Summary: The Final Blend of Ingredients

So what does this all mean? We believe that without any significant investment, and little specialized training, virtually anyone will be able to interconnect pieces of datadata, created by prolific devices connected to us, over broadband and wireless interconnectionsat blazing speeds. The data we collect in aggregate can be transformedsometimes in real timeinto information that yields new levels of business or personal value. This is the essence of Inescapable Data.

The key ingredients of Inescapable Data are communications, wireless networks, data, and data descriptions. The power of Inescapable Data is that both people and organizations with similarly scant resources can knit together divergent sources of information that yield new, highly valued capabilities, and create new sources of information that were once only available to those blessed with very large computing facilities, data archives, and specialized skills. Because we can interconnect data now, we will, and we will do so more and more in the future.

The Inescapable Data vision we seek to verify says that when a technology is good for both businesses and consumers alike, there results an exponential growth in the use of that technology as well as additional knowledge gains that were not previously anticipated, all driven by the massive ubiquity of data-producing devices. In this chapter, we brought the foundations of Inescapable Data together. Imagine every device in your home equipped with some amount of wireless connectivity, including your desk and chairswith every device being able to emit information in XML format. Imagine every business machine and home appliance able to accept instructions and commands via human- understandable text XML, wirelessly. Imagine your supplier's inventory available (through a secure gateway, of course) in XML format, as are your MasterCard charges for the past 10 years. This represents massive amounts of data (some real time, some historical), and all physically (wirelessly) interconnected. Most importantly, however, all this data can be intelligently exchanged as "information" (rather than just raw data). We now ask whether this massive interconnectivity will usher in unprecedented and unforeseen efficiencies in our lives.

Let's explore.