A quantum computer can be implemented using particles with two spin states: ' up ' and ' down ' to represent the binary digits that form the basis of digital computing. The factorisation of large integers (whole numbers), which is believed to be computationally infeasible with an ordinary computer, into the product of two prime numbers of roughly equal size would be achieved relatively easily with a quantum computer. This integer factorisation ability would allow a quantum computer to 'break' many of the cryptographic systems that are in use today, because the task could be carried out with greater efficiency. This would mean that most of the popular public key ciphers could be more readily broken, including forms of RSA, ElGamal and Diffie-Hellman. These encryption systems are used to protect secure Web pages, encrypted email and much of the data that is transferred in what we currently refer to as secure Internet transactions. Breaking these would have significant implications for Internet privacy and security. However, there are some digital signature schemes that are believed to be secure against quantum computers.

The increased processing power achievable by quantum computers would be a great boon to the sciences and medicine and the IT and computing technologies that surround these areas but pose some problems to e-commerce security.

The Semantic Web will be the bridge that creates intelligent and 'knowing' devices and services. We, as people, have now grown accustomed to finding out what we need to know from the World Wide Web. For instance, we are able to find out what movie is on tonight at a cinema in Ballarat and check our diaries online to arrange a film night. The Semantic Web is about enabling the information on the Web to be machine understandable so that we can simply have our machine automatically find what is on in Ballarat and report on the best fit to each individual's diary. In a very concrete way, the Semantic Web will facilitate the type of daily organisation that we have dreamt of and seem to move closer to requiring. Many so-called smart 'user driven' applications of ICT work at the fringes of what the Semantic Web could deliver on a global and universal basis. The development of the Semantic Web will automate many tasks that 'knowledge workers' currently do. It will create a network of machine understandable knowledge that will permit the use of network intelligence in our lives.

Consumer-led IT will increase significantly, partly facilitated by Web 2.0[i] and already apparent in the rapidly growing number of social network sites. Social networks are virtual communities organised around a range of special interest groups. Wikipedia, the open access user-generated encyclopaedia lists over 300 social networking sites. Many of these are dedicated to niche audiences, and this is seen as a major growth area. The more popular sites tend to be those organised around music, film, games and video genres. A typical social network may include video and photo sharing, chat and e-mail.

From a position of relative obscurity, social networks appeared on the scene in only recent times and have been regularly in the news headlines ever since. As the popularity of social networks has increased, media conglomerates have begun to acquire the most established sites. Social networking site MySpace launched an Australian site in August 2006, having been acquired by News Ltd for US$580 million. YouTube, founded in a home garage in 2005, was sold to Google 18 months later for US$1.6 billion. This phenomenon of consumer-generated media has major commercial and economic implications.

According to Nielsen/net ratings, social networks are the fastest growing Internet sites. MySpace, the leading international site had more than 390 million registered users (November 2006) and had achieved a growth rate of 367 percent in the previous 12 months. MSN Spaces recorded a growth rate of 286 percent during the same period. Of particular interest to business, the public sector, and individuals, is the prediction by Nielsen that social networking is not a fad that will disappear. Nielsen predicts that it will rapidly become more integrated into mainstream sites.

Demographically social networking audiences tend to be younger, typically 14 to 30 years. They are heavy users of communications technologies such as mobile phones, iPods and gaming devices. The relatively low cost of participation is allowing businesses to trial a range of new media options. Social networks are being used for advertising, for opinion sponsorship, public relations, customer relationship management and market research.

Social networks are now an established part of the Australian media landscape. They are also the way in which youth increasingly connect and get their news. Opportunities will emerge for service industries, and opinion leaders to shape the future directions of social networks. As the value of sending undifferentiated messages is further eroded, social networks will be a major interactive channel; based in, on, and for the benefit of communities of the connected. Web2.0 and the development of symmetric broadband with comparable upload and download speeds, will transform these social networks. In the future they will become powerful tools for industry collaboration, social mentoring and a revolution in consumer generated content.

