As part of Google’s 10th anniversary, the company asked ten of its experts for their take on the future of the Internet. 

Today they posted “father of the Internet” Vint Cerf‘s take, and he keys in on two trends that we’ve focused on because of their importance to new media – mobile content creation and Internet video:

In the next decade, around 70% of the human population will have fixed or mobile access to the Internet at increasingly high speeds, up to gigabits per second. We can reliably expect that mobile devices will become a major component of the Internet, as will appliances and sensors of all kinds. Many of the things on the Internet, whether mobile or fixed, will know where they are, both geographically and logically. As you enter a hotel room, your mobile will be told its precise location including room number. When you turn your laptop on, it will learn this information as well–either from the mobile or from the room itself. It will be normal for devices, when activated, to discover what other devices are in the neighborhood, so your mobile will discover that it has a high resolution display available in what was once called a television set. If you wish, your mobile will remember where you have been and will keep track of RFID-labeled objects such as your briefcase, car keys and glasses. “Where are my glasses?” you will ask. “You were last within RFID reach of them while in the living room,” your mobile or laptop will say.

The Internet will transform the video medium as well. From its largely programmed, scheduled and streamed delivery today, video will become an interactive medium in which the choice of content and advertising will be under consumer control. Product placement will become an opportunity for viewers to click on items of interest in the field of view to learn more about them including but not limited to commercial information. Hyperlinks will associate the racing scene in Star Wars I with the chariot race in Ben Hur. Conventional videoconferencing will be augmented by remotely controlled robots with an ability to move around, focus cameras and microphones, and perhaps even directly interact with the local environment under user control.

Cerf’s right.

When you look at today’s iPhone, remember that ten years ago, the iMac was hot stuff, with a 233 Mhz processor, 32 MB Ram and a 4 GB hard drive.

Extrapolate that sort of change forward, and in ten years you’re likely to have a phone with 800 GB of flash memory, a 4 Ghz multiprocessing CPU and broadband connectivity. 

That sort of shift in mobile power will massively change what is possible with mobile devices, and one the most important changes will be that mobile video publishing will become mainstream. 

See the Google blog for Cerf’s full article.