Web 2.0 driving second internet boom

Consumer-led web 2.0 and collaboration technologies will drive massive productivity gains for businesses over the next decade and radically transform people's everyday lives forever.

This prediction of a second, bigger internet boom driven by social networking, wikis and videoconferencing was made by Cisco CEO John Chambers at the company's annual Networkers conference in Anaheim, California this week.

Chambers said: "I think it will be dramatically bigger than the first wave both in terms of network volumes as well as productivity and business model changes. It's going to change business models in a way that will make the first phase of the internet look small. That's what this next decade is about."

He warned that business models will have to change from the old, traditional command and control style to a more open and collaborative one that will be enabled by web 2.0 technologies, and he said this will be as much about how companies change their culture as their technology.

Homes will have between 100Mbps and 1Gbps broadband as a minimum, people will be able to have video appointments with their doctors and devices and content will increasingly cross over from the consumer environment to the workplace, according to Chambers' vision.

During a demo on stage Chambers showed off a future scenario of booking a hotel room online and being able to personalise it so that the electronic room key is sent to the guest's mobile device, personal digital photos are automatically sent to digital photo frames in the room and the guest's personal choice of TV stations and recorded digital content are sent and pre-loaded onto the in-room entertainment system when they arrive.

In the business environment the biggest gains will be in productivity. Chambers said: "The effectiveness we are already seeing appears to be above even my own expectations... I think I can drive a decade of productivity at 10 per cent... We'll probably look back and say we've been too conservative. That's the type of capability that's in front of us."

Chambers also dismissed forecasts that another economic crash could be waiting just around the corner and said very few enterprise customers are currently using web 2.0 technologies.

He said: "There has yet to be the productivity increase, or the excitement or enthusiasm, that usually follows in the latter stages of an economic expansion or a technology innovation expansion. So in my terminology if you were in a nine-inning baseball game we are in the first inning."