The future of the Internet: Chinese content, high speeds, no more TV and radio

 Addressing CIOs and IT directors at last week's Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Orlando 2009 the chief executive officer at Google Inc Eric Schmidt stated that within five years the Internet will change from what it is understood to be nowadays. He said that most of the online content will be dominated by Chinese language and social media while the borders between TV, radio and Internet resources cease their existence. Internet users will be obtaining the information not through the conventional channels but from each other.

One of the notable achievements that will feature the Internet of the future will include a high connection speed that exceeds that of most users today. Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance. As computer efficiency will also grow in accordance with a factor of ten in Moore's Law distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.

Schmidt pointed to users’ high interest in video materials which is rapidly growing which can be illustrated by huge profits earned by Google on YouTube serve. Thus, Schmidt underlined that the content will move towards more video.

Besides, Google CEO noted that real time information is getting more and more influential and important.

"Real time information is just as valuable as all the other information, we want it included in our search results,” he said.

Meantime, the Internet trends show that more and more users are obtaining information from each other. Schmidt forecasts that in the future people will be more attentive to what other people say than to traditional sources. This poses a challenge of how to classify such kind of information.

"We can index real-time info now - but how do we rank it?” Schmidt wondered. He expressed his hope that the company would be successful in solving this problem.

In addition, Schmidt also touched upon the issue of teenagers using the Internet. He said that modern teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years - they jump from app to app to app seamlessly.