Sports Calendar

Geoff Iddison, chief executive, PayPal UK, the online payments service

From a very personal point of view, the huge shift in perceptions of online payments as security issues have become less of a barrier to transactions online. Other than that, dramatic improvements in search technology have meant that the exponential growth in information and content available on the internet has been managed. The increase in information would be meaningless without the ability for users to find it.

In the future, we are certainly going to see a far greater focus on entertainment on demand and a much higher level of personalisation. We will see visual and audio communications integrated via the internet – voice recognition especially will see marked development. Self regulation will continue – the internet is one of the few "domains" where we have seen anything like the levels of self-policing work as successfully as is currently the case.

Julie Meyer, chief executive of Ariadne Capital, the tech investment and advisory firm

In the UK, one of the most transformative events was the launch of Freeserve in September 1998. At the inaugural First Tuesday in October 1998, everyone was talking about this – asking each other "what it meant". Because local calls were not free, ISDN service to the home was too expensive to make it ubiquitous - having access to the internet for free was disruptive and ignited the internet generation in Europe.

In less than 15 years, we’ll deliver the promise of the connected home with "access points" to the web in every room in the house as well as via the mobile phone. Companies like Intamac (www.intamac.com) and Cisco (www.cisco.com) are delivering devices for the ‘Home Portal’, which will enable one to monitor every aspect of home security and safety from anywhere in the world as well as delivering information and entertainment between access points and to a host of devices.

Tim Worstall, blogger

I've been using the web and the net since the early 1990s in business and for pleasure but the most memorable moment for me was soon after I started blogging and one of the major US sites linked to something I had posted up. That Virginia Postrel, a writer I'd admired for years, thought it worth pointing out my scribblings, sending several thousand others to read them, "Hey, Wow! Maybe there's something interesting to this after all?" Yes, it's an ego thing.

The web of the future? More video, more sound, things like Google Print will have given us all of the (out of copyright at least) books online, repressive governments will have worked out how to cut their subjects off from the wider world but I still think that boring old words and prose will be the way most information (as opposed to entertainment) is exchanged. The written word is capable of conveying a greater level of detail than any other method of communication we have. Not greater emotion, or perhaps subtlety, but certainly precision.

Vinton Cerf, Google's "Chief Internet Evangelist"

The most exciting thing related to the web, in my opinion, has been its use as a universal interface to an increasing range of applications, especially those involving multiple media. Beginning with the graphical MOSAIC version of the WWW browser to today's mobile browsers, WWW has become a principal means by which we perceive and interact with the world's information.

Very likely it will include 3D presentation capabilities, speech understanding input and perhaps even gestural inputs. There will be billions of devices on the Internet and many of them will be used to intermediate in daily information exchanges with our friends, family and colleagues, to say nothing of billions of information appliances on the network.

Christoph Mohn, chief executive, LYCOS Europe

The democratisation of information and knowledge has been the most exciting thing. As the internet has grown and developed the barriers of geography, age and class have fallen when it comes to accessing and sharing the phenomenal information resource that the internet has hosted.

Ubiquity will be the key feature of the internet. The internet will be treated much as electricity is today – it will be hidden out of sight, but will invisibly bring information, communication and entertainment into our homes in the way that electricity brings heat and warmth. It will be the platform for myriad applications. The development of voice-enabled interfaces is the other big change that I foresee in the coming years.

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