When I was preparing the cloudviews.org site and was talking with Hugo about its objectives, he immediately confronted me with the question “what about Ubiquitous Computing? Doesn’t it have the same goals and definition as Cloud Computing?”.
Ubiquitous computing is a concept that I’ve already give some attention to, but Hugo’s question made me recognize, one more time, that Cloud Computing  must give credits to a great number of visionaries. His question made me  also get my bookmarks and give more time to this subject.

The concept of Ubiquitous computing was presented for the first time by Mark Weiser, in his text on Scientific American, September 1991. It is a 17-year-old concept, older than the Internet itself (the Internet as we know it nowadays, at least). It describes a computer not as a self contained object, but as multiple objects that are everywhere (hence, the ubiquitous), and are part of our daily life from the most simple tasks to the most complex ones. Ubiquitous Computing  is responsible for a great and valuable number of developments in multiple areas. We can look at some examples in the Ubicom2008 conference.

As for Cloud Computing, I can say that it doesn’t have the intention to break with traditional computing in such a radical way. With Cloud Computing  a computer will continue to be an object that groups tools with a given functionality, allowing communication between those tools, and allowing interaction with the users as well. It will continue to be a place to work, play, or “surf”. With Cloud Computing the change is in the organics of this object (computer). Its simple and solid structure (the operating system) will be transformed into a more dynamic structure (the Internet), enhancing the capability to communicate and collaborate. Cloud Computing doesn’t put the computer everywhere but, instead, it gives access to it everywhere.