An article over at BBC provides information from Vint Cerf. Dr. Cerf has been involved with the Internet since the very beginning, and continues to remain active in steering activities. I found his comments interesting because he also seems to think that hooking all sorts of devices to the Internet is the way of the future:

He said that the first decade of the net, 1972-1982, was about designing, testing and deploying the net’s basic technologies.

The second decade was about consolidation and commercialisation and the third about broad, popular use.

The next decade, he believes, will see the net spread even further and start to become the basic communications infrastructure for almost anything.

I’m certainly down with that. He goes on to talk about using naming schemes which allow for access to arbitrary namespaces, referencing Naming Authority Pointer and ENUM specifically. I’ve read neither of those, so I’m off to do so.