HSBC Global Banking and Markets operations around the world
Size matters: Many people's first internet
experience will be on a mobile device.
Vinton Cerf issues standards wake-up call
Published: 15 April 2008
In today's complex, networked world it is crucial to create broad standards for business-to-business and consumer-to-business online interactions.
This would be of vital importance to the financial services industry, in particular, said Vinton G. Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google -- and acknowledged father of the Internet -- in a breakfast briefing presentation today at HSBC's London headquarters.
Companies in the finance sector had to interact with practically every other industry, he said, making it important that the sector drive adoption of broad, horizontal information representation and exchange standards.
"There already exists a collection of standards for representation of information," he said. "The trick is not reinventing new ones but combining [existing standards] together."
Pointing to the importance of describing information and transactions in a standardised way in today's complex business and financial marketplace, Mr Cerf warned of the need to avoid the mistakes of the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) era. He noted that the creation of industry-specific vertical protocols was "the rock on which EDI foundered".
Mr Cerf stressed that the internet itself -- which he invented more than three decades ago with partner Robert Kahn as part of a US-Government-sponsored defence research project -- was built on standardised models of information representation that were combined in ever more novel ways to create the modern, flexible internet.
"Standardisation creates a platform on which we can create new applications [and new businesses]," Mr Cerf said. "This was a constant from the very beginnings of the [internet] network's architecture."
Another trend on the internet that Mr Cerf identified as a key driver for establishing robust, horizontal information exchange mechanisms was the growth of mobile access to the network.
‘The trick is not reinventing new standards but combining existing ones together.’
Today there are more than three billion mobile devices, only 15% of which have internet access and this is set to grow dramatically. "Many people will have their first opportunity to interact with the internet on a mobile device and not on a laptop," Mr Cerf noted.
The new opportunities for information exchange and transactions -- leveraging geographic awareness of these devices -- is coupled with challenges presented by screen size, data rate and keyboards. But it is critical, according to Mr Cerf, that these issues be addressed because so many devices already existed.
He stressed the importance of "the ability to get information that is relevant at the moment that we need it". In the financial world this means being able to move value around -- through authorised transactions -- even from a mobile device.
At today's briefing, executives from HSBC Global Banking and Markets also discussed the benefits of the Financial Information eXchange (FIX) Protocol, a public-domain standard for real-time electronic exchange of securities transactions.
HSBC Holdings plc
HSBC Holdings plc serves over 125 million customers worldwide through some 10,000 offices in 83 countries and territories in Europe, the Asia-Pacific region, the Americas, the Middle East and Africa. With assets of some US$2,150 billion at 30 June 2007, HSBC is one of the world's largest banking and financial services organisations. HSBC is marketed worldwide as 'the world's local bank'.
HSBC Global Banking and Markets
HSBC Global Banking and Markets is an emerging markets-led and financing-focused business that provides tailored financial solutions to major government, corporate and institutional clients worldwide. Global Banking and Markets has offices in more than 60 countries and territories. Managed as a global business, HSBC offers clients geographic reach and deep local knowledge. For more information on Global Banking and Markets, please visit http://www.hsbcnet.com/solutions.
Vinton Cerf webcast
Vinton Cerf -- acknowledged father of the internet -- recently spoke at a breakfast briefing at HSBC's London headquarters.
Watch the webcast
Beat the 'bit rot' curse
"Bit rot" will become the bane of our digital existence if we are not careful, according to internet founder Vinton G. Cerf during today's breakfast briefing at HSBC.
Mr Cerf stressed the importance of preserving the programs that allowed us to access our data, the operating systems they ran on and the very hardware those operating systems depended on -- potentially for thousands of years.
"Over time the bits we accumulate that represent value will not be able to be interpreted," Mr Cerf said. "We have to maintain the meaning of the data we accumulate."
This problem was already manifesting itself in the world of digital photography as new cameras and photo editing software sometimes lost the ability to read older photo formats, Mr Cerf pointed out.
Acknowledging the difficult problem of deciding what information was worth keeping -- particularly when this could only be known with certainty in retrospect -- Mr Cerf noted that decreasing costs of storage made it practical to keep all data indefinitely so long as the tools existed to access the data.
Perhaps not surprising for Google's Chief Internet Evangelist, Mr Cerf also highlighted another key dependency of the growth of digital data: finding the information we need.
"Just because we can store lots of stuff it doesn't mean we can find it," he said.
Bit rot would compound this problem, Mr Cerf said.
To press his point, Mr Cerf cited prolific inventor, Raymond Kurzweil, who said that by middle of this century we could expect to upload our very minds into computers to create the first "silicon human beings". At that point, he said, bit rot would be very scary indeed.
