applications

for UC like the one above. Most notable in this domain is probably hp's

"Cooltown" project. On the research side, conceptual and technical white papers

underline the research aspect of this project, on the consumer side, high quality

marketing videos try to demonstrate, what makes it "cool" to live in "Cooltown".

1

There are a wide number of other visionaries out there, NTT DoCoMo,

Microsoft, and the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) to name just a few

more. All those visions do not differ from each other significantly. They are all

based on the UC idea, which has been developed and refined by scholars for the

past decade.

This paper does not focus on the vision, however. UC, being synonymous for

information provision as well as gathering, will have an impact on the way

information will be gathered, processed, used, and valued. This paper wants to

demonstrate that the information economy we know today will in essence not

change. UC, however, will result in increased quality and scope by making

available new applications and services.

In order to demonstrate this, it is necessary to get an understanding of UC and

a technological background. An overview of UC specific elements is given in

chapter 1.2, an overview of enabling technologies can be found in chapter 1.3.

Chapter 2 deepens the understanding of the information economy and the chain

of creating, pricing and distributing published content. In chapter 3, changes to

this chain will be explained. Chapter 4 briefly touches issues arising from a UC

environment and in detail lays out four scenarios. These scenarios are this

author's estimates based on different curves of adoption and explain the impact

of UC on the information economy in every single one.

1

Hewlett-Packard (2003).

3

1.2 History and Elements

1.2.1 History

The development of microprocessors has followed an astonishingly constant

factor, first discovered in 1964 by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore. He observed

that the performance of microprocessors

2

roughly doubled every 18 months, all

other parameters held equal. Modern microprocessors not only gain in

processing power, but at the same time decrease in size, in energy consumption,

and important for the business perspective in cost.

This finding today also known as Moore's Law led Mark Weiser at Xerox

PARC to the conclusion that one day processors will be small and cheap enough

to be unobtrusively integrated into everyday objects, giving these objects

"smartness" processing power. In 1991 he coined the term "Ubiquitous

Computing" (UC) for this vision which he later defined as "the method of

enhancing computer use by making many computers available throughout the

physical environment, but making them effectively invisible to the user."

3

1.2.2 Elements and Definition

Over the years, scholars developed a clearer mutual understanding of what UC

should be, what it entails, and what it requires. A number of definitions have been

proposed. These definitions contain some or all of the following elements:

4

- The reach of current communication networks will increase; different

purpose networks of various generations will be used in a complementary

manner in order to achieve and omni-present communication environment.

This allows for access to the network anytime and anyplace.

- Microprocessors will decrease in size; capable of a limited processing set

these miniature processors will eventually be the size of small fibers or dust

particles, making them unobtrusively small. This allows for integration in any

everyday item to make it "smart".

2

Measured in million instructions per second (MIPS).

3

Weiser (2003).

4

Ref. Fleisch / Mattern / Billinger (2003).

4

- With the decreasing size of microprocessors and the integration into

everyday objects user interfaces will change. Voice recognition, remote user

interfaces, entire portals for individual objects, and next generation light

emitting polymer displays will allow for communicating with the objects as

well as for monitoring their status. The computing aspect will disappear.

- Sensors will enable "smart" objects to gather data and process the findings.

The sensory input can either be reported or even processed by the object

itself, e.g. it can be compared to programmed data ranges. In case of

deviation countermeasures can be deployed.

- The "smart" objects will sense communication partners in their vicinity.

Those can be other "smart" objects, communication networks access or

human users. Depending on their programming objects will be able to

spontaneously form networks and manipulate their own or other objects'

status if necessary. This allows for a high automation of tasks and

processes.

- The real world will in essence be simplified and modeled as a virtual world

representing all network nodes (i.e. every smart object, every network

access point and every location of either). This allows for the gap between

virtual and real world to decrease significantly in width.

- Every individual real object will have a virtual counterpart. This counterpart

will include more information about the product and go beyond the limited

storage and processing power of the physical object.

- On a more abstract level, there will also be purely virtual objects which can

be considered "helper objects" or macro objects. These are activated by a

status change in one object and trigger status changes in other objects or

run reporting routines.

- Objects can always be located, either by recent scan locations or GPS. This

enables them to "understand" more about the context they are currently

used in and (in case of empowered objects) act accordingly.

