There is a lot of talk about Web 2.0 these days and almost everyone—including the EE Times-Asia editorial team—is trying to figure out what it actually means.

For EE Times-Asia in particular, the challenge is to find out what it means for the community we serve: Asia's electronic design engineers. Moreover, how can Web 2.0 help us make our content offerings more powerful and relevant to the needs of our online users?

To answer these questions, EE Times-Asia's online team has recently launched an initiative on all of its network sites to better utilize new tools and enhance search and usability features available on the Web 2.0 platform.

This initiative is aimed at providing new content features that enhance indexing and archiving capabilities and better integrate diverse content types such as technical papers, teardowns and product profiles for design type-specific categories. Furthermore, the quick search and Web tab features would reinforce usability of our homepage and its content offerings.

Another challenge at a much broader scale, of course, is to separate hype from reality. We are confident, however, that the so-called next-generation Internet movement is for real and that it will make a far-reaching impact on communities, including design engineers that are now working in an ever more collaborative environment.

Richard Wallace, EE Times editorial director, says that Web 2.0 is the real deal. In an article titled "The power of communities," he termed the initiative as an emerging environment for design collaboration, freedom and innovation.

Industry observers see Web 2.0 creating a new ecosystem that will further enhance a participative design infrastructure and provide a catalyst for new, innovative design architectures. So the phrase "open" has become the major buzzword associated with the Web 2.0 world these days.

At the recent Web 2.0 Summit held in the United States, participants talked about how this new Internet movement could give way to open networks and, subsequently, to open-source software and open APIs.

Likewise, at his opening keynote at Interop in Las Vegas, Cisco Systems Inc. CEO John Chambers reflected on how Web 2.0 tools could boost productivity of the workforce. He said that video, whether live or streamed, could be the next killer application brought about by the Web 2.0 communications model.

Here, apart from full-screen video communications, telepresence tools such as whiteboards and IP telephony could play a vital role.

In Asia, the numbers look encouraging. IDC expects Web 2.0 to grow in Asia with a population of 900 million consumers under the age of 16. This accounts for about a third of the region's population. And more than 80 percent of Web 2.0 users will come from India and mainland China.

Web 2.0 seems to have become the epitome of openness and the creative streak that has been the hallmark of the Internet since its inception in the 1990s. So all this talk about new collaborative and communication models sounds very exciting—and once we are able to separate the hype from reality, there could be ample opportunities.

These opportunities, for publications like EE Times-Asia, would lie in helping create new content types for our users, and, for the semiconductor industry at large, in facilitating new products types to serve Web 2.0 applications.

Email the Editor

Back to top