Convergence Or Physical World Connection?

ClickZ has a neat story called Convergence: It's Back

Jeremy describes converge as "the long-projected (but not yet realized) era of ubiquitous computing -- a world where computing devices are everywhere and all connected to the same network".

The Web has taught people to expect information at their fingertips. E-commerce has forever changed the way people shop and the way that they make purchase decisions. And demand is clearly already there for e-tailing to make the leap to brick-and-mortar retail.

A BusinessWeek poll late last year found that 61 percent of people want to be able to scan a product barcode with their camera phone to receive information on other stores' prices.

He calls it convergence, I call it Physical World Connection.

Convergence comes when mobile device is able to retrieve any type of information from a physical object through the Internet and a machine readable identifier.

When a bar code, an image, speech, a sound, a GPS location, an RFID tag etc can act as a "physical world hyperlink" using a mobile phone, that is when Web 2.0 begins.