Need For Speed Text Rules The Internet, Making Access To Images A Logical Next Step, Entrepreneur Says

Think for a moment, says Bernard Daines, about how important images have become in our lives.

Not text descriptions of images. But the images themselves.

Think of radio instead of television. Newspapers without pictures. Verbal descriptions of the baby instead of a snapshot.

Because they make transmission of images across the Internet nearly instantaneous, the combination of fiber optic networks and gigabit ethernet will change our lives.

Much of what we have now, we will have more quickly, cheaper, and at higher quality. We will have a more convenient world.

Medical applications are obvious. Doctors have been talking about exchanging medical images via computers for decades but, Daines says, with the exception of a very few limited networks, it isn’t done.

Educational applications are also vast. But most of those applications remain in the realm of theory.

Daines says the possibilities hardly stop there. He instantly cites numerous niche areas in which the technology could be applied.

Daines’ church, for example - the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints - has a deep interest in genealogy. It has assembled vast quantities of genealogical documents at its genealogical center in Salt Lake City. And more than 70 percent of the people who go there to examine the documents are non-Mormons.

“What if you could sit at your computer and actually look at the microfilm images of these records?” he asked, “somehow indexed so you can search around.”

Converting all those images to text format makes no economic sense, and undoubtedly, in the conversion process, errors would be made. The solution: images of the original documents.

Or suppose you are a medical researcher who suddenly has at your fingertips access to all the death records recorded in cities and counties throughout the country?

Many newspapers, like The Spokesman-Review, now offer Web sites that give readers the option of looking at stories on news-related subjects that weren’t included in the limited print space.

But those offerings are mostly text.

“Maybe the photographer took 100 pictures of a given subject, but you are only able to print one,” Daines says. “There may be a dozen others, though, that readers would find compelling.”

Or television stations could add video footage they couldn’t run in their confined on-air time slots.

What about digital cameras? What if you could ship a digital snapshot to a processor via the Internet and have it enhanced to a studio-quality print, or printed in poster size?

The possibilities are practically endless. But, Daines emphasizes, the real value of the combination of a broad fiber optics network and gigabit ethernet is in possibilities we haven’t yet thought of.

In addition to bigger, faster, better versions of what we already have, there will be many things not yet imagined.

“Go pick up a catalog of personal computer software and go through the applications that people are trying to sell you,” he says. “Then look back 10 years and ask yourself how many of those applications would anybody have even thought of having on a computer? In how many cases was the economic viability of those applications foreseen?

“Probably, almost none of them.”