Once in a while, some news coming from the ITU (International Telecommunication Union) pops up into my RSS feed aggregator. This time, it's about a workshop that happened last week in Geneva about "Networked RFID: Systems and Services". It addresses arphids (RFID) capabilities, security concerns, new services (ranging from ladies' shoes inventory management system to container tracking) and new business models. A session interesting from my point of view is the one called "Introducing RFID - Visions and Implications". The conclusion of this session are:

RFID is part of a larger vision of future technological ubiquity, combined with sensors & developments in nanotechnology, creating an “Internet of Things” [Yes Fabien the ITU does not talk about a web of things...]

The future will be ubiquitous, meaning “universal, user-oriented, and unique”, but also “alive”!

It will be deployed by end-users and not necessarily centrally managed (“paintable”)

The pervasive nature of RFID comes with key challenges: standardization, governance of resources, consumer protection, namely privacy and data protection

(...)

However, standardization remains fragmented, interoperability and interference keys hurdles

In addition, user acceptance suffers from concerns over consumer privacy, data protection and security

ITU can play an important role in furthering international standardization efforts in addition to raising awareness about the challenges and opportunities of this exciting technology

Why do I blog this? The ITU is the place where people scale in scope, importance, and innovation to provide the necessary frameworks, protocols, and service capabilities for the achievement of new ITs platforms. In this context, it's interesting to see that they seem to be more enthusiast towards this than it was for the Web (they did not believe in the web few years back). Besides, it's good to see that they don't this "Internet of Things" for granted given existing issues (security/privacy, interoperability...).

Finally, it makes me wondering about how this thingy-internet/web might appear (especially if we think in terms of blogjects or postblogjects) and a corollary issue: can we do that (i.e. a world of communicating objects) without the internet?