When Web 3.0 Arrives, BT BizBox Will Be Primed and Ready

Just when the global community was starting to comprehend the wonders of Web. 2.0, the term Web 3.0 has made its way into the digital lexicon.

Fortunately for those still trying to grasp all of the concepts and features of Web 2.0, they haven’t been left behind. Web 3.0 is still considered a phrase describing the future of the World Wide Web, which has an infinite amount of possibilities and just as many differing opinions on what those possibilities will be.

Visionaries looking at the future may have alternating views on how it will evolve, but the one thing they agree on is that the digital future, as did the digital past, will have a profound social impact, especially due to the growing participation in online communities.

“In only a few years, social networks have become a staple in the Internet landscape as the social networking phenomenon allowed people to ‘put their lives online,’ ” Chris De Wolfe, co-founder of MySpace, told The Guardian recently. “A person’s profile became a representation of who they really were in the offline world, and allowed them to transfer their offline world online.”

The offline and online worlds are likely to intersect more and more as the Web continues to evolve into 3.0 status. It’s as if a population is colonizing a virtual world, and online communities are the cities, towns and hamlets housing the inhabitants. Those cities are expanding at a rapid pace, too, according to a U.S. study conducted by the University of Southern California prestigious Annenberg School.

The 7th annual study, titled The Digital Future Project, found that U.S. membership in online communities has more than doubled in only three years, with more than half logging into that community daily and 71 percent of members saying their community is very important or extremely important to them. Furthermore, the study found that online communities have a major impact on social and political causes.

“There are so many ways the Internet has changed people’s lives,” said Sarah Laycock, spokeswoman for Tierlinear Ltd., maker of the Web-based productivity tool BT BizBox. “People having a voice online and being able to reach out to like-minded people has simply been a phenomenon. Sites like Facebook, My Space and Twitter are connecting people in ways we’ve never seen before.”

The 3.0 era will take the Web to an entirely different level, with its most intriguing byproduct being the Semantic Web, where artificial intelligence will start to play a major role as software becomes so smart it can reason by using a set of rules that express logical relationships between concepts and data.

British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee is recognized as the visionary behind the Semantic Web concept. In 1999, he expressed the future of the Web:

“I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.”

When the Semantic Web comes to fruition, it will streamline inefficient and time-consuming tasks that often impede productivity and cut into profits. Devices like Tierlinear’s BT BizBox – which includes microformats, OpenID and Open Data Portability – will drive applications to talk to each other, even without the end user knowing. For example, a user could have information stored at Google, Yahoo! and another application, but a main dashboard application aggregates them together and shows a user the information in real-time based on a historical pattern.

“Products like BT BizBox will be able to assist small businesses in identifying their busy and not so busy periods,” said Laycock. “It will know what they are interested in seeing so it will learn what information needs to be sent to them in real-time. It’s something few imagined would be possible a decade ago.”

Laycock says that the BT BizBox in its Web. 3.0 form would create nirvana for small business, connecting suppliers, customers and the business. For example, a supplier would send out their product list in an open standard format which BT BizBox would read. BT BizBox then processes the file and identifies which customers like which products.


The end result would be that the BT BizBox would be capable of taking information from the Web (via RSS) and resign that data, resending it out in RSS feeds (via email, etc.) to the business customer base automatically. This would result in businesses that sell exactly what customers want and flip their traditional business model.  Businesses over time will simply become distributors of product and offer service, which the suppliers are incapable of offering.

“The current version of BT BizBox is an online Web-based application, which can be accessed from anywhere by any Internet enabled device,” said Laycock. “This makes it ideal for the rising number of home/flexible workers as they can access all the centrally stored company information away from the office making them more productive.  In the Web 3.0 world, BT BizBox will be extremely powerful tool for every small and medium-sized company.”

August 12, 2008 | Filed Under BTBizBox Updates | Leave a Comment