Systems that fulfill some of these requirements are already in place today on a

small scale both in areas of consumer and business applications. They are

individually implemented and individually operating solutions.

5

1.3 Enabling Technologies

In order to understand just how UC works and how it will influence information

economy it is necessary to understand the technical background, i.e. how UC will

work or is likely to work.

The above mentioned elements pose a number of challenges for technology.

Underlying assumptions for the feasibility are the continuation of Moore's law for

the processors as well as a similar, generalized Moore's Law that appears to

have the same if not a stronger effect on storage and bandwidth for

communication. The cycles for the generalized Moore's law have a length of

12 36 months for most important technology indicators.

5

This paper assumes

for simplicity that these laws will hold true over at least the next 10 years

6

.

Bandwidth, storage space, and processing power of microprocessors will be

assumed as sufficiently advanced for a UC system and not pose a threat to

overall feasibility of the system. For chapter 4, these assumptions are lifted. New

assumptions will be made based on the individual scenario.

Although in early stages of their development, many of the technologies

required for UC already exist. This chapter tries to give an overview of how these

technologies can contribute to a UC environment, what their substitutes are, and

to show the current issues and necessary improvements for a large scale

deployment.

1.3.1 Radiofrequency Identification Technology

7

Objects can be uniquely identified using radiofrequency identification (RFID).

RFID is a tag-based system. Each tag can hold a certain number of bytes worth

of information. A reader/writer unit can retrieve or store information in the tags

which then hands over this data to the system for processing. This is likely going

to be a key technology in object identification. Depending on the tags used, it

allows an identification of an object down to the level of individual object

instances.

5

Mattern (2001a).

6

Following an estimate by Mattern (2001a).

7

The following ref. Microlise (2003).

6

1.3.1.1 RFID Tags

A tag consists of three key elements: the RF antenna for communicating,

memory for storage, and integrated circuitry for management. This layout is the

typical one for a so called passive tag. It draws the power for sending its stored

memory from the electromagnetic field emitted by the reader/writer unit by

induction. It does not have any need for a power source, this way it is not

constantly transmitting. On the other hand, active tags additionally have an

integrated battery as power source. The main differences between active and

passive tags are memory capacity as larger memory needs to be constantly

kept powered and input/output (I/O) capabilities. This can be useful for use with

integrated sensors that might require a constant power supply. Lastly, active tags

have a farther transmission range (up to 330 ft) than passive tags (up to 5 ft).

The memory can contain a unique identifier number and in most cases space

for free usage. In some cases, the tags will only allow to have their identifier read

(read only tags), some can be written to once but read many times (WORM), and

a third type is fully read/write capable, information can be deleted, altered or

added at any given time.

As mentioned above, a tag can also include sensors in the design. These

sensors can be of various kinds, e.g. temperature, pressure, acceleration or

some other physical state. The data gathered by these sensors is saved in the

memory of the tag. Current memory sizes are approximately 512 bytes for

passive tags and 32 kilobytes for active tags.

RFID tags have been developed as early as World War II, but only in recent

decades interest in this technology has lead to a volume at which production cost

become attractive for large scale deployment.

8

Today's tags depending on size,

design and capabilities cost from 0.30 USD to as much as 50.00 USD.

9

Predecessors of current advanced RFID tags are often considered to be the

binary anti-theft devices found widely spread in today's retail industry. However,

current passive RFID tags have reached the size of larger dust particles,

approximately 2 mm³ in size.

As RFID tags have similar identifying properties as a current Uniform Product

Code (UPC) barcode, it is expected that RFID will complement or replace UPC

barcodes with a proposed Electronic Product Code (EPC) system. This is subject

8

RFID Journal (2003).

9

RFID Journal (2003).

Details

Seiten
Erscheinungsform: Originalausgabe
Jahr: 2003
ISBN (eBook): 9783832474577
ISBN (Paperback): 9783838674575
DOI: 10.3239/9783832474577
Dateigröße: 549 KB
Sprache: Englisch
Institution / Hochschule: Otto Beisheim School of Management Vallendar – unbekannt
Erscheinungsdatum: 2003 (November)
Note: 2,0
Schlagworte: radio frequency indentification rfid informationsökonomie vernetzung smart computing grid

Autor

Markus Riegler (Autor:in)

Ubiquitous Computing and the Impact on Information Economy

Zusammenfassung

Leseprobe

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Details

Autor

Markus Riegler (Autor:in)