[ IT ] Vint Cerf,the Vice-president of Google, in Saarbruecken

Vint Cerf (Turing Award 2004 -meaning very important person at the moment) visited Saarbruecken on 10.03.2006.This event was preceded for us by a dinner with a Google engineer and a recruiting lady. At the dinner they told us the known story of what a nice place,with intelligent and open people, open and interesting Google is. The bad thing is that to some extent they actually convinced me in this. But anyway I am not to be trusted with respect to this , because I am by default a Google fan.However Vint made a good show, making the audience laugh a lot. But somehow at the end of the day when I asked myself ,what was the idea behind the talk it was a hard question to answer.Still I have some idea and I want to present it here in short. First, even though they claim it was a recruiting talk,somehow it was not a talk about Google at all. It was a talk about an idea that Google is promoting as the next step in the development of the Internet and the network as a whole. The idea was very simple - from now on some research should be focused on the direction that all devices will be connected to the Internet and how to manage this infrastructure in order to be open,secure and scalable. All devices,computers,telephones,washing machines,ovens,fridges and even photo frames. That is why it is our goal now ,us in the universities,the so called research community to develop standards and designs and not to leave it to the commercial companies to do it. Mainly because they are driven by other goals than "making the world better".Thus Vint was more talking to the big researchers in the room like professors and post-docs advising them which will be an interesting,hot and supported research field.At least this is what I understood,however the talk was interesting and funny and I am still looking for the above mentioned picture frame connected to the net.