PLI the interface of Web 3.0.

While it may be tempting to clam that Toys “R” Us is precisely where iPads belong, here we will beg to differ. While these machines are certainly capable of being entertainment items the world still has yet to fully realize what Bill Gates’ form factor idea will finally contribute to the work place. Bill Gates because he was the one who touted tablets 10 years ago. We’re not really sure who invented them.

The tablet form factor, which is as far from an Apple innovation as bell bottoms, has serious potential. Gates knew it, Jobs knows it, and we here at V-Tek know it. We have already demonstrated some very innovative business application interfaces that are targeted for tablets. Page flipping, dragging, pop up keying, and a plethora of other layout methods stand to finally combine and create an interactive report style application interface that would leave Tom Cruise in Minority Report drooling. The outputs, the inputs all showing up in the same place. That’s where we see this going.

Some charlatan will doubtlessly appear on some corner of the web in the next few years and start touting this “new technology” as their own, and perhaps even give it a neato acronym. If they are rich enough they may even try to patent it, but the form-factor, the handling, the devices themselves are naturally evolving this. No individual can lay claim to this next generation of business applications, while many will try.

So before the illusionists get too noisy we’d like to propose an acronym for this. PLI or maybe ILP it will stand for “Paper Like Interface” and represent applications designed specifically to be navigated like a stack of papers, read like an e-book (complete with index), and combine the application’s interactive components with its output (reporting) components. Soon gone will be the days of antiquated web form fields in columnar layouts with next and submit buttons. Web 2.0 brought us AJAX and obnoxiously huge graphics, Web 3.0 will combine dynamic PDF forms, with tablet form factors, and sever the gap between inputs and outputs offering more than eye candy to productivity hounds. Beautiful outputs would equate to beautiful interface.

That’s straight from V-Tek’s crystal ball.