A common trend at this year’s CES was Internet-ready televisions and new vehicles for users to digest Web content. We’ve heard of products and applications such as Apple TV, Roku, Netflix through Xbox 360 amongst many others. This has been the existing way to absorb web content directly through your large format television. Taking this a step further, Yahoo and Intel Corp. are planning on developing television ”widgets” in order to access such Web content more easily through your existing remote, bypassing previously mentioned hardware and using the television exclusively.

“You are going to see very broad adoption of this open technology by the best brands in the TV industry — not just for specialty products but deeply penetrated in their product lines”…..Patrick Barry, VP of Connected TV @ Yahoo

We currently can access services such as YouTube and Google’s Picasa on our televisions as well as generic services like the weather. With the adoption of “Ready- Web” televisions, users will more frequently access Web content alongside their regular, habitual television programming. This opens the opportunity for advertisers to capture audiences outside the 30-second spot and could add a layer of targeting methodology that was not previously possible.

What interests me most is what this will eventually lead to.  Analysts are predicting that in a few years, there will be just as much talk about the “world wide grid” as there is today about the world wide web.  What is this, you ask?  Aggregating small amounts of power, bandwidth and storage space from each of our personal computers, placing them all in one grid structure (much like a bit torrent does for pulling large files) and creating one all-powerful supercomputer, this grid would allow applications to run robust tasks at an amazing and possibly alarming rate.

Think in terms of a beehive.  If the hive has 20 extremely effective worker bees, it cannot compete with another containing 2000 less-than-perfect worker bees, all executing simultaneously to build a large structure.  The scary part here is that this becomes a hacker’s dream.  Hackers can now run decoding applications on a very large scale.  Encryption systems have historically stayed ahead of the processing power of the top computers out there, keeping security air-tight (in most cases).  The potential to infiltrate a large-scale grid of computers is making hackers everywhere salivate at the thought.

And next, what happens as computers begin to execute small tasks on their own?  These computers can connect to the grid and employ the masses to complete other small tasks.  Eventually, the computer could use information from other computers in the grid to execute a large-scale operation (which began as a simple task created by a user).  And then?  Chaos.  The machines will utilize their strength in numbers to take over our everyday lives.  Seem surreal?  Like a movie?  Better look closer, as it’s really happening.