EDITORIAL

The formation of INformation     Editor-in-Chief

 

In my one of previous editorials I recalled that, the first time I used the Internet was using the only email account in my colleague campus to contact with my first advisor abroad, it was not free, and that was in Beijing later 1993. A year later, while I was attending my first graduate school, I got to know the first Internet browser Mosic as well as its commercial version Netscape, all a sudden, everyone was eager to create their own homepages. In less than two years, while I was attending another graduate school, yahoo! went to public, and all the people surrounding me were discussing the Internet mania, at that time both Amazon and eBay were still startups, and google was not even born yet. As a graduate student, searching relevant cited papers was my daily routine since it is part of research business, unfortunately, both search engines and directories at that time were not that as efficient as that of the-state-of-the-art. In other words, the information was not as that rich as that of today, and for the available scare information online, they were neither easy to locate, nor quick to retrieve.

Ten years passed, where are we here now and where can we get from here? Information now can be by anyone at anytime, anywhere in anyway. You can access the Internet, not only from either office or home, but also either at the airport or even on the road. The Internet now is not rich in images, audios and videos beyond plain texts. PC is not the only access device that can be used for the Internet access, as the merging of computation, communication and consumer electronics, Internet access based on mobile phones, power-line, even the freezer at your kitchen are become more and more popular. Let¡¯s take China as example, in Mainland China, the number of Netizen is 87 million as of June of 2004 according to an official report released by CNNIC in Mainland China; on the instant messenging side, the market leader NASDAQ listed Tencent owns 320 million registered members through its QQ platform, an IM system similar to MSN and yahoo! Messenger; on the mobile communication side, two hundred million Chinese possesses at least one mobile phone, and the number of short messages sent by Chinese in the first quarter of 2005 is 217 billion, according the Minister of Information Industry Ministry of China. We can see as the turn of the century, now the key problem is not how to deal with information deficiency problem, instead it is how to tackle the challenge of information overflow

In my view, the Internet is just like a jet, which makes your information journey faster and cheaper, now without jet, can people still travel? Of course, except you are one of the few tycoons in the Silicon Valley, you do not need a jet to get to work. The key concern for you is how to purchase a suitable car and find a most efficient route to reduce your commute time. The combination of the car and the route, here at Hometown Microsystems we call it the formation of INformation