homeWelcome, sign in or click here to subscribe.login
     


 

 

Weekend


Subscriber content preview

August 14, 2009

Strange But True!

Q. IAYF: What is it? Who wants it? Who needs it? Who's got it? Who'd dearly love to have no part of it?

A. It stands for “Information at Your Fingertips,” longtime motto of the information industry, or as the cooler geeks now call it, IAYF, says Paul McFedries in IEEE Spectrum magazine. Wondering if that restaurant you see while driving is any good? Ask you car's GPS system. Somebody at dinner claims Dustin Hoffman was in “Star Wars”? Look it up on your iPhone's Internet Movie Database. The point is, IAYF went from pie-in-the-sky to data-in-your-smartphone seemingly overnight. Many of us are only now beginning to realize how much findability (Googleability) the world's data has. The age of “ambient findability” is the ability to find anyone or anything from anywhere at any time! Once info becomes so ubiquitous we cease to notice it, it becomes what one geek termed “everyware.”


 
. . .


To read this story in full login or purchase a subscription.



Previous columns:



Email or user name:
Password:
 
Forgot password? Click here.