By Owen Ferguson

If there's one thing John Patrick wants you to know about the Internet, it's this: You ain't seen nothin' yet. That was the main thrust behind his opening address at CASCON, which stands for Centre for Advanced Studies Convention. The annual event, which is co-hosted by IBM and the National Research Council of Canada, brings together leading technology researchers from both universities and the private sector.

The first CASCON was held eight years ago, and since then it has blossomed into a four-day event with over 1,400 attendees from as far away as New Zealand, China, Russia and the U.K. Although many of the topics covered were, well, a little esoteric (most of the papers presented had titles like "The Fused Multiply-Add Instruction Leads to Algorithms for Extended Precision Floating-Point: Applications to Java and High-performance Computing,") Patrick's keynote speech was quite compelling. And it should be — Patrick is IBM's vice-president, Internet technology, or, as some IBM staffers call him, their "chief dreamer."

The keynote's main message was that although we tend to think of the Internet as huge today, it's about to get a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more powerful, in a very short period of time. "Consider this," says Patrick, "If you take the number of people with Internet access, as a percentage of the entire world population, it rounds off to zero per cent." But it's not going to remain that way for long. The number of people on the Net is doubling every four months, and bandwidth capacity is doubling every nine. E-businesses are also growing at an alarming rate, so quickly that Patrick says he believes "in the near future, not being an e-business will be like not having a fax machine."

Patrick also identified a number of important emerging trends in Internet communications. The first of these is instant messaging, which he predicts will become a major form of communication over the next while. "I often give talks to groups of CEOs," he says, "and I ask them how many of them use instant messaging. None of them do. Then I ask them how many of their kids use it, and all of them do." Instant messaging makes great sense for businesses because there's none of the lag time that you have with e-mail, and the physical location of people you're communicating with ceases to matter — they could be sitting at their desks in their offices, working on a laptop in their hotel rooms or browsing with their palmtops at the airport, and the instant messaging software will show them as "online." Thus, no matter where they are, they're just a mouse click away.

Another trend is something Patrick calls "Symbiotic Video." Symbiotic Video is something along the lines of convergence between the Internet and broadcast television. The day will soon arrive when someone watching an ad can click a little button that reads "click here for more information" and be instantly brought to the company's Web page, where the viewer will be able to order the product that he or she is interested in online.

But perhaps the most important thing Patrick had to say was that soon we will all be online most of the time. Not simply while sitting at the computer in the office, but while driving, while watching TV, while cooking our meals and even while checking our watches. As more and more devices become Internet enabled, we'll spend more and more time connected.