Because Bill likes the little green Android fellow,

Because his G1 could use a custom CPU*Media wallpaper,

Because New York,

Here it is.

(click it to get the proper size for your G1.)

It’s in no way endorsed by Verizon, by the way. That’s just coincidental.

Just so we’re clear: this is copyright CPU*MEDIA. Personal use only, redistribution OK as long as it moves around with full credits, and a link to www.cpumedia.com and/or this blog entry.

My apologies to William Gibson, but I never did « get it » with regards to cyberspace. It was too « out there » for me. No pun intended, but the whole thing was not very down to Earth. I like to know where I am, where I’m going, and how long it’s going to take for me to get there. I’ll be the first to acknowledge that I am, especially for an IT guy, an exception in that respect. Many of my colleagues talk about cyberspace as if such a place really existed and that they were somehow living and working in it. Don’t tell them I told you this, but I always thought that they were a bunch of dorks.

Cyberspace is dead.

Get over yourselves, please. The whole shebang is just a bunch of telecoms equipment and cables. All that stuff is meshed together with slathers of software, and the entire setup is firmly implanted in the real world and subject to the same physical and judicial laws, rules, and regulations as your automobile and your office’s photocopier. “Being in cyberspace” was always a sure fire sign of delusional disconnect.

Cyberspace is dead.

After years of becoming the « next big thing », it’s become nothing. After years of spreading through society, industry, education, commerce et al. we are now left with what remains when the spreading stops. The real world, only wired. Back to reality and not a moment too soon.

Cyberspace is dead.

Remember all that guff about how the Internet was bringing about “the death of distance”. We are now back in the real word and it’s been criss-crossed by a fine grid that can measure our movements past, present, and future. Precise measurements in time and space. Nothing but distance.

Cyberspace is dead.

Location-based services are now marrying the two entities that the Web 2.0 version of cyberspace tried very hard to make believe didn’t exist: the real world and markets. Not markets as in “my loss making startup is worth x because I have access to other people’s money and y eyeballs”. Not markets as in “freeconomics” (or whatever this week’s buzzword happens to be). No. Markets as in actual “supply and demand”. The real world as in “what do I need and where can I get it”. But in order to take advantage of that, I have to keep both my feet planted firmly in the real world.

Cyberspace is dead. …and good riddance. I never much cared for the place anyway.

Very early buzz (wait, is that pre-buzz or proto-buzz?) is using the Web 3.0 label to classify the “coming soon to a small screen near you” mobile apps that are being developed literally as you read this. Recent months have seen several barriers to entry start to fall by the wayside: lack of true mobile web surfing, too few predominant mobile platforms and corresponding SDKs, patchy bandwidth, and too strict a division between the consumer and enterprise markets. Most importantly, mobile operator walled gardens are now under siege as users slowly but surely are able to run the mobile apps they want in addition to those imposed by their operator. Mobile space is starting to look more like web space.

After an inevitable first wave of imitation composed of web sites repackaged as mobile apps, we should start to see some true innovation with applications designed from the bottom up to take advantage of the characteristics of the new mobile platforms.

Location-based apps are first out of the gate in this respect, but expect to see other types of functionality showcased as nascent user habits find there way into the feedback loop.

Be on the lookout for game changing developments as well. For example, the yellow pages industry, already badly shaken by Google, is looking at either a great mobile opportunity allowing it to leapfrog back into the lead of the local search space, or the disruptive technology that might very well bury it.

Of course, accompanying the good will be the bad. There will be no lack of Web 3.0 bloviating about how “this time it’s different”. There will be mobile vaporware. There will be mobile malware. There will be — groan — a wave of miniaturized for small screen user-generated content. Just as with the Web 1.0 and 2.0, we will all have to sift through the noise, separate the good from the bad, and keep telling ourselves… Don’t believe the hype.

What do we have cooking for your small screen here at CPU Media? Watch this space.

If social media has done anything, it’s shown that this planet is overrun by assholes.

Assholes with a big megaphone.