The future doesn’t just happen.

See the guy in the white shirt and tie at the end? He’s got a good reason to smile – he may just be cooking up the world you’ll live in a few years. And it’s a pretty damn nice world – UPS can deliver that new Indiana Jones V dvd to you – not your house, your office, but you anywhere you are.

Keisuke Murakami is a crazy wild guy – something he probably picked up while at the University of Michigan years ago I’d bet in – in one those bureaucratic offices with substandard office furniture. He’s the Director for Information Economy Planning Commerce and Information Policy Bureau in the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry; which translated means the guys who’ve rebuilt Japan over the last 60 years from rubble to the second largest economy in the world. Want to know why your next car will be a Toyota and your next flat screen TV a Sony? These are the people that made it happen.

Murakami-san is heading up a wild and crazy project – The Digital Town Browser & Unique ID – kind of like that Internet thing a few years ago. Let’s make available a optional protocol so any physical object, location or event can be uniquely identified. A really simple system, totally voluntary, user/developer friendly and even kind of fun. Let’s let government – you know, the people who manage and maintain all those protocols (sorry, rules and and red tape) that mean when you mail off your bills they’ll arrive, the wall socket won’t fry your new shiny toy and you got rights and laws and rules – tackle this one. They’re good at that kind of stuff – that’s what they’re supposed to do.

Think about the Internet for a second – the whole thing is based on one simple idea: there’s an IP address for each and every digital bit. There’s not ten thousand competing systems for identifying, there’s one. Now stick the physical world we actually live in and move around in through the same process that let the Internet touch, change and remake everything we know, buy, work with and do in 15 years. Whoa!

The Japanese will get there first because METI – that bureaucracy Murakami-san is a part of – has got a gold standard rep here for delivering the goods and because 99.9999% of the population have a laptop/telephone in their left hand 24/7 called a cell phone that works everywhere right always – not those piss-awful crappy things the telcos stuck us with in the states. It will also work because you take even a few percentage points of friction out of a system for creating/delivering/finding/relating physical things and it’s like a fire hose blasting dollar bills out. Simple math: small thing time really big systems = huge bucks at stake. I hope we do too.

Something to think about the next time you find a UPS “sorry you were out” sticker on your apartment house door.
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Next time: Microsoft, we have a problem.

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