Search engines are building more extensive personal profiles to help customers be more effective online. However, this is drawing more concern about how this data can be used in the future, and how expose and individual will be. Will search engines enhance the profile with outside data?  If so who owns the data? Will the user have any control?  

“Fears have been stoked by the potential for Google to build up a detailed picture of someone’s behaviour by combining its records of web searches with the information from DoubleClick’s “cookies”, the software it places on users’ machines to track which sites they visit.”

Source: Financial Times

“Pew Reports: Online Activities and Pursuits - “The proportion of that daily population who are doing some well-known internet activities”:

• Email 77%
• Search engine 63%
• Get news 46%
• Do job-related research 29%
• Use instant messaging 18%
• Do online banking    18%
• Take part in chat room 8%
• Make a travel reservation 5%
• Read blogs 3%
• Participate in online auction 3%

Summary article on new report from International Telecommunications Union Internet of Things. Key Points:

• next stage in the technological revolution where humans, electronic devices, inanimate objects and databases are linked by a radically transformed Internet.
• 875 million Internet users worldwide, a number that may simply double if humans remain the primary users of the future. But experts are counting on tens of billions of human and inanimate “users” in future decades.
• ITU’s vision - refrigerators that independently communicate with grocery stores, washing machines that communicate with clothing, implanted tags with medical equipment and vehicles with stationary or moving objects.

Harry Dent, the author of the Next Great Bubble Boom argues that the Internet did not bring about a consumer revolution. Most people only use the Internet for the purchase of simple commodity products. However, it is “the expansion of broadband, advance of voice activation or speech recognition technologies (easy access) and the ultimate emergence of video interactivity (real time, personalized services) that will create the real consumer revolution in the second half of this decade.”

“Most businesses continue to cater to the middle class market with the “lowest price strategy where there is high competition and low profit margins…. But the emergence of a premium class of product and services” that will rise fast in the next decades.

Project 25-30 million millionaire and affluent households by 2009 will lead the way and set the new product trends.