Framework for Global E-Commerce – Closing remarks by John Patrick
July 18, 2007
SIIA Event – Washington, D.C.
by Michael Cervieri (ScribeMedia)
About this Video
This video is from an SIIA event held in Washington, DC that marked the 10th anniversary of the “Framework for Global Electronic Commerce,” a report released by the Clinton administration and headed by Ira Magaziner. The SIIA event gathered Magaziner, Michael Mandel, chief economist of BusinessWeek, Stewart Baker, Assistant Secretary, Department of Homeland Security; Dan Burton, Senior Vice President, Salesforce.com; Jamie Estrada, Assistant Secretary (Acting), U.S. Department of Commerce and John Patrick, President of Attitude LLC and former Vice President of Internet Technology at IBM.
About John Patrick
In 1994, John Patrick joined Tim Berners-Lee and others to form the World Wide Web Consortium at MIT. The W3C as it’s called became the main international standards organization for the Web. Arranged as a consortium, member organizations maintain full-time staff to develop Web standards standards across a variety of areas ranging from the Document Object Model to the Speech Interface Framework.
Put another way, the W3C creates the standards that let developers create what they create, and do so in a way that those creations can be accessed across a variety of platforms, browsers and devices. In an interesting post yesterday on his Web site, Patrick wrote:
“None of us at the time foresaw today’s level or potential for eCommerce. Most of the focus at that time was on techniques for formatting web pages and on various other content related issues. Jim Clark, founder of Netscape, did see the eCommerce potential and he also realized one of the biggest inhibitors was the U.S. Government regulation of encryption, a key tool for making eCommerce secure. Jim and a handful of us started the Global Internet Project as a public policy group to gain more awareness about encryption and urge governments around the world to loosen the reigns.”
However, even with “today’s level or potential for e-commerce,” Patrick believes we’re barely into the Internet’s infancy and only utilizing 5% of what the Web has in store for us.
One of Patrick’s most important themes though is that the PC is not the Internet. Instead, through WiFi, the Internet’s everywhere, and almost all things. It’s the iPhone, it’s the chips in our most basic commodities that allow communication among a variety of devices. More importantly, with browsers like Opera Software’s Opera Mini that function specifically on mobile devices, the PC almost becomes irrelevant as millions of users in places like China and India forgo the desktop in favor of the connected phone.
The Internet’s come a long way of course. There’s just a longer way to go.
Framework for Global E-Commerce – Closing remarks by John Patrick
Original link for this video :http://www.scribemedia.org/2007/07/18/john-patrick/
