I have been reflecting for a couple of weeks on the significance of some of the young companies that presented at this year's Sun Valley Conference, always hosted so professionally and graciously by Allen & Co.  Thingd presented its vision of the internet of things, with crowd-sourced taxonomies of the attributes of these items.  Square demonstrated how to extend mobile credit card payments to smaller transactions. Pandora showed its user-programmed internet radio service and the database of musical attributes that drives it.

More than ever, these presentations got me thinking that all the pieces of internet infrastructure are falling into place to enable some truly fantastic services in the years to come.  It is often said in tech circles that we overestimate what technology can do in the next year or two and grossly underestimate what can be achieved in the next 10 years.  This results from the uniquely iterative nature of technology to build upon the foundations laid by the last innovation.  Each generation stands on the shoulders of those who preceded it, or more accurately, each new services-oriented architecture subscribes to and builds upon a set of services introduced by the prior generation.  Thus, the pace of science progresses not linearly, but exponentially, as Ray Kurzweil has observed.

So what does this really mean in practice? For example, the mobile e-payment system built by Square can rely on the location-specific service available for the iPhone or Android platforms to identify where a given transaction is taking place, without having to spend the time or money to write that code itself.  Similarly, if you want to add mapping capability to your new service, you would be well-advised not to go out and try to re-map the world from scratch; instead you would likely incorporate Google Maps or another service available to you through a programmatic interface.  Almost none of these new companies build stand-alone datacenters populated with separate servers for each application; they simply subscribe to the Amazon, Google or other cloud for commodity computing services.  Cloud providers in turn rely on many of the technologies that preceded them, virtualization software, in particular.

This phenomenon of building upon the efforts of our forbearers is not unique to computing.  Biochemists now routinely use gene sequencing and monoclonal antibody technologies pioneered by others, and artists regularly "sample" and incorporate the works of their masters.  However, like the early and powerful computer language LISP, in which a given line of code could be both instruction and operand, digital technology permits much faster and richer iteration.  So the next time you think that the digital generation has ruined our lives by speeding everything up, just think of the amazing advances that you are likely to live to see.  We are blessed to stand on the shoulders of giants.