I haven't got much to add that would improve the articles so far, so I'll just quote an excerpt and get out of the way.
The Internet Operating System is an Information Operating System
The underlying services accessed by applications today are not just device components and operating system features, but data subsystems: locations, social networks, indexes of web sites, speech recognition, image recognition, automated translation. It's easy to think that it's the sensors in your device - the touch screen, the microphone, the GPS, the magnetometer, the accelerometer - that are enabling their cool new functionality. But really, these sensors are just inputs to massive data subsystems living in the cloud.
When, for example, as an iPhone developer, you use the iPhone's Core Location Framework to establish the phone's location, you aren't just querying the sensor, you're doing a cloud data lookup against the results, transforming GPS coordinates into street addresses, or perhaps transforming WiFi signal strength into GPS coordinates, and then into street addresses. When the Amazon app or Google Goggles scans a barcode, or the cover of a book, it isn't just using the camera with onboard image processing, it's passing the image to much more powerful image processing in the cloud, and then doing a database lookup on the results.
Increasingly, application developers don't do low-level image recognition, speech recognition, location lookup, social network management and friend connect. They place high level function calls to data-rich platforms that provide these services.
Ray Kurzweil may be right after all. I find the concept of cloud computing to be like a link, in biological terms, from single cellular to multicellular organisms. I.e., first their was the desktop, then the mobile laptop, now the ubiquitous palm device. What's next, do you suppose?
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