In conjunction with increasing online social networking, there has been a vast movement by the media into less traditional and conventional sources. The accessibility of newspapers, traditional news programs and entertainment media online signals the beginning of a trend in online information access that is only going to increase. Accessing information and gaining knowledge via the Internet is producing a change in societal mores; mass media is becoming social media. The recurring theme of individual choice about content selection is important, and means that media is moving from a 'broadcast' of information, to a 'narrowcast'. Narrowcasting is the provision of niche environments for specific interest groups, and as consumers become aware of their increasing ability to govern their own content, every person becomes a 'specific interest group'. This change from traditional media means that specialist interest groups are able to create and operate communication channels, which are completely independent of TV, radio and newspapers. An emerging factor in this societal shift to online media is the increasing availability of all things online via an extremely mobile interface, the mobile phone.

These developments will undoubtedly have significant impact on many areas. For example, one of the main problems facing the health sector is the 'informational' problem. This has two major facets: how to collect, communicate and present health information to the clinicians and general practitioners and secondly how to use this information for knowledge management and decision support to provide improved and more reliable treatment and service. The ability to integrate information systems with appropriate communications services has much to offer and the developments occurring in the semantic web parallel what needs to happen in medicine with the development of appropriate usable ontologies that allow the knowledge to be adequately represented in machines.

In the tourism sector the use of intelligent agents based on appropriate ontologies for tourism is already being developed. This will allow the customisation of services in a semi-automated and potentially fully-automated manner.

Agri-business will be able to take advantage, not only of sensor technology but sensor networks integrated with automatic decision making based on a whole range of knowledge that could be available through the semantic web.

Mobile communications that incorporate video using low cost peer-to-peer Internet telephony network providers (e.g. Skype) and wireless are currently changing the nexus of location and work.

In the 1980s, nobody foresaw that mobile phones would become anything more than executive playthings; and the runaway success of text messaging took the entire industry by surprise. Phones will pack a lot more computing power in future, and will be able to do more and more of the things that PCs are used for today. Sony Ericsson, a leading handset-maker, points out that the processing power of mobile phones lags behind that of laptop computers by around five years. But that will change. The Economist reports that:

Another trend is towards phones that double as both fixed and mobile devices, using cellular networks when outdoors and switching to fixed networks, accessed via a short-range radio link to a small base-station, when indoors. In effect, your mobile phone will double as an indoor cordless handset, both at home and in the office. Meanwhile, distance and voice-based pricing are diminishing, replaced by a fixed monthly access fee for unlimited phone calls and data transfers. This could have positive implications for the Ballarat region.

Tiny projectors inside handsets could allow walls, tabletops or screens made of flexible materials to be used as displays while on the move, suggests Jeff Wacker, a futurist at EDS, a United States based global technology services company. As for input devices, technology exists to beam a 'virtual keyboard' onto a flat surface; a separate sensor then tracks finger movements to determine which 'keys' have been pressed. However, entering data into a phone might ultimately be done not with fingers but with speech-or even directly by the brain. Phone numbers may become as invisible to users as the underlying Internet-protocol addresses of websites are to people surfing the web (Adapted from the Economist November 2006 ).

The amount of data that we, as a society collect and store doubles every eighteen months. This means that in the next eighteen months we will collect an amount of data equal to the amount that we have collected over all past history. The collection and storage of this data continually challenges the capacity that we have to store this data as well as the capacity that we have to process it. The challenge and the opportunities that come from having such data resources command the attention of organisations and society as a whole to find ways to efficiently process, analyse and extract knowledge from it.

However all this innovation will only be effective if Australia significantly improves access to genuinely high-speed broadband. Recent announcements from CSIRO suggest Australia might be an innovator in design but not implementation. The proposed broadband provision of 7 Mbits per second (not symmetric) is still less than ten percent of the bandwidth of Korea. A CSIRO breakthrough operates at 1 Gigabit per second or a thousand times the speed of broadband delivered to most Australian homes.