Thus, it was clear that the Sandbox team would be back in lovely Geneva for the LIFT 09 conference. But this time, we wanted to contribute something. Together with the LIFT team, we decided to throw a small dinner to bring together some young attendees of the conference as well as people from the Sandbox network.

Photo by Dominik Grolimund / Wuala

On Wednesday evening, after the first day of conference, a group of 30 hand-selected people met at the beautiful Restaurant La Broche. Despite some initial resistance, we managed to mix up the people so that everyone would meet new people. As usual at Sandbox dinners, the crowd was a diverse one, ranging from entrepreneurs to NGO people and researchers.

Equally broad were topics that were covered in the discussions at the five tables: One group immediately dived into the big debate of money vs. freedom and why being a poor entrepreneur might make you happier than being a rich employee. Another table discussed intensively the business model of Poken, the very successful Swiss startup, with its founders.

As the evening went on and the wine bottles were slowly emptying, the debates moved on to the advantages of Islamic banking, the future of journalism – and medieval propaganda. Over coffee and dessert, some people discussed how innovation can actually flow from less developed countries to the developed ones, as it happened with the concept of microcredits, while others got into a heated argument on the Swiss banking secret. And before we even realised, it was 1am in the morning… Time, at least for some, to start discovering the bars of Geneva

The dinner was, in our view, a great success – it allowed us to spread the word about Sandbox and, more importantly, meet some of the smartest and most interesting people at the conference. Thanks to everyone for attending – and see you at the next conference!

A living legend for geeks from all continents, Vint Cerf is a 65-year-old computer scientist who co-invented the TCP/IP protocol and who is most frequently considered to be the father of the Internet as we know it today.

His three-piece suit and his beard make him look like Matrix’ Architect, though with a sense of humor. He is now a Google vice-president, and their Chief Internet Evangelist.

In this talk in Geneva during LIFT09, Vint Cerf mentioned the biggest challenges now faced by the information and communication technology, two of which have particularly raised our attention:

We must increase the number of IP addresses
An IP address is an identification assigned to a computer, allowing him to communicate with other devices over the Internet. As the research program started in the seventies, which led to the current form of Internet, no one could tell how many possible addresses should be created for the purpose of the experiment.  The plan was to do a low scale test, before launching a “production version” of the Internet. The immediate success had the consequence that there has never been a production version.

The IP addresses had been defined as a 32 bit number, which gives a total of 4’294’967’296 possible addresses. With 542 million computers connected to the Internet, and 3.5 billion devices, we are already reaching capacity limits, although we still have 80% of the world to connect. A new kind of Internet Protocol (IPv6) will use a 128 bits technology and will allow for 3.4×10ˆ38 possible addresses, which should cover our needs for the next couple of decades.

InterPlaNet: Interplanetary Internet
One of humanity’s biggest hopes – at least for some scientists – is to once be able to colonize other planets and therefore free us from being too dependable on the future of the Earth.

But we will have to “space-enable” Internet before that: what would be life on Mars if you wouldn’t be able to add your earthan friends on Facebook? Before sending humans to other planets, we will have to figure out how to send data. It doesn’t seem to be a big deal as we already send and receive data to and from satellites, but Internet is a much richer communication system, and the current protocols were not thought for interplanetary stuff.

The problem? “The distance between the planets is literally astronomical, and at the speed of light, it takes 3.5 minutes for a signal to propagate to Mars.” So if your computer makes a request, it will have to wait at least 7 minutes until receiving the answer, and the current internet protocols have been designed to handle delays of some milliseconds, not minutes. Another problem is celestial motion: “planets have the nasty habit of rotating and we haven’t figured out how to stop that yet”. There are people working on this and the InterPlaNet should be ready in November 09.